The fable is the story told about a poor farmer who discovered that his pet a goose, lays one glittering golden egg everyday. The farmer and the wife soon filled their own minds with greed and thought that they werent getting rich fast enough. Thinking the bird must be made of gold inside, they cut the goose open, but when they did, they lost everything.
The famous Aesop's fable was initially a moral teaching which put an illustration to the scene "those who want too much lose everything". However what I found slightly more interesting behind the fable is the teaching of what would eventually be named the "P/PC balance" theory by leadership guru Stephen Covey, P for production, PC for production capabilities, perhaps I'm gonna tell another story about golden eggs here, of a machines operator in a factory, he works very hard earning for a chance of promotion, and he produces at an optimum level, without downtime, no maintenance, he runs the machine twenty four hours a day. Production rate was phenomenal, and quickly he got a promotion.
Now think that he has a successor to the job, someone took over him for his old position, what he inherited a sick goose, worn out machines. He's responsible for machine replacement and all the high maintenance cost, he took all the blame and eventually got fired, his predecessor liquidated the asset, but the accounting system only reported unit production, costs and profit.
I suppose many of us are like the first machines operator, we see effectiveness from the golden egg paradigm, we see effectiveness a synonym for productivity and neglected the goose that lays golden eggs, we as an organization focus on our customers but neglected those who deal with our customers everyday, and individually us being in all kinds of relationship focus on the fruit of having an understanding parent, a trustable friend, a loving partner, an adorable child, and eventually we neglected the components which make up those strong relationships. It was said that true effectiveness lies in a balance between the goose and the golden eggs. A life pattern of too much a focus on the golden eggs often end up with losing the goose which produces golden eggs, hence, companies experience high turnover of human resources, break up in relationships, miscommunication and quarrel between family members.
I've been talking to a friend recently who just had a broke up with her boyfriend, she says "I've tried too hard, it's never gonna work, he just never grow up". Yes I understand how she felt, primarily hurting and tiring, when someone doesn't seems to change. And she gave up on the relationship. Whats to be said here is that, are we focusing too much on the golden eggs? We wanted our partners to be considerate, loving and caring, all are what we expect from a relationship, but somehow my suggestion here is that if it's never gonna work when we focus on the fruits instead of the tree, why not we try the other way? I would say that the one who puts passion in planting the tree will eventually get better fruits beared instead of keeping an eye counting how many mangoes there are on the tree.
I've came across friends who say similar things like "that guy right there is a jerk, making friends with him is a waste of time" or "I love being friends with him, he teaches me a lot." These are much said in our everyday life. We expect from friends, and as said by quaintly.net's latest entry, friendship comes cheap now days, all the self helps we tend to read come with titles such as "How to talk to anyone / Communication 101 / How to influence peoples / Speed of building friendships / Art of building your network) etc.(Names are made up by self) Do we need to read books to know how to make friends? where gone our originality? Where gone our sincerity? We shower ourselves so much with outside-in personality cosmetics, and we left aside the most fundamental component which builds friendships on a solid ground, our character. I even came across books such as "Speed of building up trust" What says here is that, how can we build up trust if our intention is to build up trust? Even if we do it won't be based on a solid foundation.
We see everything as a trade now, from young as kids we acted good infront of our parents so we would get more rewards from them or to show we are more adorable than our siblings, teenagers we make friends in order to show people we have a vast social circle, adults we love because we expect to be loved, in return. That answers why our birds ain't delivering golden eggs no more.
(Story of machine operators picked from Stephen R Covey - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People).
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