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THREE MONKS

Three monks is an animated film that is based on the Chinese proverb that says, “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 movie begins with a young monk doing his ritual of fetching water from the pond, watering a plant in front of the god and worshiping all day long. As a new monk comes to the monastery, the work of carrying water is shared by the two monks. But there arises the problem of balancing the bucket in the middle of the pole. The problem escalates further when a third monk joins them. The first two monks delegate the work to the third monk. But soon there is chaos and confusion and finally nobody fetches water. As the three monks stay aloof, a rat causes a fire accident which puts the three monks into swift action. They work as a team and extinguish the fire. Later on they install a pulley and fetch water with one monk filling water in the bucket, the other operating the pulley and the third storing the water in the barrel. Since each of them has a separate task to do, the process of fetching water becomes more efficient.

A lot could be learnt from the movie, where in it clearly says that unity is strength. Another key learning is that when there is not much work and there are more people than is required to work, the productivity decreases and there is no efficient utilization of resources. I could relate the same with my own experience. I was a part of a project where there were 14 members in a team. But the work allotted to the team was disproportionate to the number of members in the team. As result there was always a few people worked and the rest whiled away their time. Finally the team was dismantled altogether since there was no proper utilization of human resources.

‘Three monks’ tells about the efficient utilization of resources in order to get the desired output with more efficiency. Here is an illustration of efficient utilization of resources to get the maximum productivity. Combination (e) is considered to be the most efficient among all.

No of persons		Combination	Method	Effort (Joules)
1	a.	One person carrying one bucket		20
	b.	One person carrying 2 bucket		5
2	c	Two persons carrying one bucket each		(20+20)
	d	Two persons carrying one bucket together		2.5
	e	Two persons carrying two buckets each		(5+5)

As the three monks shifted to mechanized way of fetching water there was modern management in place. Furthermore, there was deskilling which is the most important aspect of modern management.