How to run it properly. Ten people is a small sample, so make it a varied one — try to include a shopkeeper, a factory or construction worker, a teacher, a driver, an office employee, someone self-employed, and at least four women. Ask the same three open questions to everyone, and write down their own words:
- Describe your workplace in three words.
- What happens there if someone makes a mistake?
- Does anyone teach you anything new at work? Who, and how?
Then pool the class’s lists and simply count how often each adjective appears. That count is your finding.
Sample answer: “Across our class’s 300 responses, the commonest words were busy, hard-working and helpful. Only a few people said they were formally trained at work; most said they had learnt by watching a senior. Almost nobody used the word improvement. We concluded that our neighbourhood has a strong culture of effort but a weak culture of deliberate, continuous improvement.”
Why the chapter asks this: to make the abstract idea of a work culture measurable. Japan’s kaizen — ‘continuous improvement’, applied since the mid-1940s — and the German habit of punctuality, attention to detail and quality are not laws or machines. They are just what large numbers of ordinary workers do every day, which is precisely what your ten interviews measure. If the word improvement never appears in your survey, that is a real and useful discovery about the human capital around you.
How to run it properly. Ten people is a small sample, so make it a varied one — try to include a shopkeeper, a factory or construction worker, a teacher, a driver, an office employee, someone self-employed, and at least four women. Ask the same three open questions to everyone, and write down their own words:
Then pool the class’s lists and simply count how often each adjective appears. That count is your finding.
Excellence on that scale was not individual genius; it was a whole system of human capital. This chapter’s section on India’s ancient skill heritage supplies five factors, and each of them maps onto something you have already met in this chapter.
The most striking piece of evidence is the one in the DON’T MISS OUT box: those sculptor families “used their skills without expecting to see the finished outcome” — a temple could take longer than a working life. They pursued excellence by practising regularly and learning new techniques, treating work as worship.