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
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