Three Monks : Many managerial lessons

This post is about very famous Chinese animated film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio & has won many accolades. The film has many lessons for managers. Please go through this short film for better understanding of its learnings.

Summary of the story-

A young monk lives a simple life in a temple on top of a hill. He has one daily task of hauling two buckets of water up the hill. He tries to share the job with another monk, but the carry pole is only long enough for one bucket. The arrival of a third monk prompts everyone to expect that someone else will take on the chore. Consequently, no one fetches water though everybody is thirsty. At night, a rat comes to scrounge and then knocks the candle-holder, leading to a devastating fire in the temple. The three monks finally unite together and make a concerted effort to put out the fire. Since then they understand the old saying "unity is strength" and begin to live a harmonious life. The temple never lacks water again.

The film is based on the ancient Chinese proverb "One monk will shoulder two buckets of water, two monks will share the load, but add a third and no one will want to fetch water”.

The film teaches us various aspects that impact the performance, productivity of employees in an organization, in turn impacting the growth of an organization.

Below is an analysis based on the film-

	One monk	Two monks	Three monks
How do they do it?
Tools involved	A stick and two buckets of water	A stick and a bucket of water	A Pulley, two buckets of water and a rope
Efforts put in	Maximum	Lesser	Least
Efficieny	Least	More	Maximum

Now let’s understand managerial lessons in the film:

1. Productivity & Efficiency - Productivity is a measure of how well an operation system functions. In previous post I have explained about this important equation:

Excellence = Effectiveness X Efficiency

The film talks about the importance of efficiency. Efficiency can be described by productivity ratio which is Total output / Total input.

One of the important functions of a manager is to optimize the process, improve the work design and try to aim for the most efficient process.  Managers should always come up with innovative solutions to improve efficiency. 

2. Teamwork & Cooperation:

We saw that even with increase in the number of monks the productivity came down drastically due to lack of cooperation.

Without Cooperation: One monk fetches two buckets of water, two monks fetch one bucket of water and three monks fetch no water at all.

With cooperation: Three monks increased the efficiency of the process to a level previously unattainable.

In a team, a member may try to avoid responsibility and expect from others. Manager should understand and inculcate the importance of teamwork and how cooperation and sharing of load can help improving productivity.

3. Participative Management: It is the practice of empowering employees to participate in organizational decision making. As in case of a movie, while dividing the load of the bucket one monk did the scaling and the other did marking. It involves both the parties in decision making and avoids any conflicts that may arise at some later point of time.

These were some of my learnings from the film. I would love to hear your comments.