Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management: The Legacy of S.K. Chakraborty 9811911576, 9789811911576

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Sanjoy Mukherjee László Zsolnai   Editors

Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management The Legacy of S. K. Chakraborty

Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management

Sanjoy Mukherjee · László Zsolnai Editors

Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management The Legacy of S. K. Chakraborty

Editors Sanjoy Mukherjee Sustainability and Liberal Studies Indian Institute of Management Shillong Shillong, Meghalaya, India

László Zsolnai Business Ethics Center Corvinus University of Budapest Budapest, Hungary

ISBN 978-981-19-1157-6 ISBN 978-981-19-1158-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Dedicated to the memory of S. K. Chakraborty (1940–2018); Pioneer of Indian Ethos and Human Values in Management; Founder Convener, Management Centre for Human Values, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta

Preface

In 2019, the members of the Prof. S. K. Chakraborty Memorial Trust, especially his wife Mrs. Chhanda Chakraborty expressed a wish to create a scholarly book dedicated to the memory of the great Indian management scholar S. K. Chakraborty (1940–2018). We liked the idea as both of us were collaborators and admirers of Prof. Chakraborty. One of us (Sanjoy) knew S. K. Chakraborty since he was Prof. Chakraborty’s student at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta, where he attended his Elective course “Managerial Effectiveness and Human Values: Indian Insights” and was deeply inspired by its contents and delivery. After graduation, he had kept close touch with Dr. Chakraborty and finally joined him as a Research Fellow in 1993 at the Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV) at IIM Calcutta. As a Faculty of the Centre, for nearly a decade, he was engaged in teaching, research and consultancy under the guidance of Dr. Chakraborty (who was also his Ph.D. supervisor) on Human Values and Indian Ethos in Management in the academia as well as in the corporate world in India and abroad. After Dr. Chakraborty’s retirement, Sanjoy became Coordinator of the Centre for more than 3 years and carried on at the Centre till September 2009. He was also the Editor-in-Chief of the bi-annual international Journal of Human Values (of which Dr. Chakraborty was the Founder Editor) for nearly a decade till he left IIM Calcutta. Since October 2009, Sanjoy has been engaged in his work and mission as a Faculty of the Sustainability and Liberal Studies group at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Shillong in North East India. The other Editor (László) collaborated with S. K. Chakraborty since 2000 when Dr. Chakraborty visited Hungary and participated in the first ever European conference on Spirituality in Management. In this conference, Dr. Chakraborty introduced Hindu spirituality in management as a Vedanta-based spiritual approach to business. His contribution generated echoes among European business ethics and management scholars and widened the interest in Hindu spirituality in ethics and management in Europe. We think that, in the light of the current state of global capitalism and the COVID crisis, a book on Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management is vii

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more relevant than ever. The world, and especially the business world, needs new inspirations for a more humane, ecological and peaceful development. We believe that S. K. Chakraborty’s works can provide such an inspiration for India and other parts of the world. Shillong, India Budapest, Hungary

Sanjoy Mukherjee László Zsolnai

Contents

Introduction Ancient Indian Wisdom for Modern Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sanjoy Mukherjee and László Zsolnai

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Life and Work of S. K. Chakraborty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bidyut K. Sarkar

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Vedas and Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mrityunjay Athreya

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Business Ethics and Management From Professional Ethics to a Spiritual Search for Meaning: Some Reflections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Luk Bouckaert

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On Ego and Economics Subordinated by Spirit: Reflections on the ‘Spirinomics’ of S. K. Chakraborty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mike Thompson

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Spiritual Turn in Business and Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . László Zsolnai

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From Reason-Based Decision-Making to Intuition-Based Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sraddhalu Ranade

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Understanding Human Values through Integrative Dialogue: The ´ astr¯artha Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . S¯ Sharda S. Nandram, S. Sukhada, Ankur Joshi, and Puneet K. Bindlish

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Contents

Ethical Decision-Making—Synthesizing S. K. Chakraborty’s Classification of Ethics with Levels of Moral Judgement and the Four-Component Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Sunil G. Savur Time to Globalize Sarvodaya? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Sanjeeb Kakoty From Indian and Utopian Ethos to Management for Spiritual Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Gerrit De Vylder Developing New Organizational Models and Processes A Note on Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility for Multinational Enterprises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Manas Chatterji Creating Sustainable Wealth through Human-Centered Complex Adaptive Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Pravir Malik Values of Management in Ecologically Conscious Businesses . . . . . . . . . . . 165 András Ócsai Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility: Insights from Indian Ethos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Sumona Ghosh Potentials and Pitfalls of Spiritual-Based Leadership Reflections on “Spirituality as the Context for Leadership” . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Peter Pruzan Translating Swami Vivekananda into Management Practice . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Swami Narasimhananda Dharma of Leadership: Wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita in an Uncertain World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Debashis Chatterjee Krishna: A Study in Trans-ethical Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Satya Chaitanya Leadership as an Adventure of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 Sanjoy Mukherjee Indian Models of Management and Leadership with Roots in Ancient Wisdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Subhash Sharma

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Wise Leadership—Lokasamgraha and Rajarshi Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 Anindo Bhattacharjee, Apurva Shinde, and Sandeep Singh Upanishads and Transformational Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Venkat R. Krishnan Leaders and Their World Management: The “Sanatana” Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 Pradip Bhattacharya Inspired Leadership and Indian Wisdom in Managing Crisis . . . . . . . . . . 309 Anil Sachdev and Vidya M. Iyer Times May Change, What Is Right Does Not . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 S. Padmanabhan Nurturing Conscious Organizations and Individuals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337 Yazdi Jehangir Bankwala Education, Spirituality, and Society India’s Svaraj Parampara: Nation and Modernity in India . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 Makarand R. Paranjape Is the Bhagavad Gita Modern? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355 Gautam Mukerjee Love in the Classroom? The Relevance of Erich Fromm’s Concept of Love for Business Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367 Knut Ims Teaching Ethics to Management Students in a Growth-Obsessed India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381 Jagdish Rattanani Ethics, Consumerism and Sustainability in the Backdrop of the Kathopanishad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393 Piya Mukherjee Exploring the Centrality and Transformative Power of Spirituality . . . . . 401 Katalin Illes, Nitha Palakshappa, and Madhumita Chatterji Epilogue Man, the Unmanageable: Meditations on Clarity, Morality and Meditation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 Arindam Chakrabarti

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Sanjoy Mukherjee is associate professor of Sustainability and Liberal Studies at Indian Institute of Management Shillong. Previously he was working at the Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV) at Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. His areas of research include Indian ethos in management, management by human values, business ethics, corporate social responsibility, wisdom leadership, alternative learning, spirituality in management and management and liberal arts. His latest book is “Looking East: Indian Wisdom for Modern Management” (2022, Peter Lang, Oxford). László Zsolnai is professor and director of the Business Ethics Center at Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary, and an associate member of the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice, Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, UK. He serves as president of the European SPES Institute in Leuven, Belgium. He has been a guest professor/visiting scholar at University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of California at Berkeley, Georgetown University, University of Richmond, Concordia University Montreal, University of St. Gallen, Bocconi University Milan, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. László Zsolnai’s books include “Ethics, Meaning and Market Society” (2018), “Caring Management in the New Economy” (2019), “The Routledge International Handbook of Spirituality in Society and the Professions” (2019), and “Responsible Research for Better Business” (2020). His website: http://laszlo-zsolnai.com.

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Contributors Mrityunjay Athreya is an Indian author, educationist and management advisor, widely regarded as one of the founders and pioneers of Indian Management movement and education. He was a professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, the London Business School and the Strathclyde Business School. He is the founder of Sampradaan Indian Centre for Philanthropy, a non-profit nongovernmental organization, serving as a platform for charity initiatives by high-net-worth individuals. In 2014, the Government of India honoured him by bestowing on him the Padma Bhushan civilian award. Yazdi Jehangir Bankwala is the principal consultant at Arpitha Associates in Singapore and Malaysia. Since 1995, he has conducted training programmes, coaching and provided consultancy for organizations in the areas of “Transformation, Vision, Values and Change”. His clients include FORTUNE 500 companies like Amoco, BP, Indian Oil and Petronas, and other organizations based in Malaysia, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Mauritius and the UK. He is co-founder of the Centre for Promoting Human Values in Singapore, founding member of the Centre for the Advancement of Philanthropy in Malaysia, and director of the Sejahtera Leadership Initiative in Malaysia. Anindo Bhattacharjee is an assistant arofessor of General Management at SVKM’s Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai, India. His academic and teaching background covers operations management, strategy and ethics. He is a TEDx speaker and has conducted international workshops, seminars and conferences on ancient philosophies and their relevance to contemporary management and leadership. He serves as co-principal investigator in ICMR-FORTE Indo-Swedish Research on Ageing Care (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India). He is also a volunteer for the Course in Mindfulness at Naperville, IL (USA) that conducts mindfulness-based programmes in leadership and wellness for corporates and academic institutions. His research interests include emerging market strategy, leadership and philosophy of management. Pradip Bhattacharya is from Calcutta, India. He has been the West Bengal State Government’s nominee on the Board of Governors, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta for over 15 years and was on the editorial board of its Journal of Human Values. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature for his research on the Mahabharata and a Postgraduate Diploma with distinction in Public Service Training from Manchester. He is India’s only International HRD Fellow and an MD in Homeopathy. He has authored and edited 33 books and published numerous articles on public administration, comparative mythology, Mahabharata, homeopathy and management and human values. His latest books are The Mokshadharma Parva of the Mahabharata and The Jaiminiya Mahabharata. Puneet Bindlish is a practicing consultant in integrative intelligence for organizations globally facing VUCA and co-founder of Integrative Intelligence. He teaches in

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the Department of Humanistic Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi. He brings a blend of academic, consulting and entrepreneurial experience across healthcare, telecom, technology, banking and insurance, education, sports, public sectors. His fields of interest include spirituality, leadership, organisational behaviour, entrepreneurship and integrative intelligence. Luk Bouckaert is professor emeritus of ethics at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He is a philosopher and an economist by training. His research and publications fall within the fields of business ethics and spirituality. In 1987, he founded the Centre for Economics and Ethics at the Catholic University of Leuven. In 2000, he started the SPES Forum (Spirituality in Economics and Society) and in 2004, the European SPES Forum which he chaired as president until 2014. His publications in English include: The Palgrave Handbook of Spirituality and Business (co-edited with László Zsolnai, 2011. Palgrave), Business, Ethics and Peace (co-edited with Manas Chatterji, 2015. Emerald), Art, Spirituality and Economics (co-edited with Knut Ims and Peter Rona, 2018. Springer) and The Will to Serve. Inspiring Models of Servant Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship (co-edited with Steven van den Heuvel, 2020. Palgrave). Satya Chaitanya is an educator and corporate trainer with over 30 years of experience. He has given training sessions to senior bureaucrats, corporate executives, businessmen, doctors, engineers, college professors, schoolteachers and entrepreneurs. He has been associated as a visiting/adjunct faculty with the Indian Institute of Management (Lucknow), XLRI School of Business (Jamshedpur), Xavier Institute of Management and Research (Mumbai) and Xavier Institute of Management (Bhubaneswar). He has also taught in the Loyola College of Education (Jamshedpur), where he was a full-time faculty for more than 8 years. As corporate trainer, he has been associated with the Management Development Centers of Tata Steel and the Confederation of Indian Industry. Arindam Chakrabarti is Lenney distinguished chair professor of philosophy at University of Hawaii, Manoa, USA for the last 25 years. From 2018 to 2020 he occupied the Mattoo Endowed Chair of Classical Indic Philosophy at Stony Brook University, New York. He did his doctoral work in philosophy of language at Oxford in 1979-82. Since 1984, he has taught at the University of Calcutta, the University College London, the University of Washington Seattle, the University of Delhi and the University of Hawaii. His areas of specialization include Philosophy of Language, Moral Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, Aesthetics and Comparative Indian-Analytic Philosophy. The author of more than a hundred papers in journals and chapters in edited volumes, he has edited and authored seven books in English, six in Bengali and one in Sanskrit. His latest monograph Realisms Interlinked: Objects, Subjects and Other Subjects came out from Bloomsbury London in 2019. Penguin Random House India is going to publish his Book of Questions: An Analytical Introduction to Indian Philosophies in 2023. Debashis Chatterjee is professor and director of the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode. He has taught leadership classes at Harvard University, Said Business

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School, Oxford University, and at the Indian Institutes of Management, Calcutta, Lucknow and Kozhikode. His books include Leading Consciously (Routledge, 1998) Timeless Leadership (Wiley, Singapore, 2012), and Invincible Arjuna (Westland, 2016). He has also published a popular book Can You Teach a Zebra some Algebra? (Wisdom Tree, 2014) for educators. He has trained more than 25 thousand managers globally in Fortune 100 corporations and over 50 thousand school principals and teachers as part of his globally subscribed Leading Schools workshops. He has served as leadership coach to political leaders and CEOs of major Indian organizations. He is a pioneer in the field of Asian models in leadership. He serves as Independent Director on the Boards of several multinational and Indian companies. His website: https://www.debchat.com. Madhumita Chatterji is the director of ABBS School of Management, Bangalore. She is a founding board member of the South Asian Alliance of Disaster Research Institutes. Her areas of interest include Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Governance, Spirituality and Business Ethics, Cross-Cultural Management, Business History and Indian Ethos and Culture. She has completed her Ph.D. from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She has completed programmes in History, Politics and Society at the University of Oxford and Participant-Based Learning at Harvard Business School. She has authored/edited four books and written many refereed articles in her areas of interest. Manas Chatterji is a professor of management at Binghamton University, New York, and Guest Professor at Peking University, China. He previously taught at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and held visiting appointments at Cornell University, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the University of Karlsruhe, the University of Munster and other universities in the United States, Europe, Asia and South Africa. He authored or edited more than 30 books and published about 80 scholarly articles in the areas of peace science, military spending, disarmament, economic conversion, conflict management, regional science, technology management, healthcare management and energy, environmental and urban Management. He is a general editor of two book series: Conflict Management, Peace Economics and Development (Emerald Publishing UK), and International Studies in Peace Economics and Peace Science (Cambridge Scholars, UK). Gerrit De Vylder studied History and Development Economics at KU Leuven and Ghent University, Belgium. He obtained his Ph.D. (Economics) from Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He worked as a researcher at Tilburg University, authored several books on business history and executed development project evaluation assignments in India, Ethiopia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Ukraine. For more than two decades, he taught economic history, history of economic thought and international political economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business Studies, Antwerp Campus of Catholic University of Leuven. More recently, his publications have focused the history and philosophy of India, and the historical, philosophical, spiritual and religious aspects of globalization.

