Inspiration

Inspiration and Ingenuity is all around us. You don’t have to look at Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie for these qualities. You find them everywhere. If you are keen and bothered to look around, you can learn a lot, just by observing people.

Before I begin this blog, I’d like to introduce you to the term ‘Blossom strings’. Women from South, especially Tamil Nadu have long adorned their hair with flowers, tied together neatly by a twain or a thread, and this art is called ‘Blossom strings’. Very many thanks to my friend Swathi (www.rswathi.com, check her site if you like to know more about her) for being kind enough to patiently educate me on this very important matter.

I commute to office daily through city buses, and the journey takes the best part of an hour and a half. Sometimes, I have to change buses to reach the destination. Last week, I met a couple of women, who were small time flower vendors in one of those buses. For the sake of convenience, let’s call them ‘Flora’ and ‘Fauna’ or ‘Florists’. They had boarded the bus in the Central bus terminus, and you as you could see in the picture, they were comfortably sat, and they were busy with their Blossom string’ing. 

The bus I had boarded was a ‘Deluxe’ bus, and while it wasn’t an AC Volvo, they do charge extra for tickets, and these two women didn’t seem ‘well-to-do’ in a matter of speech.  I had asked the florists why did they travel in a Deluxe bus, because they could have travelled in normal buses for cheaper tickets, and what do they achieve by knitting flowers, while travelling in the bus. Their answers were very revealing. 

Flora and Fauna have been selling flowers for a long time. They’ve been earning their living through buying flowers from the Flower market, and sell them anybody in need of flower, their bulk of the market being women and priests of temples. Like all businessmen and Software Engineers, they work on a strict schedule and being late to any of their work involves serious loss of daily income. Unlike most of us, who wait for the yearly annual appraisal, the impact to any loss of their revenue and immediate and profound, including and not limited to foregoing dinner.

Being early risers, Flora and Fauna used to get up early and collect the flowers that were bought from the flower market, and set off immediately on the art of blossom strings. Meticulously, they use their twains and threads and weave in and out with flowers in hand. The end result is brilliant strands of Jasmines and Roses. While it’s easy to describe the process, and glorified by many a poet, it’s a time consuming job. The flowers have to be spaced equally, not too close, else the florists use too much flowers and incur a loss and not to wide apart, else the buyer will shun the strand, but at equal parts at all times, so that it appears uniform to the user.

After completing this process and when all the flowers are dangling in beautiful strings, the two Florists collect the tied together flowers and set off on their journey to sell flowers. These two usually go to the OMR Road by bus, where most of the software offices are located, and they set about selling these flowers to all prospective buyers. Once they’ve sold their lot of flowers for the day, or suitably convinced that they are not going to make further sales, they come back to their home. They carry the flowers in a moist bag so that they don’t lose their vigour. Once they are back in home, they wait to see if any of these can be used again tomorrow and if not, they are usually given to friends and family. Rinse and repeat daily.

Amidst other issues, the Florists contended they faced two main issues daily, sort of blockers as the testing team would say. They often missed their regular bus timings, as they spent too much time on blossom strings, which caused them to miss out on valuable customers. The second biggest issue was the crowd and reliability of normal buses. Driven by logic, they used to travel in normal buses as the ticket fare was less on regular buses, compared to Deluxe and Volvo AC buses. The downside being, there was always a huge rush in the normal buses, leading to crushed flowers sometimes and tiring journey most of the days. The other issue was the travelling time increased drastically in normal city buses.

After struggling through buses, flowers, buyers and conductors, Flora and fauna set about improving their business methodically. There were many details that they could not control, such as the price of flowers, petrol and the time of sun rise. But the ones they could control, they argued and agreed was the source of many of their troubles, the bus in which they travelled. After a few failed trial and error attempts that they didn’t share with me, it seems that they opted to use the Deluxe bus.

They reasoned that they could travel in Deluxe City buses and can afford to pay increased ticket fare, if they could put to use the one and a half hour of journey time to the process of blossom strings. This way, the travelling time was put to good use, they also made sure that they are not excessively tired, trying to wriggle between the swathes of bus boarding crowd, and they were not hard pressed to complete the blossom strings in the morning. While this was just theory, it provided convenient excuses to them for a try out. And they did try it out.

In fact, Flora and Fauna discovered that they made more money than before. They increased cost of ticketing was offset by the additional money they earned by selling flowers and using their morning time for other business ventures. They also found out that they were less irritated, as they had a reasonably pleasant mornings and this attitude improvement caused wonders while dealing with buyers. It seems that many stories do have a happy ending.

To my maligned Software Engineering brain, it seems Flora and Fauna did a thorough ‘Root and Branch Review’ of their daily work, and saw there are a few ‘opportunities’ for improvement. They ‘implemented’ a new system and ‘incrementally perfected’ it which gave them the platform to increase their ‘efficiency’. They ‘measured’ their ‘throughput’ daily, and in due course, were able to accurately ‘estimate’ their output. The florists took a ‘calculated risk in investing’ by spending more on bus ticket and their risk assessment paid off, when they received ‘better returns’ on their investment. They are less tired, which means they are ‘motivated’ more and they demonstrated their capability to ‘work smarter’.

I almost asked them when they would be implementing the BIC program, the latest process improvement that we are trying in our projects. Hello inspiration, my old friend!!!!