Learning from others

You may recall the troop of Japanese macaques who learnt that they could separate rice from sand by throwing it in the water (the rice floats and the sand sinks.)  This trick is now used by all the monkeys in the troop.  It works better, so they do it.  Our cats have discovered that they can pull down the towels we leave over the radiators and make a snug little pussy nest under the radiators.  One cat figured it out, now no towel is safe from their urge to be comfy. 

The reason I raise these obscure and possibly unimportant factlets is that  when someone works out a better way to do something, our reaction tends to be to mock them, to ask why they are not confirming, to wonder ‘who they think they are?’ etc.  Companies try to get workers to share best practice, but we resist, at least in the West (the Japanese are much better at it.)  It might be just another facet of change averseness, but as our cats and the macaques can attest, Life is more rewarding if we are prepared to learn from others…

“Life will teach you the lessons, it is up to you to learn them”

Tags: cats, learning frm others, macaques

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 at 16:51 and is filed under Business Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.