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Sumona Ghosh has been associated with St. Xavier’s College Kolkata since 2002. After completing her postgraduation in Commerce, she has been conferred with the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Business Management by the University of Calcutta in 2014. Her area of research is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). She is also a Certified Assessor for Sustainable Organizations (CASO), certification conferred upon her by UBB GmBH Germany. She has been appointed as the member of the Sustainable Businesses Council of the Women’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry (WICCI) in India. Katalin Illes is the associate head of College (External Relations) in the Business School at the University of Westminster, UK. Her early career included successful entrepreneurial and consulting initiatives. As an academic, she led and developed collaborations between UK universities and higher education institutions in Denmark, Finland, Hungary and India. She also worked as the director of International Development of China’s first liberal arts college. She has led and developed innovative, creative, trust-based networks and partnerships to promote practicebased, life-long growth of individuals, communities and enterprises around the world. Knut J. Ims is professor emeritus of business ethics at the Department of Strategy and Management in NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen, Norway. He has a Ph.D. from the School of Economics and Legal Science, Gothenburg University, Sweden. His publications include Business and the Greater Good. Rethinking Business Ethics in an Age of Crisis (2015. Edward Elgar). Product as Process— Commodities in Mechanic and Organic Ontology (in Ecological Economics, 2015), Deep Ecology and Personal Responsibility (in The Spiritual Dimension of Business Ethics and Sustainability. 2015. Springer). Vidya M. Iyer is the director of SOIL School of Business Design at Gurgaon, India, and the Chair of the Human Resources and Career Management. She has been a founder consultant at Strizon Consulting. Vidya has published research on employability and skill building in national and international journals. She keenly follows diverse areas of management including Organization Design, Network Analysis, People Analytics and Talent Management. As a consultant, she enjoys working with SMEs and women entrepreneurship ventures. She has been a mentor with the Cherie Blaire foundation and the ISB-Goldman Sachs 10,000 women entrepreneurs’ programme. Ankur Joshi is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Management Studies— WISDOM, Banasthali Vidyapith, India, and he coordinates the academic training and research activities of Indian Ethos, Indigenous Research, and Education. He is an OMRISE Researcher and contributes to online module development for teacher training projects. He is a Fellow of MDI-Gurugram in Public Policy and Governance. Sanjeeb Kakoty is an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Shillong. A historian by training, his Ph.D. was on the theme of Technology and Social Change. He is also a documentary filmmaker, and a writer who has spent time

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as an amateur farmer and a carpenter. He is also the editor of the monthly magazine NUKSA the Pine Chronicle and Chairperson of the Centre for the Development of the North Eastern Region and the Incubation and Enterprise Support Centre of the Indian Institute of Management, Shillong. Venkat R. Krishnan is the director of the Center for Oneness and Transforming Leadership in Chennai, India. He received his M.A. in Philosophy from Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati; Ph.D. in Business Administration from Temple University, Philadelphia; and D.Litt. from S-VYASA University, Bengaluru. He was a professor at XLRI Jamshedpur, and then the director of “Yale-Great Lakes Center for Management Research”. He had earlier taught at Temple University and was a manager in State Bank of India. He does research on transformational leadership, value systems, and Indian philosophy. He has written more than 100 research papers. His website: http://rkvenkat.org. Pravir Malik has been developing a unified theory and mathematics of organization. He has written 16 books related to this, which includes a recently completed 10 book series on “Cosmology of Light” to elaborate mathematics with implications in quantum computing, generation of computational strata, genetics, artificial intelligence and transhumanism. He currently serves as the Chief Technologist at Deep Order Technologies. He was formerly the Head of Organizational Sciences at Zappos.com. Additionally, he has served as a founding member of A. T. Kearney India, and was managing director of Advisory Services for BSR, a leading global CSR consulting company. Gautam Mukerjee has been an industrial entrepreneur and management teacher since the 1980s. His venture in welding metallurgy was set up in 1981 with branches across India, exports to seven countries and technical collaborations from Belgium, Denmark and Italy. He retired from his firm in 2017 and has since focused only on teaching and writing. He has been a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (1989–93) and XLRI Jamshedpur (1991–2003). Gautam was mentored by James O’Toole for the Aspen seminars on “Leadership by Values” and served as co-facilitator for India. He currently conducts management training mainly for India’s Tata group on Values and Creating the 21st Century Organization. Piya Mukherjee is the founder and director of Vivekananda Education Society’s Leadership Academy and Research Centre in Bombay. A “bridge-builder” and former investment banker with 24 years of experience in transformational ethics and human values, cultural sensitization, leadership training, HR intervention, intergenerational management and finance, she blends the rigorousness of Western analyses with the deep-rooted wisdom of Eastern scriptures. She is a corporate coach and mentor for senior industry executives. She contributes articles on spirituality to various publications, including mainstream newspapers like “The Speaking Tree”. Sharda S. Nandram is a professor of Hindu Spirituality and Society at the Vrije University Amsterdam and a professor of business and spirituality at the Nyenrode Business University, The Netherlands. She has earned two Bachelors and

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two Masters at the University of Amsterdam: one in Psychology and the other in Economics. She has received her Ph.D. in Social Sciences at the Vrije University in Amsterdam. Her fields of interest are Hinduism and spirituality, business and spirituality, Indian leadership, entrepreneurial behaviour, organizational innovation and integrative intelligence. Swami Narasimhananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission founded by Swami Vivekananda in 1897. He is the Secretary of Ramakrishna Mission Sevashrama, Kozhikode, Kerala, and runs a higher secondary school, a kindergarten and a polyclinic. He was the editor of “Prabuddha Bharata”, an English monthly journal started by Swami Vivekananda in 1896. Swami Narasimhananda has edited a volume of Swami Vivekananda’s teachings titled “Vivekananda Reader”. He works in the areas of Indian philosophy, sociology of religion and spirituality in management. András Ócsai is an assistant professor at the Business Ethics Center of the Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary. After graduation at the Corvinus University of Budapest in 2002, he worked for several multinational companies, and in the Hungarian public sector. Then he found his way back to his alma mater and has been contributing to the activities of the Business Ethics Center since 2010. He defended his Ph.D. thesis in 2019. His research interests include ecological economics, Buddhist economics and spirituality in business. He is member of European SPES Institute, Leuven, Belgium and serves as the Hungarian contact of Globethics.net, Geneva, Switzerland. His latest publication is Ecologically Conscious Organizations: New Business Practices Based on Ecological Commitment (2021. Palgrave). Nitha Palakshappa is the associate head of School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. Her research interest includes sustainability, social responsibility and ethics. She has a particular interest in the nexus of organizations, responsibility and livelihoods. She explores these issues in a range of global contexts (including India, New Zealand and the United States) and sectors (including food and fashion). Makarand R. Paranjape was educated at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he got his Masters and Ph.D. in English. He was the director of Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla and has been a professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University since 1999. Earlier, he taught at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, the University of Hyderabad and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His latest books include The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi (Penguin Random House, 2015), Debating the ‘Post’ Condition in India (Routledge, 2018), Swami Vivekananda: Hinduism and India’s Road to Modernity (HarperCollins 2020) and New Perspectives in Indian Science and Civilization (Routledge 2020). He is currently a columnist in Open Magazine, Gulf News, The New Indian Express and The Print.

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Peter Pruzan is professor emeritus at the Department of Management, Philosophy and Politics, Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. He served as guest professor at Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning in India and has been president of an international consultancy and professor at the Technical University of Denmark, and the University of Copenhagen. Authored many books and articles in international scientific journals on operations research, multiple criteria decision-making, business ethics, values in organizations, corporate responsibility, spiritual-based leadership and research methodology and the philosophy of science. His books include Leading with Wisdom: Spiritual-based Leadership in Business (with Kirsten PruzanMikkelsen, Debra Miller and William Miller, 2007. Greenleaf, UK.), Rational, Ethical and Spiritual Perspectives on Leadership (2009. Peter Lang, Oxford) and Research Methodology: The Aims, Practices and Ethics of Science (2016. Spinger). Jagdish Rattanani is a faculty member at the S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai, India. He teaches MBA participants in the areas of ethics in business, business communications and management and society. He is the director of Foundation of The Billion Press, a not-for-profit media company he co-founded to bring to attention “voices less heard”. He has authored some 200 columns on contemporary issues, building on his work as a career journalist for over three decades in India. He has M.Sc. in Sustainability and Responsibility from the Ashbridge Business School in the UK. He is a director and member of the Wisdom Council of Association of Sustainability Practitioners in UK. Sraddhalu Ranade is a scientist, educator and scholar based at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India. A multifaceted personality he specialised in physics, mathematics and computer sciences integrating them with philosophical, metaphysical and spiritual studies. He travels all over the world delivering lectures and conducted workshops on management by consciousness, integral education, esoteric sciences, self-development, integral yoga and related spiritual practices. Anil Sachdev is the founder and chairman of Grow Talent Company Limited, the School of Inspired Leadership-SOIL and SOIL School of Business Design, with two campuses in Gurgaon, India, and focus on the five pillars of Mindfulness, Ethics, Compassion, Diversity and Sustainability. He is a member of the Academic Committee of CEDEP in INSEAD campus, Fontainebleau. He is a member of the World Compassion Council, Seattle, and a Trustee of the Chinmaya Mission. He serves on the Global Board of Shizenkan University in Tokyo. Bidyut K. Sarkar has 24 years of formal teaching and administrative experience in management institutions of India. He has been the vice-principal and membersecretary of Tagore Centre for Human Values and serves as managing trustee, Prof. S. K. Chakraborty Memorial Trust, Kolkata, India. As a corporate educator and visiting professor, he has been regularly conducting EDPs across India and abroad with top- and middle-level executives of public and private sector companies and taught courses at various academic institutions across India on Values, Ethics, Leadership and Stress Management. His publications include 48 papers/articles, 3 monographs and several book chapters.

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Sunil Savur is a lecturer at the School of Management, University of South Australia, Adelaide. He has a Ph.D. for ethical decision-making, a master’s degree in manufacturing management and bachelor’s degree in engineering. Prior to academia, he had a career of over 30 years in engineering and manufacturing management. He teaches courses on Business Ethics, International Business Strategy and Ethics, People, Leadership and Performance, and Engineering Ethics. His research interests include ethical decision making, spirituality in management, engineering ethics and business ethics. Subhash Sharma is the director of Indus Business Academy in Bangalore, India. He has made significant contributions to institution building as founding member of WISDOM at Banasthali University, in Banasthali, Rajasthan, founding director of the Indian Institute of Plantation Management in Bangalore; and founding member Indus Business Academy in Bangalore. He is the author of well-known books such as Management in New Age: Western Windows Eastern Doors, New Mantras in Corporate Corridors, and New Earth Sastra. Apurva Shinde is a social worker and freelance consultant who works with different non-government organizations (NGO) on issues of health, education, livelihoods of marginalized communities and assists non-profits’ service visibility at digital platform. She has a master’s degree in Social Work from the College of Social Work, Nirmala Niketan Mumbai, along with a postgraduate diploma in UNESCO Interreligious Dialogue and Water Sustainability from CSWNN. She also has a postgraduate degree in Human Resources from M. S. University of Baroda. She is an active travel blogger on social issues and mental health among youths. Sandeep Singh is a professor of management at the School of Management Sciences, Varanasi, India. His teaching and research areas include leadership, business ethics, spirituality and marketing communication. He is coordinator of Centre for Spiritualism and Human Enrichment and member of academic council of SMS, Varanasi. He is also the executive editor of bi-annual journal Purushartha. He has edited two books: Essentials of Leadership: Ethics and Spirituality and Spirituality in Management. He has also authored many journal papers in Indian philosophy of management and ethics. Sharma Sukhada is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanistic Studies at Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi. She did her Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. She has received the traditional degrees of Vyakaranacharya and Niruktacharya from Arsha Shodha Sansthana, Hyderabad. Her primary research interests lie in machine translation, natural language processing, application of the Indian grammatical framework to modern technologies, Sanskrit computational linguistics, Vedic philosophy, Human Values, health and the 16 samskaras. Mike Thompson is an adjunct professor at the Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, Canada. He was a professor of management practice at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai. His teaching and

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research focus is on sustainability innovation, entrepreneurship, wise leadership and corporate governance. He serves as co-editor of The Macau Ricci Institute Journal and is a reviewer for several management journals. He co-authored Responsible Entrepreneurship (with S. Rothlin and T. Myers, 2015. Palgrave) and co-edited Wise Management in Organisational Complexity (with David Bevan, 2013. Palgrave). He served as a board director alongside entrepreneurs throughout his career including The Entertainer toyshops. He was CEO of GoodBrand, the impact-led innovation consultancy now part of the Anthesis Group, the sustainability activators. He is currently the Leader of People Services for Anthesis.

