Kingo, not a strong believer in management principles, was very excited as he heard an extension of the Hare and the Tortoise fable on a management lecture on Teamwork. He burst out, “. We know the moral of first half of the fable. They ran three more races – one easily won by the hare, one won by the tortoise as there was a river on the path and the hare could not cross it and in the final, they work together with hare riding on the back of the tortoise and then carrying the tortoise to the finish line – they both won”.
Kaushik, always the first to compare anything to Bridge was quick on the trigger. He said, “This is indeed a classic example of working on your core competencies and mastering them and achieving a good result. If we work as a team and don’t keep arguing about errors but work on what went wrong, listen to expert comments and improve, we will all improve our core competencies, and this will lead to better team performance”.
Padma interjected saying, “It is not so much on focusing core competencies but developing partnership and working on them. They say that if a partnership reaches the right contract 75 per cent of the time, it is a good partnership. In Bridge, developing effective partnership is the cornerstone for success. Partners must enjoy playing with each other and team members must enjoy playing together as a team”.
Prabha was in deep thought and said, “We are all good friends and enjoy each other’s company and thus have good relations with each other but our results in Bridge tournaments are far from satisfying. What is the reason?”
Kaushik had a very strong view on this aspect. He said that while we are all good friends and have good team spirit, it is not enough to win consistently in Bridge. We must focus and reduce unforced errors to zero. We will always have the odd judgement error and wrong decision on some wild hands. We are making too many unforced errors and that is why we are not doing well
Padma was nodding in concurrence about focusing on unforced errors. She added that as a team, we need to devote 10 hours a week for practice and analysis. Practice, analysis, and corrective measures are the key to improvement, and we have not been able to do that due to our other pre-occupations. We need to find time if we must improve our game
Tailpiece:
Goofy was wondering why this discussion was taking place. Working in teams is obvious thing. When one dog barks, we all bark in unison without asking the reason
