Reasonable Expectations

The motivation to this post sources to the article on ‘Project Triangle’, which I read a few days ago. The bottom line of which is: A product or service can be Cheap, Fast, Good; pick any two. This is the corporate way of setting the right expectations. The question is: Is this how things actually work in real life too? Another question is that what if someone makes an offer that defies this rule? I thought about it for a while and then remembered a story, I had read as 8 years old. I’m posting the same story, and to my mind, this story is incredibly relevant even today.

Long, long ago, there was king in southern part of India. He had set a daunting goal for himself, to keep every person in his kingdom happy. As the summer approached, the main agenda which the king had to deal with was to provide good quality hand fans to everyone, at most affordable rates. In some of southern states of India, the summer can be nasty beyond imagination. As this is a story from the era, when there was no electricity, hand fans were the only viable alternatives. Being a fair minded king, he invited bids from all the craftsmen who could come up with affordable and fancy-looking fan that would perfectly suit the needs of the people. The king, with the help of his finance minister, selected three bidders and gave them orders for making 100 fans each, and after a public feedback, one of them would get the contract to make the fans for the rest of the public. The first two craftsmen had the same negative feedback from people, of being too pricy while people were not too happy with the beauty element of the fans, made by the third one. The king was puzzled and said to his finance minister, “There seems no plausible way to please these people. They find 50ps fans expensive and are not happy with looks of those fans that cost 30ps. How do we deal with these people Mr. Finance Minister?” The finance minister’s wisdom was unbounded and he came up with a solution. The solution was, to hire an anonymous craftsman who would make an attractive fan for just 10ps, but it came at a condition. Every resident had to make the payment in advance for their individual fan. People were very happy and lined up to place their orders. A week later, as promised, all the fans costing just 10ps were made available to each of the resident. Everybody seemed happy till they actually tried to use the fan. The moment someone tried to oscillate the fan for the gentle breeze, the fan simply broke. By the same evening, almost everyone had lined up in front of the king, whining and complaining. It was then the king who brought it to everyone’s attention, about the note inscribed on the fan, which was very hard to notice otherwise. It read, “Cheap and fancy fan… oscillate your face in front of this fan for cool breeze. But if you oscillate the fan, it will break” The king asked everybody to be cautious from now on and read carefully before they bought a product, whose dynamics defied conventional wisdom. People realized that this was king’s ploy to teach them a lesson and set reasonable expectations in future. However, once they had learnt this lesson, the king presented each of them with a free fan for that summer.

Every choice that we make in life, involves tradeoffs and if we are unwilling to forgo anything, we probably end up either losing everything or doing nothing. The timeless lesson to be taken away is to be reasonable in setting our expectations, be it money matters, personal relations or professional life. A few may even draw a conclusion that a task to please everyone at the same time itself may be an unrealistic goal.