Introduction

Ancient Indian Wisdom for Modern Business Sanjoy Mukherjee and László Zsolnai

The book is a tribute to the revered Indian management scholar and philosopher Professor S. K. Chakraborty, the pioneer of Human Values and Indian Ethos in Management and the Founder Convener of Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV), Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta. The volume brings together a collection of papers from eminent scholars and practitioners from India, Europe, the USA, Australia, and New Zeeland on the topic of Indian Spirituality and Management. The book presents and highlights the broader context within which the globalized, market directed business forces clash with Indian spiritual values and ethics. This value-conflict was the “Leitmotif” of S. K. Chakraborty for his decades-long endeavor with inspired zeal to establish and promote an Indian Model of Management built on the indigenous knowledge of India. The seminal contribution of S. K. Chakraborty has been in anchoring a solid spiritual foundation to human values and leadership using insights from Indian ethos and its modern proponents like Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, and Sri Aurobindo. Shitangshu Kumar Chakraborty (1940–2018), originally a finance and accounting professor gradually transformed himself into a non-conventional teacher of Human Values, ethics, and leadership. This spiritual metamorphosis kept the industry awed so much so that in the 1990s many public sector and private sector companies invited him to conduct development programs for their top and middle-level executives.

S. Mukherjee (B) Associate Professor, Sustainability and Liberal Studies Area, Indian Institute of Management, Shillong Umsawli Campus,, 793018 Meghalaya, India e-mail: [email protected] L. Zsolnai Professor and Head, Business Ethics Center, Corvinus University of Budapest, F˝ovám tér 8, 1093 Budapest, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_1

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Chakraborty’s mission was to bring in India’s indigenous concepts into the professional Indian management. He published 41 books, 28 of them are focused on values, ethics, and leadership. He founded three journals and two institutions, and inspired many business students in India and abroad, and thousands of corporate executives and professionals who have gone through his management development programs. Of special mention is the Journal of Human Values, of which he was the founder Editor-in-Chief, published biannually by Sage Publications India. One of the major themes of the book is how spirituality can serve in renewing business ethics and management. Chakraborty’s effort to root business ethics in the traditions of Indian spirituality, particularly in the Vedantic heritage, is challenging for Western ethicists who usually think in terms of theories of rights, social contract, and utility maximization. However, in the last decades, there have been considerable efforts in Europe and in North America to do something similar as Chakraborty did in India: giving business ethics a spiritual foundation. Introducing spirituality in the field of business and managerial ethics creates a shift from external rule-directed behavior toward an inner-directed, existential search for meaning. What is missing in conventional business and managerial ethics is a deep, inter-subjective intuition of the Presence of Life that guides thoughts and actions. Chakraborty calls “consciousness ethics” such an ethics based on the re-connection with the inner source of Life, what he distinguishes from compliance ethics and cognitive ethics. The book argues further that a spiritual turn is needed in business management as a whole. With its instrumental rationality and extreme materialistic orientation today’s business management produces large-scale ecological, social, and ethical “ills”. Business management needs a more spiritual foundation to solve the failures caused by the application of the narrow sense of rationality and the corresponding materialistic management models. The book presents and analyses a number of real-world examples from India, Europe, and the USA which show the viability of spiritually inspired business models in different competitive settings. The success of these companies suggests that spiritual motivations may have a foundational role in good, innovative, and values-oriented management. Another major theme covered by the book is spiritual-based leadership. S. K. Chakraborty pioneered in rebalancing the weaknesses of Western behavioral sciences and managerial practices by drawing on the Indian Rajarshi leadership model. He presented spirituality as the essence of transformational leadership to promote performance, role-effectiveness, and quality of work–life within organizations. Spirituality as the context for leadership has evolved over the last decades both in the East and the West. This new focus has not only led to far broader concepts of purpose and success than traditionally associated with management but also given rise to deeper existential questions as to the identity and responsibility of corporations and their leaders, questions very similar in nature to those faced by persons with a spiritual quest. In the “East”, many leading institutions of higher learning concentrate on the leader rather than on the processes and methods of leading. The emphasis is on the

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virtues a leader must possess to be a “good” leader in both a moral and an operational sense. These virtues have their origin in age-old perspectives on the purpose of man’s existence and of his spiritual nature. Here the connection between the leader and his/her spirituality is more direct and explicit. The book compares and contrasts the Rajarshi leadership model as refined by Chakraborty with contemporary applications of Aristotelian “eudaimonia” conception, Catholic Social Teaching, models of Servant Leadership, and wise leadership. The pitfalls of spiritual-based leadership are also explored by academics and practitioners in the book. The emerging consensus is that the high ideal of Chakraborty’s spiritualized organizations should be compromised with the reality of managing organizations that operate within a market context accountable to many diverse stakeholder groups. The problems of business education are another major theme of the book. In the wake of widespread and all-encompassing globalization, the business scenario is increasingly being dominated by the phenomenon of market capitalism and the gospel of fierce competition. This has reduced the quest for creativity and human excellence in business schools because of focusing on techno-economic knowledge and skills with little attention to the deeper and higher dimensions of life and work. Pertinent questions on meaning of work and purpose of life have been pushed far beyond the margins of dominant vocabulary of mainstream business schools. The Mahabharata, in spite of being a tragic tale of human destructiveness and frailty, praises humanity in the highest possible terms. Nothing is nobler than being human, it asserts in the Book of Peace. What is that humanness which it extols? Should we take it normatively as ideal—but rarely exemplified—human virtues such as truthfulness, forgiveness, non-cruelty, non-envy, and humility, the cluster of virtues which the Mahabharata calls “the thirteen forms of Truth”? Or should we take the entirety of human nature, with all its fragility and finitude, its aspirations, and its contradictions, to be constitutive of that humanity which the Mahabharata values above all? We believe that S. K. Chakraborty was right that the mainstream materialistic value orientation of today’s business can hardly be reconciled with any genuine spirituality. The dominant understanding of economic rationality as individualistic, selfinterest maximization should be replaced with a much broader notion of rationality. Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen suggested that rationality requires subjecting one’s choice of action, including objectives, values, and priorities to reasoned scrutiny. In this way, spiritually inspired choices may not be incompatible with the demands of human rationality. Business actors can rationally pursue objectives based on spiritual values and priorities.

1 Issues and Themes In his paper “Life and Work of S. K. Chakraborty”, Bidyut K. Sarkar (S. K. Chakraborty Memorial Trust, Kolkata, West Bengal, India) gives a comprehensive

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picture about the personal and professional achievement of S. K. Chakraborty. Sarkar emphasizes that Chakraborty was a man immersed in Indian Ethos in mind, body, and speech. Based on the perennial principles of Indian wisdom like “simple living, high thinking”, his life is a fascinating story of transformation of a teacher of nonspiritual subject like finance and accounting into an a¯ ch¯arya of sacred topics like human values, ethics, and leadership. He made these domains spiritualized. In his paper “Vedas and Management”, Mrityunjay Athreya (Author and Educator, India) emphasizes that modern management is an interdisciplinary science. It has utilized concepts from different fields, such as economics, psychology, mathematics, and engineering. For dealing with ethical issues, management can benefit from philosophy and spirituality. The paper brings out some of the ways in which modern management can benefit from the Vedas. All the Vedas contain philosophical dialogues on the basic questions of the meaning of existence, purpose of human life, and relationship between the individual and the cosmos. This can be particularly useful in management. In his paper “From Professional Ethics to a Spiritual Search for Meaning: Some Reflections”, Luk Bouckaert (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium) argues for the need of a spiritual foundation for professional ethics. Although the sources of inspiration are different from those of S. K. Chakraborty, Bouckaert agrees with Chakraborty that an ethic of compliance is insufficient to guide professional ethics. The paper defines the purpose and structure of a professional ethic. Then it uses Ian Mc Ewan’s novel “The Children Act” to demonstrate why professional ethics regularly fails to overcome existential and ethically difficult choices. Then the paper explores the possibilities of a spiritual ethic as an alternative to a compliance code of conduct. Bouckaert presents Albert Schweitzer’s principle “reverence for life” as a good foundation for a spiritual ethic and refers to Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgement to elucidate the process of discernment and decision-making within the field of a spiritual ethic. In his paper “On Ego and Economics Subordinated by Spirit: Reflections on the ‘Spirinomics’ of S. K. Chakraborty”, Mike Thompson (Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, Canada) emphasizes that Western management and business practice has developed on what might be regarded as providing returns on capital employed for the work of management and labor in producing profit through the economic ‘machinery’ of supply and demand. But the ‘machinery’ is in the hands of self-interested individuals who compete for their interests in the marketplace. The competition is for material rewards for their Body, their Life, and their Mindset (or, ego). It is at this point that S. K. Chakraborty makes his challenge to the role of the self in self-interest. He regarded Western management and business practices as being exploitative of the human condition and the greater well-being. The ego, he argues, must be subject to the development of the spiritual or higher self. Mike Thompson brings together key Vedantic themes as synthesized by Chakraborty and complementary insights selected from Western sources. He reflects on the applicability of Chakraborty’s work to the globalized world of business practices that indicate shifts towards the ideals of Chakraborty’s “spirinomics”. The paper outlines and discusses four major themes, namely, detachment of the ego-self,

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managing the ego-self, Rajarshi leadership—wise leadership, and the nature of desire and economic paradigms. In his paper “Spiritual Turn in Business and Management”, Laszlo Zsolnai (Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary) argues for the necessity of a spiritual turn in business and management. He argues that the contributions by Chakraborty on Vedantic ethics and management have vital importance to make the required changes. The paper presents real-world examples from India (Organic India and Aravind Eye Care System) and Europe (Focolare Enterprises and Triodos Bank) to show the feasibility of spiritually inspired business models. Zsolnai’s main conclusion is that spirituality and rationality are not antagonists in good management. In his paper “From Reason-based Decision Making to Intuition-based Management”, Sraddhalu Ranade (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India) argues that, for centuries, we have relied on reason, mathematical models and projections, empirical recommendations, and the guidance of “experts” to make safe decisions with predictable outcomes. But in a world of exponentially increasing information, complexity, and rapid change with disruptive technological transitions, these means have become unreliable and even erroneous. Consequently, our means for decision-making need to evolve and transcend the current paradigm of logic and reason towards a higher faculty that we can call “intuition”. The paper explores the nature of intuition, how it guides decision-making, and how to exercise it deliberately in the field of management and life. In their paper “Understanding Human Values through Integrative Dialogue: ´astr¯artha Method”, Sharda S. Nandram (Free University of Amsterdam and The S¯ Nyenrode Business University, The Netherlands), Sharma Sukhada (Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India), Ankur Joshi (Nuclei, Bangalore, Karnataka, India), and Puneet K. Bindlish (Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India) focus on an integrative communication method called ´ astr¯artha”. It is an ancient Indian approach to communication where the process of “S¯ reconciling different positions happens naturally. The aim is to understand the truth through dialogue, and the result is transformational thinking. Such a method can have applications in action research because of its transformational potential. The authors ´ astr¯artha approach includes both “doing” (a materialistic focus) and argue that the S¯ “becoming” (a spiritual focus), and considers values as means to achieving higher purposes in organizations. In his paper “Ethical Decision Making—Synthesizing S. K. Chakraborty’s Classification of Ethics with Levels of Moral Judgement and the Four-component Model”, Sunil G. Savur (University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia) attempts to synthesize Chakraborty’s seminal work on business ethics and some well-established contributions from the West. These include Chakraborty’s three classifications of ethics (compliance, cognitive, and consciousness ethics), James Rests’ four component model of ethical decision-making (recognize, judgement, intention, and action), and Bebeau, Thoma, and Walker’s three levels of moral judgement (abstract or general principles, professional codes, and organizational level codes). In his paper “Time to Globalize Sarvodaya?”, Sanjeeb Kakoty (Indian Institute of Management, Shillong, Meghalaya, India) recalls that Mahatma Gandhi popularized

