A Key To Productivity

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- Hariharamahadevan M

A businessman entered a restaurant and ordered a dish called Kashmiri Pulao which has black grapes as one of the ingredients. Upon seeing the dish on a nice plate, he noticed a beetle in the dish.

“What is this?” he shouted at the waiter. The waiter immediately replied with confidence, “Sir, we add black grapes with this dish as one of the ingredients; looks like you don't like black grapes!” saying these words, he quickly picked the beetle and swallowed it. The businessman went straight to the owner of the hotel, not to complain about the waiter but to request if he could hire that waiter for his company.

Was the waiter, right? He was right in one way and wrong in another way.

More than the loyalty and concern for the brand image of the restaurant he was serving, the first thing that should have flashed in his mind would have been the threat to his and his colleagues' job. He wanted to save the job and he dared to take a risk. He swallowed the beetle to save himself from that customers' wrath, which in his case became a reward!

In a way, he was wrong because he was not proactive. In the above restaurant example, the attitude of that customer matched with that of the waiter, in the sense, both were reactive. Will it hold good for all types of customers always? Will it serve the purpose in the present-day environment where the customers are very knowledgeable and the media is very powerful? There are customers who will go to the extent of spending thousands of rupees even for a petty issue. May be, some other customer in the same situation would have taken a photo of the dish with the beetle, before drawing the attention of the waiter and released it to the media which is only too eager to sensationalise such issues. To put it simply, the waiter should have been proactive and should have checked the dish before handing it over to the customer.