The Hindu Business Line : Perils of parallel processing

THE Japanese tea ceremony called chanoyu is a combination of ritual, art, flower arrangement, and Zen ideology. The idea is to focus on the present and forget everything else.

But on the basement of Takashimaya, a large department store in the Nohimbashi district in Japan, I was looking for a cup of coffee. Passing through scores of counters arrayed with delectable pasty treats, I finally came to a coffee counter, stuck in a corner, with a few bar stools in front.

When I sat down, the very placid looking assistant in spotless white, with a chef's cap pointed to a board with Japanese writing on it and asked what I wanted. Looking at my quizzical face, he tried the limited English he knew, which was definitely better than my Japanese. He pointed to the first line and said `bitter' and the second line was `sour.' I quickly put him out of his misery and said the first was fine. I was about to witness the work of an artist.

He boiled water in a kettle. While waiting for it to boil, he tidied up the narrow counter, wiping out imaginary stains. He then placed the filter paper in its holder and spooned in coffee powder from a jar within reach. The water came to a boil. He picked up the kettle and slowly poured it into the filter, stopping now and then so that the filter did not flood. When the task was completed, he discarded the filter paper into the bin and placed the filter in the sink.

By this time,a couple of other customers had wandered in and sat on stools beside me waiting their turn. He did not even look at them. His attention was entirely focused on that cup of coffee. He poured the decoction into a cup, and placed the cup along with milk and sugar containers on a tray and placed it in front of me (I was just a couple of feet away from him). He looked up, smiled at me, and then turned to the other waiting customers. The coffee was good and I reflected on his behaviour. All his moves were unhurried but precise, totally intent on the present, and doing his job to a perfection. It was just a cup of coffee, but it might as well have been setting diamonds a necklace. Does it make a difference to be focussed on the job at hand and give your entire attention to the one customer you are serving? From a customer's point of view, it was special. I think it enhanced the taste of the coffee.

I compared it to my experience of standing in front of a bank counter in Chennai waiting my turn. There was an amorphous line in front of me. Person one was being served, but person two in line was not behind person one but to his right, and peering over the counter. The teller did not seem to mind. She certainly could have asked him to step back to the line marked on the floor. Person three was shuffling to the left of person one and trying to get the teller's attention. He, as an explanation to all who may be listening, said that he just wanted a deposit form.

The teller looked up, as she was counting the currency, and nodded to him acknowledging his request. With a glance, she also looked at the furtively gesturing person two who was waving a completed deposit form wanting to just leave it with her. Person one was getting anxious if the teller was counting his money right and I could see him trying to count along with her. I was person four and wondering if I can continue to hold my ground as person five, behind me, was trying to press ahead and getting irritated at my not moving forward even though nobody had left the line as yet.

Yet, to the teller's credit, she had handed over the cash to person one, handed out one deposit form to person two and waved; a few people behind me wanting a form broke ranks and got what they wanted; with another hand she had collected the completed deposit form from person two and suddenly I was there at the counter having forgotten what I had come for. The line had vanished.

Perhaps Indians just operate at a different level of logic than the Japanese. A colleague explained it to me. The teller is very good at parallel processing, he said, smiling. But the question is if she was doing it as best as she could. Would she have handled the same crowd in the same time and to a higher level of satisfaction if she had paid attention to only one person at a time and completed his or her request? Focused work has its merits. Also, systems fail if they are not constantly enforced, when being subjected to violation by the method of `creep,' that is, when the violation takes place in tiny bits.

Indiscipline in a system leads to lowered efficiencies, but it is up to all parties to enforce it. The people in line could not wait their turn but were creeping to the front to get their work done. They were distracting the teller who was trying to deal with them all. Progress by creep is also visible at four-way road crossings when the only rule that is followed is for all parties to stare at one another and judge whether the other person will dominate, and slowly move to the centre of the intersection trying to find a way across.

But, miraculously, the traffic does seem to sort itself out at the cost of time and the blood pressure of at least a few involved!

(The author is professor, international business and strategic management. Suffolk University, Boston. Feedback may be sent to cgopinat@suffolk.edu)

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