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the term “Sarvodaya”, which is the amalgam of two Sanskrit terms, “Sarvo” meaning all and “Udaya” meaning rising or uplift. Hence, Sarvodaya can be understood as Universal Uplift or Progress of All. The term “Sarvodaya” was first used by Gandhi as the title of his translation of John Ruskin’s book “Unto This Last”. Gandhi suggested that the Earth can provide enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not for every man’s greed. Gandhi advocated a social order that would be free from any greed for material wealth and stressed on simple living and high thinking. All natural resources are assumed as common property to be utilized for the welfare of all. Every individual is taught to see oneself as a trustee of the common resources and use it diligently for fellow creatures and the future generations. In his paper “From Indian and Utopian Ethos to Management for Spiritual Growth”, Gerrit De Vylder (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium) underlines that S. K. Chakraborty and poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore have argued that labor and its management should have their own rewards in terms of personal and spiritual development. This should also guarantee fair-play, righteousness, and moderation. De Vylder underlines that in the Indian ancient tradition two currents of thinking about the nature of the ‘homo economicus’ can be identified. The first is represented by Kautilya, the advisor to the Mauryan emperor during the fourth century B.C., while the second is represented by Thiruvalluvar, who was a Tamil poet-philosopher during the first century B.C. Kautilya’s approach seeks to formulate pragmatic norms and rules within a strong institutional framework, while Thiruvalluvar’s approach is more flexible relying on a change in the philosophical and spiritual make-up of a person. The paper argues, like Aldous Huxley, that only critical thinking and the efforts to “recollect who we really are” (a higher spiritual intelligence) can guarantee to realize Chakraborty’s and Tagore’s high ideals. In his paper “Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility for Multinational Enterprises”, Manas Chatterji (Binghamton University, State University of New York, USA) discusses the relationship between ethics and corporate social responsibility for international businesses, particularly multinational enterprises. This relationship is quite different compared to that of domestic corporations. In international business, factors such as culture, values and norms, social stratification, mobility, religion, language, educational system, economic and political structure, are all crucially important. Chatterji argues that as a result, the definition and relevance of the principles of business ethics in international business will be quite different than that of a domestic enterprise. The paper highlights these differences and present some theoretical models from which the differences will be estimated using empirical data. In his paper “Creating Sustainable Wealth through Human-Centered Complex Adaptive Systems”, Pravir Malik (Deep Order Technologies, San Francisco, USA) states that a complex adaptive system can be a generator of multidimensional wealth. Yet business leaders often continue to view the lubricator and output of contemporary complex adaptive systems, be they corporations, markets, or economies, in one dimension only: money. This narrow vision marginalizes the effectiveness of complex adaptive systems, causes inherently unsustainable practices, and destroys rather than creates wealth. The paper explores the power of deeper human values in

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being a stimulator of building effective complex adaptive systems and sustainable wealth. In his paper “Values of Management in Ecologically Conscious Businesses”, Andras Ocsai (Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary) underlines that the current ecological crisis and the reality of the Anthropocene show the responsibility of mainstream economics and business. S. K. Chakraborty had suggested practical solutions to promote successful environmental conservation and to prevent ethical failures at individual and organizational level. Ocsai argues that personal values of business managers have decisive influence on the companies, determine how ethical, ecologically conscious a business is. The paper presents empirical studies about the values of management of eight well-known ecologically conscious businesses throughout the world (Interface (USA), Natura (Brazil), Patagonia (USA), Houdini Sportswear (Sweden), Organica Water (Hungary), Scott Bader (UK), Green Monday (China), and Organic India (India). These cases show that ecologically conscious business organizations can achieve ecological transformation and reorientation of business behavior. In her paper “Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility: Insights from Indian Ethos”, Sumona Ghosh (St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, West Bengal, India) emphasizes that the practice of social responsibility and sustainability is engrained in the Indian value system, references of which can be found in the Vedas. CSR is rooted in the concept of “trivarga”. The ancient tradition of daan (charity), prevailed in the Indian society from ancient times and what we recognize as CSR can be seen as an extension of this tradition. The spirit of the Indian classical wisdom which looks upon the entire universe as a single large family including all the living beings of the world can be achieved if CSR is aligned with sustainability and Sustainable Development Goals. The paper further explores the links among CSR, sustainability, and the Indian ancient wisdom. In his paper “Reflections on Spirituality as the Context of Leadership”, Peter Pruzan (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark) suggests that the practice of organizational leadership can be better understood via reference to spirituality as the context for purposeful behavior. He emphasizes that a focus has evolved, both at leading business schools and at a number of successful and admired corporations in the “West”, on leadership as a supplement to or an overarching background for management. This focus has not only led to far broader concepts of purpose and success than traditionally associated with management but also given rise to deeper existential questions as to the identity and responsibility of both corporations and their leaders, questions very similar in nature to those faced by persons with a spiritual quest. In his paper “Translating Swami Vivekananda into Management Practice”, Swami Narasimhananda (Ramakrishna Mission Sevashrama, Kozhikode, Kerala, India) recalls that Swami Vivekananda tried to amalgamate Western organization with Indian spirituality. Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission, two worldwide organizations that he founded, served his attempts in that direction. In his short life and amazingly large corpus of writings, letters, and talks, Vivekananda expounded

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various aspects of his leadership model and other issues of leadership and management that have become of great significance today. The paper sheds light on the insights of Vivekananda and analyses some attempts that translate them into practice like that by S. K. Chakraborty. In his paper “The Dharma of Leadership: Wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita in an Uncertain World”, Debashis Chatterjee (Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, Kerala, India) states that the post-COVID world requires creative leadership for solving problems as well as initiating the restoration of core human values that are the foundations of a sustainable world. Leaders of the future will have to ignite the rites of renewal and restoration by which organizations can transcend the very rationale of their existence from a mundane to a spiritual plane, from mere discontinuity to a deeper and greater continuity; from disharmony to sustaining harmony. Chatterjee argues that the notion of dharma in the Bhagavad Gita affirms an enduring life vision for global leaders. It upholds deeper threads of wisdom for a sustainable world order. In his paper “Krishna: A Study in Trans-ethical Leadership”, Satya Chaitanya (Indian Institute of Management Lucknow and XLRI School of Business, Jamshedpur, India) emphasizes that the Mahabharata presents two great leaders: Bhishma and Krishna. Bhishma represents ethical leadership at its best with all its strengths and weaknesses. In contrast, Krishna is not limited by his ethics and frequently rises above it in his eagerness to do good to the world. This paper studies Krishna’s trans-ethical leadership in comparison to Bhishma’s ethical leadership and contrasts the two. The paper explores why a leader should rise above ethics to transethical dimensions as and when the situation makes it unavoidable for the common good. The paper points out how Bhishma fails in this respect on many occasions and how Krishna unhesitatingly rises above ethics, even sacrificing his image as a great leader with integrity. In his paper “Leadership as an Adventure of Consciousness”, Sanjoy Mukherjee (Indian Institute of Management, Shillong, Meghalaya, India) underlines that large section of management literature, business school courses, and corporate training programs focus on leadership skills. The importance of values, particularly human values is hardly dealt with. Mukherjee attempts to establish the deep connection between leadership and human values for achieving holistic effectiveness by adopting a consciousness approach in spiritual sense. The seminal contribution of S. K. Chakraborty has been in anchoring a solid spiritual foundation to human values and leadership using insights from Indian ethos and its modern proponents like Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, and Sri Aurobindo. The paper elaborates on the roles of intellect or reason and emotions or feelings in values development process of the leaders. Drawing inspiration from illumined minds of the East and the West the paper charts out a roadmap for a leadership journey from information through knowledge to wisdom. The paper concludes with reflections on leadership as an adventure of consciousness. In his paper “Indian Models of Management and Leadership with Roots in Ancient Wisdom”, Subhash Sharma (Indus Business Academy, Bangalore, Karnataka, India) presents some holistic models derived from ancient Indian concepts including (i)

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OSHA Model of Management and Leadership, (ii) Theory K of Enlightened Leadership, (iii) Negergy-Synergy Grid of Leadership, (iv) ‘MBA’ Model of Decision Making, and (v) Corporate Rishi Model of Leadership. These models are built on the works by S. K. Chakraborty, M. B. Athreya, J. B. P. Sinha, Rajen Gupta, Debashis Chatterjee, and Radha Sharma which have explored the idea of Self in relation to management and leadership. In their paper “Wise Leadership—Lokasamgraha and Rajarshi Revisited”, Anindo Bhattacharjee (Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai, Maharastra, India), Apurva Shinde (NGO Manager, Mumbai, Maharastra, India), and Sandeep Singh (School of Management Sciences, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India) revisit two Indian concepts, “Lokasamgraha” and “Rajarshi” which were brought into modern management by S. K. Chakraborty. They constitute an alternative view of wise leadership from a Vedantic perspective. Lokasamgraha is about the well-being of society and the various stakeholders. It is a conception of general well-being of the world, as expounded in the Bhagavad Gita. This concept can help arrive at a Vedic conception of the modern stakeholder theory. The authors suggest an Indian construct of wise leadership that combines Lokasamgraha and Rajarshi (wise king) given by ancient Indian political economist, Kautilya. In his paper “Upanishads and Transformational Leadership”, Venkat R. Krishnan (Center for Oneness & Transforming Leadership, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India) emphasizes that the Upanishads are fundamental texts that explain the Atman, the real self of all beings. Krishnan believes that it is not possible to understand leadership without an inquiry into the Atman. Leadership requires seeing oneness among the diverse beings in the universe. Enabling others to realize that they are not just the body–mind complex, but that they are the Atman takes them closer to the state of oneness with everyone. This is moral and authentic transformational leadership, that enable followers to lift themselves into their higher self. In his paper “Management: The “Sanatana” Approach”, Pradip Bhattacharya (Author and Mahabharata Scholar, Kolkata, West Bengal, India) emphasizes that S. K. Chakraborty’s effort is extremely significant because it seeks to reverse the prevailing ethos of Indian management’s slavish worship of Western concepts. Management depends on values and values depend on perception. Man is the highest sampada, and not a resource that is used by others. Tyaga is a value shift from a lower impulse to what is higher and wholesome, identifying with that, attaching to that which has no first cause, will never decompose: Eternal Bliss. In their paper “Inspired Leadership and Indian Wisdom in Managing Crisis”, Anil Sachdev (School of Inspired Leadership, Gurgaon, Haryana, India) and Vidya M. Iyer (School of Inspired Leadership, Gurgaon, Haryana, India) explore the practices of leadership development followed by five large Indian organizations through their leadership frameworks, their competency models, assessment systems and coaching interventions, and multifactor leadership questionnaires to get 360 feedback on the behaviors of their senior leaders. The authors warn that the Indian scriptures prescribe leadership as an integration of self-leadership, spiritual leadership, and professional behaviors. With the COVID pandemic, the impact of leadership behaviors on well-being of the employees and other stakeholders has become crucial.

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The paper recommends a model that develop leaders who can create physical wellbeing, communication well-being, emotional well-being, intellectual well-being, and spiritual well-being. In the paper “Times May Change, What Is Right Does Not!”, S. Padmanabhan (Tata Business Excellence Group, Tata Group, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India) recalls Jamshedji N. Tata, the Founder of Tata Group who said, “We think we started on sound and straightforward business principles, considering the interests of the shareholders our own, and the health and welfare of the employees, the sure foundation of our success.” The paper reflects the spirit of the Tata group, which has been guiding it since its inception in 1868. The Group’s eternal ethos of Leadership with Trust, its core values, and the Tata Code of Conduct (articulated in 1998), serve as cornerstones for this relentless journey. In 2006, the Tata Quality Management Services (TQMS), in collaboration with the Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV), IIM Calcutta, developed a diagnostic approach to assess the ethical tenets of business corporations. TQMS, currently known as Tata Business Excellence Group (TBExG), a division of Tata Sons Pvt. Ltd., partners with Tata companies in their pursuits of excellence. In his paper “Nurturing Conscious Organizations and Individuals”, Yazdi Jehangir Bankwala (Arpitha Associates, Malaysia & Singapore and Sejahtera Leadership Initiative, Malaysia) reflects on the following questions. How can organizations and individuals seek to deepen their own purpose and meaning? While management is a science of efficient allocation of resources, will it transcend to incorporate invisible resources including aspirations, passion, expressions, fulfilment, and the spirit? How can organizations and individuals be net contributors to society/community/others rather than extracting/taking from them? Can an approach with emphasis on inner process and in destruction of the self-identity be enabling or disempowering? Can a values-based approach be an important starting position on this journey? In his paper “India’s Svaraj Parampara: Nation and Modernity in India”, Makarand R. Paranjape (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India) explores India’s quest for “Swaraj in Ideas.” The idea underlying the phrase made famous by K. C. Bhattacharya’s seminal and eponymous lecture of 1928 requires nothing short of an overhaul of our entire intellectual infrastructure. Paranjape argues that central to such an overhaul would be the concomitant realignment of India’s intellectual enterprise—the pursuit of self-knowledge, truth, virtue, beauty, and, of course, happiness, the organization of the material resources in such a way that our daily life conduces to these aims. But Paranjape warns that to regain parampara, merely substituting Western ideas by half-understood Indian ones will not do. Parampara is not a knee-jerk reaction to the domination of Western categories over Indian ones, but a deep understanding of the difference will take India forward. This can be done by opening a dialogue between Bharatiya parampara and Western modernity so as to create new spaces of knowledge and svaraj. In his paper “Is the Bhagavad Gita Modern?”, Gautam Mukerjee (Anandini Foundation, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India) revisits the 2500-year-old dialogue of Bhagavad Gita in the light of the discoveries of contemporary science. The paper

