A better way to do things...
I had an amazing trip to India! We covered the country by air, train, bus, car, subway, shuttle, rickshaw, and foot. Definitely a trip I will never forget and one that forged some great friendships with fellow HBS students.
I took lots of pictures on the trip, and wanted to share this humorous chain of events I captured. I consider this to be symbolic of evolution... or of how productivity evolves into greater and smarter methods.
Step 1: Monkey gets 2L bottle of orange soda
Step 2: Monkey opens 2L bottle of orange soda
Step 3: Monkey tilts soda onto ground so as to spill it. Note, smaller monkey watches this unfolding.
Step 4: Bigger monkey drinks his spoils by sipping the soda from the grass. Efficiency... maybe 20% of the soda captured? But since he gets the full 2L to drink from, that's still a satisfying slurp!
Step 5: Smaller monkey, left thirsty, sips the drops left in the bottle cap. Then notices that a little bit of soda is left in the bottle due to the bigger monkey's inefficient drinking methods.
Step 6: Smaller monkey, who can't throw his weight around to get the drink in the first place, nor afford inefficiency in his habits, comes up with a better and more efficient way to drink. He finishes off what the bigger monkey treated as waste.
Step 7: Yea, I'm a small monkey, but so what? Don't act like you've never seen a monkey before. Don't you have something better to do?
What can we learn from this 7 step process?
I took lots of pictures on the trip, and wanted to share this humorous chain of events I captured. I consider this to be symbolic of evolution... or of how productivity evolves into greater and smarter methods.
Step 1: Monkey gets 2L bottle of orange soda
Step 2: Monkey opens 2L bottle of orange soda
Step 3: Monkey tilts soda onto ground so as to spill it. Note, smaller monkey watches this unfolding.
Step 4: Bigger monkey drinks his spoils by sipping the soda from the grass. Efficiency... maybe 20% of the soda captured? But since he gets the full 2L to drink from, that's still a satisfying slurp!
Step 5: Smaller monkey, left thirsty, sips the drops left in the bottle cap. Then notices that a little bit of soda is left in the bottle due to the bigger monkey's inefficient drinking methods.
Step 6: Smaller monkey, who can't throw his weight around to get the drink in the first place, nor afford inefficiency in his habits, comes up with a better and more efficient way to drink. He finishes off what the bigger monkey treated as waste.
Step 7: Yea, I'm a small monkey, but so what? Don't act like you've never seen a monkey before. Don't you have something better to do?
What can we learn from this 7 step process?
- People/monkeys/companies that are big and don't have to save every drop will tend to waste resources, have low efficiency, and stick with "if it's not broke - don't fix it" mentality.
- People/monkeys/companies that are small and don't have the luxury of wasting resources, will find ways to innovate, find new solutions, and other means to increase efficiency.
- It is limited resources in this world which drives us to improve ourselves. Never be satisfied with the old ways of doing business.
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