Whistling Cows - Retaining Talent with Compensation

Author: Jiang Dingwei
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: Make bosses more strategic, managers more efficient, employees more loyal, and create a more pleasant work environment!
When I was in elementary school, I watched an animated film called "The Three Monks." It tells the story of a monastery with only one monk. When there was only one monk in the monastery, he had to fetch water for himself. Later, another monk joined the monastery, and after some negotiation, the two monks decided to fetch water together, neither suffering any disadvantage. When a third monk joined the monastery, the three monks couldn’t agree on how to fetch water, so none of them went, and everyone had no water to drink.
If you watched this story and didn’t feel anything, just laughed and thought the monks were too foolish—what if each monk was responsible for fetching water on a rotating day? Since joining the workforce, I have worked in foreign-invested, private, and state-owned enterprises. Later, I joined an advisory company, providing consulting services to various types of businesses, and discovered that every company and group faces problems similar to those of the three monks. The complexity of these issues is even greater, far more than can be solved simply by having "one monk responsible for one day."