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relies on the metaphysical understanding of the Bhagavad Gita by Sri Aurobindo. The practical analysis is from V. S. Sukhtankar who brought together many versions of the Mahabharata to create a modern singularity of the epic. The important messages from the past are contextualized with current neurophysiologic, psychoanalytical, and scientific ideas from Abraham Maslow, Rudolph Tanzi, David Bohm, Deepak Chopra, Danah Zohar, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The paper concludes that Aldous Huxley’s categorization of the Bhagavad Gita as “Perennial Philosophy” is standing firm even today. In his paper “Love in the Classroom? The Relevance of Erich Fromm’s Concept of Love for Business Students”, Knut Ims (NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen, Norway) states that one of the challenges of modern business ethics is to deal with the limitations of the existing model of man in economics—the image of “homo economicus” as a rational self-interested being—and search for alternative criteria of success for business entrepreneurs and leaders. Ims believes that business ethics needs to use the concept of genuine love. The paper applies Erich Fromm’s concept of “productive love”, which consists of four components—respect, care, responsibility, and knowledge. Ims draws on his own experiences with the course “Ethical action” that he was teaching for more than two decades at NHH Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen. The central question of the paper is: can Fromm’s conception of love be applied in a business school setting with the purpose to develop the students’ empathy, to enrich their personal development and their understanding of what a good manager looks like? In his paper “Teaching Ethics to Management Students in a Growth-obsessed India”, Jagdish Rattanani (S P Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai, Maharastra, India) asks the question posed by S. K. Chakraborty in 2002: “Both managers and students may wonder why they should be interested in ethics. What is there in ethics for me?” Almost two decades later, the question is more significant particularly in India, one of the fastest growing global economies. Rattanani notes that the students of today were born after the nation changed direction and pushed liberalization and privatization under its New Economic Policy of 1991. Faster GDP growth over time not only brought an explosion of glitzy malls, fancy cars, and gated communities but also the impending crisis of rising inequality seen every day in the slum colonies, marginal labors and homeless children who play on the streets just outside schools where future managers study to earn their MBA degrees. In her paper “Ethics, Consumerism and Sustainability in the Backdrop of the Kathopanishad”, Piya Mukherjee (Vivekananda Education Society’s Leadership Academy and Research Centre, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India) argues that in the post-pandemic world the learnings of the Kathopanishad (an important Upanishad) are very relevant. The statement “Neh nanasti kinchana” (meaning, there is nothing else than Atman or awareness) then becomes equivalent to a “mahavakya” given by the Upanishad. This drives home the point of fundamental interconnectedness between all humans and the physical environment. In the pursuit of moksha, individual as well as collective endeavors become balanced, saner, more compassionate, and sustainability-oriented.

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In their paper “Exploring the Centrality and Transformative Power of Spirituality”, Katalin Illes (University of Westminster, London, UK), Nitha Palakshappa (Massey University, New Zeeland) and Madhumita Chatterji (ABBS Business School, Bangalore, Karnataka, India) argue that the grand challenges of our time need to be broached with a consciousness demonstrating embedded ethics, responsibility, and the umbrella of sustainability in order to respond appropriately. The authors use deep personal reflections to reveal narratives that provide a rich understanding of what S. K. Chakraborty refers to as a subjective realization of spirituality and how it ensures that human values are central to management thought and action. Through a very personal journey, informed by their experience as management educators, the authors explore spirituality as a transformative force in management. In his paper “Man, the Unmanageable—Meditations on Clarity, Morality and Meditation”, Arindam Chakrabarti (East West Center, University of Hawaii, USA) outlines that the Mahabharata, in spite of being a tragic tale of human destructiveness and frailty, praises humanity in the highest possible terms. Nothing is nobler than being human (na m¯anu¸sa¯ t s´re¸s¸thataram hi kincit), it asserts in the encyclopedic XIIth Book of Peace. In the current “development-driven” India trying to become a superpower competing with the USA and China, there is the decline of “the humanities”, in favor of engineering, space and rocket technology, business management, and computer science. Can we maintain the Mahabharata’s concept of what is it like to be really human, in the face of such ecologically and ethically destructive disvaluing of the humanities? Chakrabarti’s paper ends with this open question, because perhaps it is in such self-examining interrogatives—in re-enacting a timely and cosmopolitan Prashna-Upanisad—that the greatness of humanity consists. ∗ ∗ ∗ We as editors of this book very much hope that the book will serve as inspiration for academics, business leaders, and management professionals and help them to rethink their roles and responsibilities in transforming business into a more humancentered and ecologically oriented enterprise founded in spiritual wisdom. For doing this important and urgent task, the book provides a rich variety of theoretical insights and experiential evidence on how spirituality can work in business organizations in India and other parts of the world. The book has contemporary relevance in a world ridden presently with an alarming crisis (caused by the global spread and attack of COVID-19) as some of the authors highlight the importance of upholding and pursuit of human values and Indian Ethos in the global combat against this killer virus by suggesting alternative ways of thinking and living for a safe, sane, and sustainable future for the self, organizations, communities, societies, and the planet at large.

Life and Work of S. K. Chakraborty Bidyut K. Sarkar

Some persons are memorable not just because they have done something great but for the fact that contemplation of such personalities uplifts the human being to the next higher level towards divinity. S. K. Chakraborty had such a character—a man immersed in Indian Ethos in mind, body, and speech. Based on the perennial principles of Indian wisdom like simple living, high thinking, his life is a fascinating story of transformation of a teacher of non-spiritual subject like finance and accounting into an a¯ ch¯arya of sacred topics like human values, ethics, and leadership—at least he made these domains spiritualized.

1 The Early Days Eldest son of Dr. Shailendra Chandra Chakraborty, a renowned professor of English, associated with Presidency College, Calcutta, and later Proctor with Bengal Engineering College, Calcutta. S. K. Chakraborty was born on January 29, 1940, in Mymensigh town (now in Bangladesh) and grew up in Punjab. His mother, Jogom¯ay¯a Devi was soft, gentle, pious, and with esthetic bent of mind. Chakraborty gave his matriculation in 1953 at Jalandhar, did his ISc. Then he came over to Calcutta in 1955 and completed his graduation (B. Com from Calcutta University), postgraduation (M.Com from Calcutta University), and Cost Accounting (from ICWAI). Though he had a very strong academic bent of mind, he did an industry job (from 1961 to 1964) at Sahu Jain group because his father asked him to do so, essentially to support the family, particularly the studies of his younger brothers. But his family

B. K. Sarkar (B) Founder-Managing Trustee, Prof. S K Chakraborty Memorial Trust, Kolkata, West Bengal, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_2

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heritage of teaching profession got better of him, he joined Bardham¯an University. After one and a half years, he went to Goenk¯a College, Calcutta, as a lecturer.

2 The Commonwealth Scholar With the intention of getting some exposure of academic life in the West, he applied for both Fulbright and Commonwealth scholarship and got both. He opted for Commonwealth in 1967. He finished his Ph.D. from Liverpool University, UK, on a topic “National Coal Board and the Management of a Declining Industry” in 1970. Back to India, he served in the industry for a brief period and finally joined Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIMC). Finance and accounting were his subjects in those days. In these early days of his teaching career, he contributed to both the areas of general management and finance and accounting. He did a large empirical work on financial management and accounting, doing field work all over India.

3 Looking and Growing Within During late 1970s while teaching finance and occasionally attending various national and international conferences both in India and abroad, he had an insight regarding the orientation of his contemporary Indian intellectuals vis-à-vis that of foreign intellectuals. He realized that while other Asian intellectuals were trying to link with their roots Indian scholars are getting uprooted from their own cultural roots in both thoughts and actions. This made his earnest patriotic heart worry at the prospect of Indian Management getting de-Indianized both in theory and in practice. Chakraborty observed that Japan is getting respect from the USA as American thinkers were researching and writing books on Japanese Management, whereas India with such lofty ideals and philosophy was drawing no such attention of international thinkers in the management field. It seemed to him that Indians were not respecting themselves and therefore could not expect attention from others. Moreover occasionally, he got opportunity to discuss the soft areas of management with corporate executives. These experiences made him to arrive at a conviction that he must delve deep into the sources of Indian age-old wisdom to find out whether India could offer meaningful and worthwhile concepts of management and leadership. From 1978 to 1982, he largely remained withdrawn barring the regular professional commitments. In this period, he studied Indian and Western philosophical thoughts, the Upanishads, and books of other religions. Along with Indian sh¯astras, particularly on Yoga and Vedanta and their interpretations by Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, and others, Chakraborty deeply immersed himself into the writings of some Western thinkers

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like A. J. Toynbee, B. Griffiths, D. C. Korten, E. F. Schumacher, and others. All these Eastern and Western pearls of wisdom gave him an understanding of the nature of the forces that were shaping the world in 1980s and 1990s. This realization ultimately developed into a worldview, rooted in Indian cultural roots. Thus, he was transformed into a thinker from a scholar. He started observing mauna (silence) for a day once a week to concentrate and strengthen his mind, thus his life got transformed from an ordinary life of a professor to the spiritual life of a seeker.

4 Connecting Indian Management with Its Roots Chakraborty felt that something must be done urgently, to Indianize Indian Management and place it firmly on the solid foundation of Indian culture. With the inspiration in the heart, he published a paper on “Business Management and Mysticism” in 1982 ¯ in Prabuddha Bh¯arat (the famous monthly journal of Advaita Ashram, M¯ay¯avati, Ramakrishna Mission). In 1983, he launched the first postgraduate program on Indian Ethos at Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, as well as initiated the first industry program. He realized that the views and norms of human nature and social interactions that were incorporated into management theory, based on the research data of Western society and personality, are not necessarily applicable in India because the cultural undercurrents are quite different. He attempted to devoid the psychological theories (which were the basis of management theory) of their Western content and recontextualize with Indian data and sociocultural reality. In fact, he went a step forward and tried to assert the Indian spiritual culture in management in a comprehensive way. Chakraborty took some of the popular management jargons coming from the West and redefined them in the light of Indian psycho-philosophy. For example, he redefined “human resources development” as “human response development” and attempted to deal with some key human response dimensions, pertaining to performance effectiveness and quality of work–life within organizations—viz., values versus skills aspects of role-effectiveness, teamwork, cooperation, sharing and trust, leadership and leading, stress, burnout and inner harmony, ethics of decision-making, motivation, commitment, work-ethic, creativity, and counselling (Chakraborty, 1987). He found that the theories of Western behavioral sciences are not enough to explain the intricate organizational behavior, particularly as the model of man employed in these theories seemed to be highly inadequate. Chakraborty brought some of the basic concepts of Indian philosophy like that of Higher Self (as named by Sri Aurobindo or Real Self as designated by Swami Vivekananda), Guna Dynamics (of S¯ankhya Darshan, i.e., Philosophy), Karma (common in some form to all Indian Philosophies except C¯arv¯aka) into professional management literature. Thus, he was trying to connect Indian Management to its deep cultural roots.

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Chakraborty’s primary objective was to create a body of management literature based on Indian ethos which can serve as source material for developing effective curricula and programs for management students and corporate executives. The central theme of his books was the development of the individual to achieve development of the organizations. While most of the best academic work in the field of organizational management has been at the system and group level, Chakraborty has all along stressed upon the individual as manager and particularly his or her level of consciousness. Chakraborty was following the Vedantic assertion that the cause is always superior to the effect and the individual is the cause, while the organization or society is the effect, hence his focus has been always on individual development. According to him, subjective is the cause and objective is the effect—therefore the cultivation and purification of individual’s inner domain (chittashuddhi), the realms within which subjective decisions are made, is of paramount importance to effective management. He wanted to spiritualize the materialistic outlook of management world, particularly based on Vedantic heritage. He was not only working at the intellectual theoretical level but also was trying to develop suitable methods of s¯adhan¯a for corporate managers. In response to methods of brainstorming, he developed his concept of brain-stilling based on Yoga philosophy and auto-suggestion and started imparting that to the managers. In fact, he suggested that works like the Bhagavad Git¯a or Patanjali’s Yogasutra(s) should be used at all stages of management development programs. Incorporating all these ideas and concepts he started imparting annual workshops on “Values System and Managerial Effectiveness” to academics and executives at IIMC, which attracted many participants from India and abroad. He summarized the basic implications in the form of certain propositions which are reproduced below (Chakraborty, 1998: 29): • The concept of Self in man has to embrace the spiritual dimension beyond his physical, social and economic dimensions. • Man’s creative energies are derived from and rooted in the Supreme Creative Intelligence. • Managerial decision-making requires the interplay of both analytic and holistic faculties; today the analytic powers are at a premium at the expense of the holistic powers; the recapturing of holistic powers by systematic processes is beyond the scope of contemporary management development practices. • In de-egoization rests the final resolution of managerial conflict situations. • The key to cooperation and teamwork lies ultimately in the progressive assimilation of the reality that it is the same Atman which dwells in each one of us. • A full understanding and internalization of the “doctrine of karma” is essential to improve the quality of managerial decision-making and style. • Intrinsic and enduring motivational strategies need to be based on the “giving” model of man; the “needing” model of man is a false step in our journey towards human response catalysis.

