I was born and brought up in Mumbai and these lessons were learnt by me from a Udipi Hotel close to my home in Mumbai at a very early stage in my life.  I had presented these lessons in the Chief Learning Officers Summit in Mumbai on the best practices at Wipro.  While this is a longish email but I am sure you will find lot of value from each lesson.

First Lesson “Owners Eat Here” – This to us can be translated as “Practice what you preach”.  So I told the audience that whatever you see in my presentation is what is implemented in Wipro and there is no “hawa” in any of the slides.

Second Lesson “If You Like it Tell Others Else Tell Us” – I use to be a ERP Consultant for many years and always use to help people on coming up with solutions to their functional and technical issues.  Most people would then say that Yogesh is a very helpful guy, always ready to support etc. but in reality I was enjoying the learning I would get from solving people’s problem.  So I use to tell them that if you like my solutions tell others so that they can come to me with their problems (more learning for me) and if you don’t like my solutions tell me so that I can think of some other solution (again more learning).  Isn’t this a great lesson from the hotel to learn throughout your life and also help people.

Third Lesson “Coin Exchange” – The waiters in the hotel would get award for coming up with ideas jointly.  When I was speaking to the owner of the Udipi hotel he shared this coin exchange lesson.  The dosa at that time costed Rs. 1/- and he said to me that if you have Rs. 1/- coin and I have a Rs. 1/- coin and we both exchange the coins we will have one coin each but if you have a idea and I have a idea and we exchange ideas we both have two ideas each.  Isn’t that a great way to keep learning and adding more and more ideas to our life by exchanging ideas.

Fourth Lesson “BROKEN BANANA LEAF” – As usual when I was having my Rs. 1/- dosa on the banana leaf (there were no steel plates in this hotel) and there was a customer on next table shouting at the waiter for giving him a broken leaf.  Given the reputation of the hotel where the owners also eat there, the waiter was arguing that usually that does not happen and it was just a one off case but the customer would not budge.  The owner came to the table and pacified the customer by saying that he will ask one of the other waiters to bring 15 banana leaves and if even one of them was broken, his lunch will be free.  So when the 15 leaves arrived and customer started pulling out one leaf after another he could not find even a single broken leaf and on the 6^th leaf he apologized with the owner and said that I now trust you that it was just a one off case.  The learning from this is how confident are we about the solutions that we give to our customers.  Can we do a check for broken banana leaf whenever we deal with our customer.  Not only this, after this incident the owner took the waiter on the side and said that a customer should only call you to say “Thank You” and for everything else you should anyway be there on his side which to me meant a lot in the level of service we should give to our customers (checking for broken leaf every time we serve our customers).  And now as trainers are we ensuring that like the Udipi customer our participants are calling us only to say “Thank You” and for everything else in the session we are there always with them.

Hope you found the above lessons useful.