Monks who changed their lives

Three Monks

Prof Mandi - a monk in terms of his teaching pedagogy has yet again arrived with a distinguishing style of teaching.Graphics coupled with good audio enhances the impact of the Educational medium.

Three Monks is a Chinese animated short, released in 1980 and directed by A Da. It is one of the most famous and beloved of Shanghai Animation Film Studio's productions, and has won awards at film festivals throughout the world.
In the movie : -
"one monk fetches water to drink",
"two monks carry water to drink"
"three monks"
The unfinished third sentence reflects the film's central question, which is whether the three main characters will learn to work together so that they can all have water to drink.






The movie highlights the following learnings that we must incorporate in order to achieve the management in an organization. 

1. Designing Team Work.
2. Defining Team Roles.
3. Cohesiveness.
4. Achieving Excellence Efficiency & Effectiveness.

Designing Team Work: -

The movie succinctly portrays the transformation monks carried while designing the work;
In first case monk 1 carries two buckets of water on his shoulders so as to achieve the best possible ergonomics and efficiency.

In case 2 monks design the system using scale to design the best possible way to carry the bucket of water with minimum effort i.e. max efficiency.

In case 3 monks design a system using Pulley (an involvement of innovation) to come up with a solution to divide the work. 

Scientific and objectives measurements and instruments  used to resolve the conflict.

Defining team roles : -

When only one Monk was there he was doing all the work necessary for the monastery but as the monks increased the work increased and they started facing problems. Even though they came with a design to solve the efficiency they could not work effectively.

The problem of effectiveness could only be solved when they designated the roles to each other in the end. The roles were not only specific but also equivalent.

Cohesiveness : -

In the situation of crises Individual sums become bigger than what was there individually .

Excellence Efficiency & Effectiveness : - 
Workplace efficiency, performance and productivity can often be improved by introducing and measuring any change to working practice.
Three Monks did it by making change in the working practice by pulling the water through pulley instead of fetching it each time.

Goals Setting

How Important are Goals for an organization ? Imagine a cricket or a football match or any sport for that matter without a goal or a score to be achieved. We watch it keenly so as to see the goals to be achieved. But are organizations equivalent to sport? Well, the fact is Organization play a bigger sport. Effects of a sports match could be seen only on field for some time after it. But Organization reflects society, we can imagine the catastrophic effects that an organization can cause if they operate without goals. It's important for the existence &  the purpose organization serves to set goals for it.

Now the question is what kind of goals should organizations have ?

How do we know what kind of goals to set? The whole point of setting goals, after all, is to achieve them. It does no good to go to the trouble of calling meetings, hacking through the needs of organization, and burning up precious time, only to end up with goals that aren't acted on or completed. Unfortunately, this scenario describes what far too many managers do with their time.

The best goals are smart goals — well, actually SMART goals is more like it. SMART is a handy acronym for the five characteristics of well-designed goals

• Specific: Goals must be clear and unambiguous; vagaries and platitudes have no place in goal setting. When goals are specific, they tell employees exactly what is expected, when, and how much. Because the goals are specific, one can easily measure One's employees' progress toward their completion.
• Measurable:What good is a goal that one can't measure? If one's goals are not measurable, one never know whether employees are making progress toward their successful completion. Not only that, but it's tough for employees to stay motivated to complete their goals when they have no milestones to indicate their progress.
• Attainable: Goals must be realistic and attainable by average employees. The best goals require employees to stretch a bit to achieve them, but they aren't extreme. That is, the goals are neither out of reach nor below standard performance. Goals that are set too high or too low become meaningless, and employees naturally come to ignore them.
• Relevant: Goals must be an important tool in the grand scheme of reaching one's company's vision and mission. It should be Relevant to the society which it is reflecting and to the employees that it has.
• Time-bound: Goals must have starting points, ending points, and fixed durations. Commitment to deadlines helps employees to focus their efforts on completion of the goal on or before the due date. Goals without deadlines or schedules for completion tend to be overtaken by the day-to-day crises that invariably arise in an organization.
  
  SMART goals make for smart organizations.
  Goals are often unclear, ambiguous, unrealistic, unrelated to the organization's vision, unmeasurable, and demotivating. By developing SMART goals One can avoid these traps while ensuring the progress of one's organization and its employees.
  In experience of Prof. Mandi in NITIE, goals should also be like an Fibonacci spiral which should be increasing arithmetically with feedbacks of past to challenge the future.