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• Conscious modulation for effective leadership style (and management style) requires the understanding of the triune “guna” composition of the human being—”sattwa”, “rajas”, and “tamas”. • All managerial decisions are subjective in the ultimate analysis; the effectiveness of such decisions, therefore, depends in a large measure on the purity of subjective of the decision-maker. The above propositions yield in a nutshell the ideas that Chakraborty carried to the corporate executives and management students in the early days of his saga.

5 Responding to Alien Ideas In response to the jargons and concepts coming from the West, Chakraborty developed and propagated terms based on Indian sh¯astras which have relevance in the management world. Will-to-Yoga in response to the Freudian “Will-toPleasure” or Adlerian “Will-to-Power” or Frankl’s “Will-to Meaning”; “Quality of Domestic Life” in response to “Quality of Work-life”; “Human Response” as against “Human Resources”; “Self-Transcendence” in response to “Self-actualization”; “transcending both pleasure and pain” in response to “seeking pleasure, avoiding pain”; “freedom from” (greed, jealousy, etc.) as opposed to “freedom of” (such things), etc. Chakraborty was of the opinion that the Western science is good for developing technologies for material development of the nations but it had very little use for the psychological interventions in the management world which is culture specific. One of the main objectives of his efforts was to heighten and deepen soul-quest among management thinkers dealing with the human dimensions of Indian organizations. An area which constantly drew Chakraborty’s attention was that related to prevention and management of mental stress. His primary concern of enhancing managerial effectiveness naturally brought him in this area because management effectiveness was a function of energy-processing, especially psychological energy, and stress is an energy dissipater. Chakraborty came to the conclusion that the wisdom of Indian Rishis was better placed to solve the problem than Western theories. Hence, he applied concepts from perennial philosophy of Bhagavad Git¯a and the writings of Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. His efforts at erasing the detrimental effects of mental stress did not stop at intellectual gymnastics. He devised certain breathing exercises (breathing for cultivating sattwa guna), identity exercises, Nirdwandic (free from the dualities), and Samattwa (equanimity) exercises. He classified all the various approaches to coping stress into two broad categories: secular and spiritual approaches (Chakraborty & Chakraborty, 2008: 101). Comparing the salient features of the two approaches, he put forward two interesting points: (i) while secular approaches classify stress into good stress (eu-stress) and bad stress (dis-stress), the spiritual approaches regard stress as entirely negative, and

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(ii) stressful situations (or stressors) may be classified into two categories—noncontrollable external variables (e.g. loss of job, work pressure, denial of promotion, etc.) and controllable internal variables (e.g. greed, jealousy, high ego, etc.). The secular approaches largely focus on the external variables neglecting the internal ones, whereas the spiritual approaches deal more with the internal ones acknowledging the external stressors. Then Chakraborty related the controllable variables with the Human Values dimensions and gave a profound strategy to cope with stress based on antarmukhit¯a (interiorization) and chittashuddhi (purification of emotions). Then he connected his concepts with the insights of Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda as well as with the spiritual Indian psycho-philosophy.

6 Walking the Talk One of the outstanding features of Chakraborty was that whatever he learnt theoretically, he applied that first to himself to test its efficacy, tried to understand the impact, compared it with the experiences of the great realizers and thinkers, and if found useful, he imparted it to his students and participants of his workshops and learnt from their feedbacks. Following the perennial wisdom statement “prevention is better than cure”, Chakraborty always emphasized upon stress prevention and not on stress management—here again his advice was to follow the concept of Samattwa of Bhagavad Git¯a (verse 2.38, 50, 56, 66; 3.20; 4.20; 5.3; 10.2; 13.19; 14.24). The area which drew most of his time in the later years is the one involving leadership and teamwork. Initially, he was involved with teamwork. In this regard, he had to face two intellectual challenges: (i) widespread viewpoint, especially in academic circles, that the feudalistic Indian culture, supported by strong hierarchical and authoritarian features, was responsible for sloppy teamwork, particularly in the organized corporate sector, and (ii) the emancipation lies in applying the theories coming from outside regarding team-building, etc. He argued that the lack of team spirit was not typical to Indian tradition, rather there had been many direct and circumstantial evidence in Indian history to prove this. Then he established giving references to works of Rishi Patanjali, Buddhist thinkers, and others a conceptual framework to develop team spirit based on Indian cultural concepts like Maitri, Karun¯a, Mudit¯a, Upeksh¯a, etc. In the early years of the 2000s, Chakraborty found himself confronted with a turmoiled world that seemed to have slipped from the state of a “risk society” to that of a “catastrophe society”—terrorism, violence, and all kinds of negative activities which were manifestations of very unhealthy mind were on the rise across the world which made him think deeply as to if there was a strong case to inspire ourselves to swim against this tide of negative connotations instead of drifting straw-like with the tide. From roughly this time onwards, he was expressing his views against mainstream Western worldview. He argued that, for the last three centuries, politically, technologically, culturally, economically, financially, ideologically—in every sphere

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of human existence—the dominant player on the world stage had been the Western civilization, and here if we had slipped into a “catastrophe society”, the responsibility had to be taken by the Western mindset and their proponents. At the outset, he forcefully highlighted the basic East–West distinctions as perceived and experienced by great modern-day Indian thinkers, Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and Mahatma Gandhi. Their thoughts were compared with that of some significant contemporary thinkers from the West, namely, Bede Griffiths, Arnold Toynbee, Romain Rolland, David Frawley, and others. He arrived at the conclusion that henceforth the need for the saving flow of fundamental ideas and ideals for change should be seen as flowing from the East to the West. This is in the long term interest of humanity and the planet as a whole (Chakraborty, 2003: 30).

He further asserted, that the Western actions must be guided by Eastern contemplations and then went on to question some of the established management principles of his times. According to him, (i) in management man must get the central importance instead of non-human components dealt in economics, politics, science, etc., which is collectively named as “mechanical economism” by Sri Aurobindo, (ii) there was a misplaced priority given to the quantitative measurable aspects at the cost of qualitative subjective dimensions which being the causal factors were more important, (iii) the subjective effectiveness should be given more importance than objective efficiency, (iv) the issue of sustainability should get priority over shareholder value, (v) “existential competence” (a term he coined to denote the ability to solve existential problems of life and remain content and blissful) should be prioritized over skill competence, (vi) the organizations and systems should be more transparent to fight against corruption, (vii) firm transformational “s¯attwic” leadership was the need of the hour instead of meek followership, (viii) intuition or wisdom should be a priority over research/knowledge, and (ix) the concept of “business ashram” (a term implying a business organization which has an organization climate based on the spiritual principles of ancient Indian ashram or hermitage) should be popularized.

7 Modelling Indian Leadership Concept With respect to the Indian Leadership Model based on Human Values—quoting from various Indian sources supported by the views of Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda, and others Chakraborty was gradually establishing the fact that the Rajarshi Leadership was the Indian Leadership Model that stood the test of time and is still relevant as ever. He put forward some illustrations of Rajarshi leaders from ancient time till the contemporary period, namely, Ashoka the Great, Emperor Akbar, J. N. Tata, M. K. Gandhi, Netaji Subhas, C. Bose, R. K. Talwar and showed that India was blessed with Rajarshi leaders who took the country to great height and therefore this was the ideal model to be followed in our national context. Along with these conceptual

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insights and discussions, he presented very lucidly his experiences of imparting the executive development programs on Vales, Ethics, and Leadership based on these concepts to the corporate executives of top-level organizations. He saw Rajarshi Leadership as an answer to the existential misery and ecological crisis of today. Looking within and examining his contemporary world, he found that the much hyped modernity was a hollow cry. To ameliorate the situation, the wouldbe leaders of the society should imbibe the Rishi dimensions (which he identified explicitly and designed programs to develop in the participants) so that they would be able to lead their followers in the right direction.

8 Call for a Spiritual Economics Realizing that economics is major force driving the professional management, Chakraborty delved deep into the various economic systems influencing the mankind. Those were the days when socialist systems were on the decline and capitalism was on the rise. Liberalization, privatization, and globalization was introduced in India, and intellectuals were debating the pros and cons of this movement. Chakraborty did not form his opinion based on the viewpoints of professional economists. Chakraborty coined the term “spirinomics” (i.e. spiritual economics, economics subordinated to Spirit), and suggested that if the world had to survive the capitalist economics, it must be transformed into spirinomics. He established that this spirinomics is the sustainable economics (Chakraborty & Chakraborty, 2008: 127). He also asserted that in the light of sustainable economics the present self-seeking economic globalization must be replaced with the age-old spiritual globalization whose universal declaration was issued by the Upanisadic Rishi of the Taittiriya ¯ Aranyaka—Yatra Vishwam Bhavati Ekanidam (where the world is a nest for all birds). He substantiated his theoretical assertions by practical illustrations from business and industry. Highlighting few architects of Indian industry like Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray, Ardhesir Godrej, J. N. Tata, J. R. D. Tata, and G. D, Birla, he showed how the spirinomics could be put into action. This current of thoughts inevitably brought him to the question of globalization which was a raging issue then as it is now. His sharp insights discovered the inherent hypocrisy in the concept of economic globalization and its mode of application. The concept of corporate social responsibility also did not skip Chakraborty’s attention. For a corporation too, with many apparently conflicting claims on it, the principle should apply: corporate character grounded in higher consciousness. This implies leaders of pure and high character. This in turn, required relentless vigilance about and investment in human values.

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9 Spirituality in Management—The End, not the Means In the early 2000s, Chakraborty noticed that some academics were beginning to deal with spirituality through quantitative research techniques. This attempt to put spirituality to rigorous scientific tests with the intention of using it as another means to achieve business objectives, disturbed him. When he heard much talk about “secular spirituality” at an international workshop in 2001 in Europe, his reaction was sharp—probably the protagonists meant “non-religious spirituality” (and it may carry some meaning in the way the word “religion” is defined and understood in the West). For Chakraborty, whose understanding was rooted in all-encompassing dharma, the term stood for a meaningless or even harmful oxymoron. Hence, according to him, it would be correct to speak of “spiritualized secularity” instead. In this regard, he coined a term “technoxication” which means techno-economic intoxication. According to him, technoxication was a menace particularly for the youngsters, and the authentic spirituality should be perceived as a remedy for it. Chakraborty distinguished between sacred rationality and scientific secular rationality and argued that environmental conservation could be better achieved if the sacred attitude was spread. He argued for sensible localization (as against senseless globalization), spiritual intuition (as against intellectual speculation), deep subjective as against the superficial objective, “centripetalization” (as against centrifugal tendencies), non-aggressive and non-acquisitive ancient Indian civilization (as against acquisitive and aggressive contemporary tendencies in international politics), and mind enrichment (as against job enrichment).

10 Beyond Cognitive Ethics Classifying ethics into three categories, namely, compliance ethics (codes and legislations), cognitive ethics (intellectual theories), and consciousness ethics (spiritual communion) Chakraborty emphasized that ethics usually remains at the compliance level because it is not implemented by a leader operating from the right consciousness. This classification and assertion around consciousness ethics is an important contribution of Chakraborty in the field of ethics in general and business ethics in particular. The interface between technology and ethics is another domain that drew Chakraborty’s attention. He argued that mere intellectual culture driven by technology is insufficient to support ethics, and the super-sensual or trans-rational has to be accepted.

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11 Devotee of a Karmayogi Chakraborty’s words were straightforward and were never written to please anybody. He was not an armchair author, rather he was a thinker, who shared his thoughts with top-level executives, bureaucrats, and professionals. He was not much convinced about the effectiveness of the application of the leadership models developed in the West in Indian context largely for two reasons. (1) In the last about one and a half century, many such models have been developed, applied in various situations and many of them have become obsolete within few years—thus they did not appear to be enduring or time-tested to him and (2) almost all of them were developed in nonspiritual environment. Instead, he thought, in India with deep spiritual undercurrents, “a careful study of the leadership cum institution building facet of Vivekananda’s multi-dimensional personality should be enormously rewarding” and “pursuit of sacro-secular fusion is the very first lesson modern institution builders at least in India may want to learn from Vivekananda’s conceptual framework” (Chakraborty, 2012: 15 and 16). Chakraborty pointed out a letter written by J. N. Tata to Vivekananda inviting him to lead the institute of science that Tata was planning to establish. He argued that without recognizing the “deep-structure” of metaphysical backdrop of Indian society and tradition “hasty examination of India’s surface traditions usually leads to inefficient and erroneous conclusions about the sense of time, authority, hierarchy, change, discipline, women’s role and a host of other things” (Chakraborty, 2012: 16). Chakraborty always questioned the vague attempt to create “new values” for “new India”, instead he exhorted that we must follow the perennial values of our perennial culture which are rooted in fundamental truth and opined that Swamiji’s life is an example of such values. According to Chakraborty, Indian education should set right stress for real human development—priority should be on simplicity over complexity, silence over noise, contentment over greed, humility over vanity, co-existence over domination, wisdom over smartness, God over mammon, conviction over calculation, feeling over reasoning, intuition over intellect, sacred over secular, steadiness over restlessness, inner over outer, restraint over promiscuity, consecration over consumption, duties over rights, soul over body, immeasurable over measurable, marriage over companionship. Each of these priorities he explained in the light of the viewpoints of world thinkers.

