Award winning Chinese animation on 'Three monks'.

Background:

It is a Chinese animated short film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio.  It is also known as The Three Buddhist Priests.  Dr Mandi told us to watch this movie and come prepared to the class with all the management fundas we learnt from it. The most important funda was “How Teamwork and Productivity go hand in hand”.

The Story:

There was a small temple on a mountain and a little monk in the temple. His daily routine was shouldering water, chanting sutras, knocking the wooden fish, adding water to the holy water bottle on the table honoring the Goddess of Mercy, and watching over the mice from stealing food at night. His life was smooth and comfortable.
Soon after, a tall monk came. He drank half of the jar’s water as soon as he arrived at the temple, so the little monk asked him to fetch water. The tall one thought it was unfair for him to fetch water alone, so he asked the young one to do it together. They could only carry one bucket a time, and they would only feel content when the bucket was placed in the middle of the shoulder pole. Anyway, they still had water to drink in this way. Then, a fat monk came. He wanted to drink, but there was no water in the jar. The short monk and the tall one asked him to fetch water by himself. He carried a bucket of water, and drank it up immediately. From then on, nobody would fetch water, so they had no water.
Everyone chanted his own sutras and knocked his own wooden fish. As nobody would add water to the holy water bottle, the plant in the bottle withered soon. At night, a mouse came out stealing, but everyone pretended not to see it. As a result, the mouse was so rampant that it knocked over the candleholder and caused a fire.
Only thus did the three monks make a concerted effort to put out the fire, and finally awaken. After that, they started hanging together and the temple never lacked water again.

Learnings:

The movie teaches us a lot of managerial lessons. I have listed down few of them:

1.Productivity - It is an economic term defined as output per unit of input. Workplace productivity is about how firms can utilize labour and skills, innovation, technology and organizational structure to improve the quantity and quality of their output. For e.g. in the above example, if two monks would have carried one bucket instead of single monk carrying two buckets, would have increased the productivity.

2. Team work - The work which could have been done very easily had they worked as team took a toll on them. As we have seen in case of emergency (monastery catching fire), they worked as a team and got the desired results very easily. The manager has to ensure that the employees are working in a team, individuality hinders the progress of a firm.

3. Job distribution - The situation can be compared to an organisation which has all the resources in the world but is not able to utilise them properly. In the movie even with three monks (resources), water (end result)  was scarce in the monastery. It is responsibility of the manager to utilise the resources provided to him optimally. As we can see in the end the monks divides the job and get the desired result very effectively and easily. 

4. Crisis management - In the movie when the temple catches fire all the three monks work together as a team and gets out of the crisis situation. There are times when people lose their cool during emergencies. A manager must always keep a clam composure no matter what the situation is. In case of emergency, the manager should adopt a rationale thinking in getting the team out of the emergency situation. He should be in a position to assign different employees in different roles so as to better the situation.