LE04: The 3 Monks

The Story with a Lesson

Three Monks is a Chinese animated feature film that highlights the importance of teamwork. It was screened in the POM class to make us students understand how people react in real life situations where there are conflicts. Thus, it aimed at bringing home the value of team work and co-operation. This was yet another example of the off-the-beaten-track learning methodologies being applied in POM.


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." A noticeable point is that the film does not contain any dialogues, allowing it to be watched by any culture.


Plot
A teenage 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 who had recently joined the monastery, 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 candleholder, leading to a devastating fire in the temple. The three monks finally unite together and make a combined 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.


Observations
#1 Disagreements will arise when people work together due to difference in viewpoints.
#2 Work needs to be divided scientifically and objectively.
#3 The solution should be conceptual.
#4 When multiple parties with differing opinions are involved, what is required is Participative Management.
#5 The last scene of using a pulley to get water says that for success, one has to go for disruptive methods that have the power to change the game.


Productivity
Does team work increase productivity or decrease it? Rather than answering in a straight yes or no, lets go step by step. 

• Initially, a single monk could get 2 pails of water daily. High effort, high output. 
• When the second monk joins, they get 1 pail of water everyday. Now, the effort as well as output has become 1/2 of original (for a team of two). 
• The work comes almost to a standstill when the third monk comes, nobody bothers to get the water himself as all of them leave it on the other person to take care of the chore. Originally, this behavior was called “social loafing,” a term coined by a French professor, Max Ringelmann in the 1890s.

Then how can the management ensure high productivity in an interconnected and interdependent environment?

• Availability of adequate support systems and resources for teams
• High degree of instantaneous feedback and communication
• Rigorous accountability systems for teams
• Synergistic work environment will increase the productivity manifolds for a team

Thus, team work can actually increase the productivity exponentially, given that above features are incorporated in the work culture laid out by the management.

Learning
The story of the three monks teaches us that everyone is capable of being selfish and working individually, but doing so diminishes our ability to cooperate with one another.

A thought on Team Work- "If its not efficiently effective then its not useful."

LE03

This post talks about some more management concepts discussed in POM class. They include Teamwork v/s Individual work, Organisations, Work and Planning. I will be going through them one by one.

Team Work- 3 Idiots crossing the Valley


What? Why??
When several workers come together to achieve a high common goal , thereby giving more significance to collective success over  individual gains, then that is called team-work.


Since prehistoric times, man has been working in teams to realise dreams that would have been impossible for him to go alone.

Ants working in a team

The Situation at the Valley

Team work v/s Individual work

This problem was presented to us in the class while discussing about team-work. The message was self evident and beautifully depicted.
3 people have to carry a payload(a log in this case) and deliver it to the destination. But there is a problem, there is a valley like gap in between where each member has to rely on other two to cross. 
Would this have been possible had it been a single individual? No. 
What makes the difference now? Its the TEAM. Each of the member can now hang on while crossing the valley from the other two and also provides support when his team mates are endangered.


This is how the entire activity will get completed:

Observations:

• Each team member is fully safe once and half safe twice i.e. the risk is distributed.
• All of them will have to safeguard each other when they get into a risky situation i.e. the work is equitably distributed.
• All of them have to ensure instantaneous communication and cooperation to finish the task.

These 3 key points can be applied to any scenario of team-working.

Organisation, Work & Planning

The aim of an organisation is to increase Co-operation and decrease Co- ordination.

We know that management involves Conceptual, Human and Technical Management.

With the confluence of these three aspects, organisations strive to leave a lasting impact on the society.

The 3 concepts around which organisations are created are:

1. Work: Physical organisation of work

2. Authority: Identifying who is the boss. Can be centralized or decentralized

3. Control: Formal and Informal culture of the organisation. Involves standardization, formalities and systems

For these 3 concepts to be implemented, the first step is Planning.

This brings us to the 3 knobs of planning-

• Work Planning
• Authority Planning
• Control Planning

So, this is a very brief preview on how Organisations are planned.

LE02

A phenomenon called Khan Academy


Let us first introduce it to those who have been unaware of one of the most potent knowledge wave in the recent world. When Mandi Sir suggested we write something about the Khan Academy, then I had no idea what it is about. But as I learned about it, I realized what I was missing due to ignorance.

The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization which was created in 2006 by Bangladeshi American educator Salman Khan, a triple degree holder from MIT and  an MBA from Harvard Business School.
But why would anyone do that? What is the motive or the idea behind it?
Before I answer, lets take a look at the Academy's vision and mission.

"A free world-class education for anyone anywhere."

This explains it all. The endeavor is simple, educate all, whosoever wants to learn shall get it, no matter which country you live in, what school or class you go, you just need to have a drive to learn, that's all.

The website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,200 micro lectures of length about 10 mins on an average via video tutorials stored on there and even on their YouTube channel. Here, we can find them teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics and microeconomics, and computer science.

In their own words, it's a global classroom where one can join millions of students and education enthusiasts and learn. Yet, it is as local as a teacher sitting nest to you, helping you solve maths sums or teaching you ancient history i.e. just anything under the sun. This is the beautiful part, it doesn't try to bind you, rather, the learning methodology being applied here excites you to read, makes learning interesting, thereby setting you free. 

The constant evolution that the education process at the Academy has been undergoing has churned out even more benefits for learners like being able to see your stats, your coverage of the Knowledge map, classroom performance data and badges that motivate students to go to the next higher level.

The man who is re-writing the rules
 of education

It is a wonderful, yet so simple, concept that echoes 'Learning knows no bounds'. Salman Khan, who was earlier working as a hedge fund manager, has come out with an idea that has the potential to change the world. The basics as mooted by Salman are:

-  people find watching a guy do a problem [while] thinking out loud more valuable than daunting

- exercises that are based on skill level and performance

- using the videos as tools of classroom teaching and then homework should be done by students in the presence of teacher for explanation and support

No wonder, that this venture has received aids worth millions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google. In 2010, Google announced it would give the Khan Academy $2 million for creating more courses and for translating the core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages, as part of their Project 10^100. There goes down the final barrier of language.