12 Working at the Causal Level All his efforts were aimed at developing individuals, particularly their human values dimensions, because he thought society or organization is the effect and individual is the cause, therefore one must work at the causal level—this is quite contrary to the

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mainstream management theories. Hence, he exhorted each one of us to introspect honestly into our own zone of discretion and that in this religious and spiritual literature could be of great help to the earnest soul. For him, the world was a “moral gymnasium” in which he worked hard to uplift himself and his students fighting against the contemporary tide of crises in values. Applying Sri Aurobindo’s trichotomous classification of mental levels, viz. Animality, Humanity and Divinity, he argued that the Rajarshi inspirations can be nurtured if the mind goes beyond the human level to the divine level, i.e. divine or spiritual psychology is the one that the Rajarshi-aspirant must take resort to (not the one that is taught in conventional courses). Chakraborty was not only explaining the goal of becoming a Rajarshi Leader, at the same time he was highlighting the way to achieve that goal also—he named this path as the “spiritual law of ethical work” (Chakraborty & Chakraborty, 2013a: 95). This spiritual law implies Nishk¯am Karma (detached involvement or action devoid of personal desire) as against Sak¯am Karma (attached involvement or action with personal desire). He drew ample material from conventional sources like Bhagavad Git¯a, Upanishads particularly Katha Upanishad, Mah¯abh¯arata to explain and distinguish the two approaches towards work and tabulated the distinctions brilliantly in lucid language. Many a times, he used to invent short aphorisms in his own way to present lofty philosophical thoughts in easily understandable expressions. He expressed the connotations of two verses of Bhagavad Git¯a (verse 18.37 and 17.38) as “Short Term Pain, Long Term Gain” (outcome of Nishk¯am Karma) and “Short Term Gain, Long Term Pain” (outcome of Sak¯am Karma). Chakraborty’s efforts of incorporating Indian Ethos into professional management drew respectful attention from abroad also. He was invited by many universities and institutions in the UK, the US, Australia to conduct programs and deliver lectures. In 1994, he spent 5 weeks at Stockholm Business School, and in 1995, 1 month at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, offering courses and seminars on Human Values and Ethics. Indian organizations and governmental institutions also sought his administrative and academic assistance. He had been on the board of many organizations (e.g. IIM, Indore) as well as in the expert committees of several institutions of the Government of India.

13 Communicating to the Corporate Executives In the book “Human Values and Ethics: In Search of Organizational Integrity”, Chakraborty had expressed a summary of most of his thoughts and experiences of the last 30 years in a lucid style, almost like a training manual (Chakraborty & Chakraborty, 2013b). Here, he defines the term “values” (the foundational term, in all his theoretical and applicational ventures) in a very simple but profound and unique manner. Values are enduring emotions that determine the goals of an individual and

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the means to achieve them. They can be positive or negative, which he termed as “Human Values” and “Disvalues”, respectively. It is rarely seen that authors define such terms in so simple but unambiguous way and at the same time in agreement with the Vedantic concepts. It showed the remarkable clarity of thought that he had achieved over the years. Similarly, he defined the basic terms like “Ethics”, “Leadership”, etc.—all these definitions were based on his practical experiences of interacting with thousands of participants as well as on his deep contemplation regarding scriptural realizations. Starting with Values and Ethics, he built up his concepts gradually following logical steps, e.g. the relevant concepts of “skills”, “feeling”, “reasoning”, “willing” were discussed in relation to values and a brief theoretical foundation was laid on which to bring up the structure of his other thoughts—types of values, ethics were presented briefly with simple illustrations. Gradually, the thoughts moved from individual to society and organization—an expression which was typical to all his presentations (which we mentioned earlier). Then, other related concepts at macro level came, e.g. change, progress, sustainability, freedom and discipline, psychology of competition, etc., all of which have a bearing on individual development (which was his primary area of concern). Time and again he tried to answer some of the points raised by his respected critics, e.g. can we teach values and ethics? In this era of globalization, do we have relevance for these local concepts based on Indian age-old Ethics? Are they scientific? Are they not too abstract or abstruse? What is there in them for me? Does the sacred have any role in the secular domain like business? Can they be practiced in the hectic life of 24 * 7 work culture? etc.—very decisive answers to these and many other such questions were put forward by him. He took pains to explain the difference and relationship between corporate values and individual values, professional codes of Ethics and Consciousness Ethics, etc. After presenting these theoretical discussions and dispelling some of the doubts of his audience, he gave a practical model of values development based on Indian Ethos which he named as Five Pillar Model—this had been the crystallized form of his 30 years of activities in this area. According to his views, Chittashuddhi (purification of emotions) is the primary sine qua non of development of Human Values and there are five ways or means to achieve the same, viz., Giving Inspiration, Nisk¯am Karma, Triguna Tattwa, Law of Karma, and Higher Self. He had developed extensive training modules to impart these concepts to the participants. The concept of mental stress came naturally in his ambit of work—one needs to concentrate mental energy to achieve Chittashuddhi and Human Values, but mental stress is an energy dissipator and in today’s hectic world full of ever-increasing variables, this has been the main stumbling block in this achievement. Hence, he had to naturally handle this very important topic. Over the years, he had developed a full training and development module on stress prevention and management.

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14 Learning by Heart Chakraborty always tried to take his students and workshop participants through some experiential methods so his programs involved the head and the heart because his primary objective was Chittashuddhi (purification of emotions). His method involved five steps which have close conformity with the last five steps of Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga. He named it Quality Mind Process (QMP). At times, some small modifications were made within these steps to incorporate ideas related to Rajarshi Leadership or Stress Management to make the process relevant to these topics. Thousands of executives have gone through these methods and many of them have given positive feedback. He developed case studies in his own way. But the treatment of his cases was quite different compared to that of the conventional management cases used in business schools. While the cases in management institutes are conventionally designed and used to develop intellectually rational decision-making skills of the students (through the application of various decision making models and OR techniques), his cases were used to illustrate the theories developed by him and for individual values development—thus while the typical management cases revolve around situations and events, his cases were all targeted on individual personality. He used his cases as mirrors, in front of the participants so that through the characters of his cases, the participants could self-introspect and understand their own personality dynamics and thereby get inspired to orient themselves in the right direction. Along with cases, he used autobiographical notes (mostly of top corporate executives and business leaders) as well as his dialogues with some prominent leaders of his times as pedagogical tools in his workshops. Thus, he developed a methodology and pedagogy of his own for genuine individual development from within.

15 How It All Started Along with the development of a knowledge base on Indian Management based on Indian ethos, he was imparting development programs to the executives of various companies starting from 1983. The holy monks of Ramakrishna Mission (RKM) played an important role in the formative years. The first paper of his connecting management with Indian Ethos was written at the inspiration of a young sadhu of RKM in Ranchi, which was published by Prabuddha Bh¯arat in 1982. The article was read by Swami Budhananda, the Head of the Delhi RKM, who referred the same to Shri L N Jhunjhunwala, Chairman of Bhilwara Group of Industries, he got so inspired that he invited Chakraborty to impart programs on Values Education to Bhilwara group. He constituted a 12-member team including himself, his son, his son-in-law, and chief-executives of his various units. The first one was conducted in a hermitage like atmosphere in the Sariska Forest Reserve Sanctuary Guest House in Rajasthan for 3 days—the program was continued for

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3 years with sessions after every 2 months—the impact was so profound that Shri Jhunjhunwala talked highly about their effectiveness even after 30 years. Thereafter, there was no looking back—almost all the large organizations in the public sector and some big organizations in the private sector did his program on Values, Ethics, Leadership, and Stress Management in the next 30 years. This phenomenal success is to be judged against two very important facts: (1) he never promised anything very high in terms of material gain—in fact, he was very straightforward and told them to delink his programs from the “bottom line” and (2) there was no advertisement or publicity for his program—the communication was only through word of mouth. This shows the depth and strength of his personality.

16 The Institution Builder In January 1992 Chakraborty submitted his resignation to the then director of IIMC— the atmosphere at IIMC had been hostile to this non-conventional man for the last more than 10 years. He was going against the tide and had been writing and speaking profusely on Indian Ethos in Management that brought him unprecedented success which were not to the liking of many of his colleagues who were oriented otherwise—he was labeled a reactionary, a revivalist, or a Hindu fundamentalist—so he decided, he must leave. Now again, by divine design, the man came, who changed the course of his destiny—just before the Board meeting, where the agenda included the resignation of Chakraborty, the previous director quit and the new director came in, Subir Chowdhury. Chowdhury, a simple but high thinking personality, could sense the greatness of this man—very sagaciously he went to Chakraborty’s room, discussed with him for 2 hours, assured him all support, more importantly suggested establishment of a separate Centre for Human Values on Indian Ethos. Chakraborty reluctantly but respectfully consented to this elderly erudite soul. Sensing the hostile climate, Chowdhury using his authority by-passed the Faculty Council and placed the matter along with the proposal of the Centre in the agenda of the meeting and got it approved by the Board. But there was a condition—land would be given within IIMC campus, but no money, which meant that raising fund completely fell on Prof. Chakraborty’s shoulder. Like a mendicant monk, he went all around the country with a begging bowl, many public sector companies and industrialists came forward to his clarion call— about 45 organizations donated money—some of them gave for constructing the building, some for faculty endowments—in all about 4.25 crores was raised through the consistent effort of Chakraborty. Chowdhury gave him all support and shielded him from the sinister design and malicious campaign of his detractors. The center, which was conceived on December 6, 1992, through the laying of foundation stone by Hiten Bhaya, former Director, IIMC, was born in the form of the Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV) in 1995—the first and one of its kind in the IIM eco-system—the architecture of which worth special mention because

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of its unique and holistic symbolism based on Indian cosmology, a brainchild again of Chakraborty. The center was financially autonomous—except for the salary of Chakraborty and that of two or three clerical staff. Executives from almost all the major organizations of India came here for EDPs, many professionals came from abroad also. Annual Oration was held with great enthusiasm where some of the greatest minds of the contemporary period came and delivered lecture. During one time, the center was not only self-sufficient, the surplus went to the IIMC budget but the hostility went on. Along with the MDPs, the center was running the course on Indian Ethos, started two journals, viz. Journal of Human Values (published by Sage) and Decision (published by Springer) and was developing few faculty persons under the mentorship of Chakraborty who was trying hard to develop a group of torch-bearers who could carry forward his work. The optional course ran quite well for some time but started declining during the last few years of his tenure—he blamed what he called the internal ideological hostility and “cultural imperialism”. But the other activities went on quite well till his retirement in 2003 after serving the IIMC for an unbroken period of 33 years. Still the center is standing tall to tell the history of its glorious past.

¯ arya 17 The Philanthropic Ach¯ Chakraborty was a man of action in his own s¯attwic style. Retirement brought him opportunity to fully concentrate in his s¯adhan¯a and writing occasionally for invitation of some organizations. He as a true a¯ ch¯arya always tried to imbibe the ideals of the ancient Indian wisdom and put them into practice. Following the model of Varn¯ashram Dharma, after retirement he tried in his own way to follow the essential ¯ ideals of the V¯anaprastha Ashram. It was a novel and noble experiment of leading the life of a v¯anaprasthi within the household—a life marked with some strict spiritual discipline in which his very devoted wife gave full support. Any sensible outsider who visited his house could feel the sublime serenity and profound peace. After retirement, the scope of his work and the target audience got widened. Beyond corporate executives, management students and professionals he started interacting with students and teachers at non-technical colleges and universities. His writings also covered a wider scope of the society at large, including overall national education scenarios and cultural comparisons. These can be observed from the books that he had written during this time, e.g. Leadership and Motivation: Cultural Comparisons, In the Valley of Values, Education in India: A Wake-up Call. Some time in 2010, a new opportunity to carry forward his mission beckoned him. He got a call to establish a center from Shri Harshavardhan Neotia, Chairman, Ambuja Neotia Group—a renowned and erudite industrialist with a strong cultural and esthetic bent of mind. Chakraborty took it upon himself as a labor of love. He did not take any remuneration except some conveyance, etc.—he used to say—“The

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Govt. of the nation is giving me pension; I should give back to the nation whatever I can to the best of my ability”. Ambuja Neotia gave financial support and Prof. Chakraborty extended the academic and administrative leadership as the MentorEmeritus—The Rabindranath Tagore Centre for Human Values (RNTCHV) was thus founded on Rabindrajayanti (birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore) day in 2011. During the early days of the Centre’s life, Chakraborty, an enthusiastic old man by then, gave all the care and support—almost single-handedly established the office, the classroom and a small but excellent library. Some of his associates and students gradually joined and under his mentorship soon the center started thriving. The center initially took upon itself three main duties: to offer values-ethics workshops to in-house employees of Ambujan Neotia group companies, to conduct 2-year full-time MA program in Values, Ethics, and Indian Culture course along with a monthly stipend to select Honors graduates and to offer Values Workshops to external organizations on request. The center did quite well under his guidance despite some marketing problems and became financially self-reliant for a brief period of time, but he left in 2015 and the momentum could not be sustained.

