THE POWER OF DOING THE RIGHT THING

THE POWER OF DOING THE RIGHT THING:

                                          The Hundredth Monkey Effect

It’s about the power of one person doing something right, which can spread quickly to change the behavior and culture of a whole Team. The story goes like this …

In 1950s in the Island of Koshima, where there was a large population of monkeys, potatoes fall from the trees into the sand for the monkey to eat.

One clever young monkey discovered she could wash the sand from the tasty vegetable by putting them in the stream.  She taught her siblings to do this, and then her playmates, who in turn taught others.  For years, only members of these monkey families washed sand off the sweet potatoes.

Then something amazing happened.  One day, seemingly overnight, all the monkeys in the Island were washing the sweet potatoes before eating it.  It was as if a certain threshold was reached.  Once the hundredth monkey learned the behavior, popularizers of the research explained, it spread to every single monkey on the Island.

At that time, there were people who believed that the behavior even spread to monkeys on the other Islands.  Its not like one monkey e-mailed all others, ‘wash potatoes’ when a critical mass was reached they all just knew how to do it.

The story of the hundredth monkey remind us that each of us has influence on others and by doing the right things always who knows how far such act might go to change our entire team, families, peer groups to greater heights.

 

Culled from – It’s not about Coffee – The story of Starbucks Coffee – lesson of putting people first, from a life of a starbucks, by Howard Behar