Three Monks Animation

Three Monks  is a Chinese animated feature film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in 1976, It is also referred to as The Three Buddhist Priests.
 

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.

 

There was a monk who lived in a temple built on the top of a hill. Everyday he used to get two buckets full of water from down the hill and carry them back to temple using a shoulder pole. The water he got was more than enough for one person. One day a monk visited the temple and started living there. next day when they got up, first monk thought of giving the responsibility to bring water to the new monk. But the new monk refused to do it alone, therefore they decided to share the responsibility but the shoulder pole was small and could accommodate only one bucket then.

The water they got was still enough for both of them.

Later a third monk came to stay with them. On the next day morning when all the monks got up, nobody took the responsibility to fill the buckets as the shoulder pole could accommodate only two persons and they could not decide who should stay back .On that day, they began to suffer from thirst since water had finished. That night temple caught fire. Finally all the three monks got together to fight the fire and started working together to get the water every morning and no one suffered from thirst thereafter.

 

It is evident that team work is necessary for successful organization. The animation needs further probing for learning the secret of effective team work. The first lesson for managers is that each member has a different capability and should be assigned work accordingly. The second lesson is to assign right work to right people. We saw in the video that when third monk was given task of fetching water he was consuming most of it himself. So he was not the right person for such hard task. Finally not only his work was utilized, he was also not consuming the monastery resource as he was positioned near water pool down the hill.

There were some important concepts shown in the film which need to be analyzed. Management is all about the concept of conceptual skills, human skills, and Technical skills. If productivity is not there, better to change the technology not the people. Divide work and perform accordingly. One of the important concepts was “Job Rotation”. Job rotation is a management technique that assign trainees to various jobs and departments over a period of a few years. Job rotation help trainees to best apply their knowledge, abilities, interests.

Another concept was division of labors and labourers. Division of labors means divide the work amongst labors. Labourer is a person who does one of the construction trades, traditionally considered unskilled manual labor, as opposed to skilled labor.

Laborers have all blasting, hand tools, power tools, air tools, and small heavy equipment, and act as assistants to other trades. Division of work amongst labourer is divide the work force, society by the pre-conceived notion.

Some important points would like to highlight :
1) Everyone is capable of being selfish, but doing so diminishes our ability to cooperate with one another.

2) As the saying goes, “Unity is strength” we should co-operate with each other and work together in a harmonious manner.

3) This story teaches us that it is inappropriate to shirk responsibility and proper measures should be taken before a catastrophe occurs.