THE POWER OF INFLUENCE

Life they say, it’s all about sharing. I like to share this story I read from;” a life of starbucks” by Howard Behar and also lessons from the story. The story is about the power of one person doing something right, which can spread quickly to change the behavior and culture of a whole team.



In 1950s in the Island of Koshima, there was a large population of monkeys, and these monkeys eat potatoes that fall from the trees into the sand. 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 the same, 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 with water before eating it.  It was as if a certain threshold was reached.  Once the hundredth monkey learned the behavior, 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.  It’s not like one monkey e-mailed all the other monkeys to ‘wash potatoes’ before eating 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.