18 Legacy of a Pilgrim Chakraborty’s actions with philanthropic motive never stopped. His physical conditions deteriorated but his mind remained devoted to work to help his students and serve the society at large. At the same time, his sharp pen remained ever active till the very last day. He was a keen observer of happenings around him—though normally detached from media (lest they should bring in negative vibes and disturbed his s¯adhan¯a), he kept himself abreast of important events by questioning well-informed persons and through some research work on national and international reports. He had a sharp insight that could see behind the veil and understand the dynamics underlying the surface incidents. His writings of the last few years of his life expressed these things in full vigor which drew unkind comments from his critics that he was only highlighting the negatives and lost balanced approach, though some, who knew him well, appreciated. When he was confronted with these views particularly referring to one shloka (verse) of Bhagavad Git¯a (17.15), his response was that the blistering wound required to be opened up, operated, and attended at its root—it could not be treated by simply applying some smear as cover up. Thus, he kept on writing fearlessly without any selfish motive but the man inside this tough exterior remained sad at the turn of events and at the lack of ethical and moral stamina in people around him particularly in some of his students whom he had tried to develop to the highest standards of humanity. In that sense in the last phase of his life, he had echoed the same sentiments as that of Tagore when he said—‘d¯ao phire se aranya, lao e nagar (give us back the sylvan past, take away today’s cities).

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19 The Curtain Falls Death had drawn considerable attention of this great thinker. It is a good teacher— more so for the Rajarshi leader. Chakraborty, at many places in his writings, had dealt with “Death” from various angles and showed how an ideal leader may learn from this inevitable event of life, e.g. quoting poem No. 76, 80, and 81 from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali he wrote—“preparation towards a serene, peaceful last breath implies life-long vigilance about ‘human values’ here and now. One needs to be cautious regarding the life-process of now to achieve the consummation of ‘death’ as a transition to a diviner existence in the next round of evolution … Tagore is amongst that rare breed of ‘wise’ persons at whose feet we may sit to ‘prepare’ for death-in order to ‘live’” (Chakraborty, 2011: 20). Though ailing, he was more or less fine, woke up in the radiant autumn morning, like any other day, finished all the morning chores—then peacefully engaged himself in writing an article. Suddenly he fell seriously ill, taken to a hospital and within few hours the curtain fell and the drama we call life ended—it was September 13, 2018. The auspicious Ganesh Chaturthi day. What has he left us? In terms of material dimension, not much, but in terms of intangible, subjective and spiritual dimensions, it is huge—a considerable mass of elevating thoughts which, if imbibed, may gradually lift us from the level of researcher to that of realizer, from bahirmukhit¯a to antarmukhit¯a, from a shallow man to a profound personality. These thought waves are now dispersed in the form of the knowledge base (books, monographs, articles, journals, etc.), the training modules, the trained and inspired personnel, institutions, curricula, a life of constant academic pursuits soaked in spirituality—all created and displayed by him. Now, it is our duty to accumulate all these and present them through programs for the benefit of the society and that of the nation. The life of this unsung Rishi of Indian Management Education has come to an end—but his legacy goes on. The legacy of his pivotal work and pioneering contribution based on which most of the development of contemporary Indian management thoughts have taken shape, will inspire the other fellow thinkers for another revolution in terms of “Human Values Oriented Management” which is Indian in origin but universal in application.

References Chakraborty, S. K. (1987). Managerial effectiveness and quality of work life: Indian insights. Tata McGraw Hill. Chakraborty, S. K. (1998). Foundations of managerial work: Contributions from Indian thought. Himalaya Publishing House. Chakraborty, S. K. (2003). Against the tide: The philosophical foundations of modern management. Oxford University Press. Chakraborty, S. K. (2011). Fragrant light from the Tagorean flame; Shraddh¯anjali Series-1, RNTCHV.

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Chakraborty, S. K. (2012). Swami Vivekananda: Leader of sacred nationhood. Advaita Ashram. Chakraborty, S. K., & Chakraborty, D. (2008). Spirituality in management: Means or end? Oxford University Press. Chakraborty, S. K., & Chakraborty, D. (2013a). R¯ajarshi leadership: The saving role of authentic spirituality. Sri Aurobindo Society. Chakraborty, S. K., & Chakraborty, D. (2013b). Human values and ethics. Himalaya Publishing.

Vedas and Management Mrityunjay Athreya

1 Management Modern management is an inter-disciplinary science. It has utilised concepts from different fields, such as Economics, Psychology, Mathematics and Engineering. In recent years, there has been an increasing stress on Ethics in business. For dealing with ethical issues, management can benefit from Philosophy and Spirituality.

2 Vedas The Vedas contain profound ideas on Religion, Spirituality and philosophy. The four main Vedas have different emphases. The Rig Veda is essentially made up of devotional hymns. The Yajur Veda deals primarily with Karma Kanda, various rituals and sacrifices. The Sama Veda is a source of classical music and dances. The Atharva Veda contains much Tantric Knowledge. All the Vedas contain some of the Upanishads, philosophical dialogues on the basic questions of the meaning of existence; purpose of human life; and relationship between the individual and cosmos. This part is particularly useful in management. The term Vedas can also be taken as an umbrella term for Hindu scriptures, including the Puranas and Itihasas. This paper attempts to bring out some of the ways in which modern management can benefit from the Vedas.

Paper for the World Vedic Conference, Ujjain, January 2007. M. Athreya (B) Former Professor, Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata, India Independent Management Mentor, New Delhi, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_3

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3 Administrative Management The major organisation in ancient times was the state administration. Industrial enterprises and non-governmental organisations are of more recent origin. However, many of the principles are applicable to them also. i.

Raaja, The King The Vedas and the Dharma Shastras assign a very important role to the King. They provide role models of kings like Raghu, Janaka, Prithu, Rama, Yudhishtira, and Parikshit. The king is charged with several responsibilities. a. b. c. d.

To take care of the subjects, as if they were his own children. To ensure justice with high impartiality, even if it meant punishing members of this own family. To provide peace and stability so that the people can pursue their work, business and social activities unhindered. To defend the kingdom against external aggression.

To play these roles, the king needed many qualities. a. b. c. d. e. ii.

Prajaa, The Citizen The Vedic literature also emphasises the duties of the citizen. a. b. c. d.

iii.

He should be a role model. Yathaa raja, tathaa prajaah. As the King, so the people. He should employ ministers and officials on the basis of their ability—the competence principle. He should directly consult his ministers, and indirectly consult the people, before making major decisions—the participative style of management. He should reward his officials adequately so that they are nor tempted to be corrupt—the compensation principle. He should institute proper checks and controls, to ensure their performance and integrity—the audit principle.

To respect and revere the King as a parent, and even an incarnation of God. Go about their work and relationships peacefully. Pay their taxes and dues, at local and state levels, to ensure good administration. To avoid indiscipline and discourage divisions and rebellions, to prevent araajakam, lawlessness, in which they will be the worst sufferers.

Mantri/Adhikari; The Minister/Official The Vedas and Shastras also give guidelines to Ministers and Officials. a. b.

To give unbiased advice to the king, to help formulate good state policies, decisions and plans. To carry out the king’s final policies effectively.

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c. d.

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To ensure the efficiency and honesty of themselves and their teams. To act as a two-way link of communication between the king and the people.

4 Organisational Management The Vedic literature deals with many types of organisations—the Ashram; Gurukulam; Vishwavidyalaya; Sanstha, etc. The insights from these are relevant to modern organisations. a.

b. c. d. e.

The Rishi exercised almost entirely a spiritual leadership over the ashram. His power was not based on economic incentives or physical punishments. This influenced the role of the king. The ideal King was seen as a Raja Rishi, a Philosopher-Statesman. The Rishi was deeply committed to the learning and development of his sishyas, disciples—the Mentor principle. The Ashram fostered group learning among the shishyas, through the swaadhyaaya chakras—the Teamwork principle. The Ashram expected self-study and personal growth of each student, through swaadhyaya, regular, systematic application—the Self-Development principle. The Ashram’s resources were mobilised, and all activities run by the disciples— the Self-Management principle.

An important process of Organisational Management is Leadership. The Bhagavad Gita, which is part of the Vedanta, the essence of the Vedas, stresses sreshtha dharma, the responsibility of the elite. Yad yadaacharati sreshthah tad tadeva itaro janaah. Sa yat pramaanam kurute lokah tad anuvartate. “The members follow what the leader does. They adopt the standards set by him”. The Role Model principle. This principle is applied in modern organisations in many areas i.

Values and Culture Many companies now have statements of core values. They attempt to build a culture for the organisation, around these values. Often, there is disenchantment, scepticism, and even cynicism, within and outside the organisation. This is due to the gap between precept and practice. Junior executives, workers, and business partners will follow the values, in their actions only if they see the top and senior management exhibiting these values in their style and behaviour.

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ii.

Quality Management System Many companies have implemented Quality Systems like ISO 9000. These deal with the basics of preparing system manuals, and training people to practise those procedures. But, periodic quality audits reveal deviations from the manuals. Then, the companies go for TQM, Total Quality Management. This deals with the cultural and behavioural aspects. Both Leadership and Membership become more aware of their responsibilities to comply with the various quality standards. Training and Development Many companies have also been spending more time and money on the training of their executives and workers. Such training was initially focussed on the transfer of knowledge related to the different jobs. After seeing that such knowledge is often not applied, training in Attitudes was added. Even then, some employees applied the knowledge more efficiently than others. Companies realised the need to add a third dimension to training, namely skills, on how to apply relevant knowledge, with the right attitudes. Individual, departmental and organisational performance did improve for some time. However, with passage of time, there is a human tendency to regress to the old ways doing things. So, it was necessary to add a fourth element, namely, Habits— systematic, regular, periodic application of KAS. Good habits represent the principle of saadhana, a disciplined drive towards perfection. There is need for sustained abhyaasam, practice. The senior executives, as leaders have to demonstrate their own learning on all the four dimensions of KASH, as well as their abhyaasam and saadhanaa. This will inspire their subordinates to absorb the KASH training and utilise it on the job. When this happens, organisations realise that training has one of the highest returns on the investment made. It goes further, and raises the rate of return on all other investments, such as on machines; research; and brands, which are often much higher than on training.

iii.

5 Self-management The distinctive strength of the Indian Vedic heritage, compared to all other world civilisations is its stress on the Management of one’s own self by each and every individual. The Vedic literature has much more to say on Self-Management than on Administrative Management and Organisational Management. However, as the karmacharis, employees in organisations manage themselves better and better, Organisational Management will become easier; and more effective. Similarly, as the naagarikas, citizens manage themselves better Administrative Management will also become better. Modern theories of Organisation stress the need for delegation, decentralisation, consultation, participative and empowerment for Self-Management and OM, with a bottom-up approach. Likewise, modern Political Theory also

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emphases the need for the entitlement, access, empowerment and participation of citizens. Recent laws, like the Panchayati Raj Act amendments, the Right to Information Act, etc., deepen this process. The Vedic literature contains myriad ideas, suggestions, cautions, and prescriptions for the individual. The following list is only a small sample. i.

Purushaarthas, Life Goals A fundamental question which every human being must confront is— what should I do in my life? With my life? He/she is torn by many states of duvidhaa, pulled in two different directions. The rise of materialism and consumerism pulls the individual towards more wants and consumption. Vedas offer a balanced model of four life goals, namely– a. b. c. d.

ii.

iii.

iv.

Dharma, Righteousness/Ethics; Artha, Wealth; Kaama, Enjoyment of Desires; and Moksha, Liberation.

There is the normative prescription that the practice of dharma is the primary goal; and moksha, the ultimate goal. The other two—artha and kaama are intermediate goals. Artha should be acquired and used in a manner that does not violate dharma; and endanger the chances of moksha. Karma, Work As part of Vedanta, the Gita advises all of us, through the nimittam, instrument of Arjuna, to approach work with yagna bhaava, an attitude of sacrifice. It advocates nishkaama karma, work without attachment to personal rewards. Contrary to some popular misunderstandings, this prescription is quite logical. Our adhikaar, control is only over our work. It is not over the phalam, in the sense of both the results, and the consequent rewards. The outcome of all action has to be accepted as Bhagavad prasaadam, God’s Gift. This has profound implications for the total organisation also. Its performance is the net result of not only its own efforts but also the environment, competition, etc. The final rewards to the individual have to be based not only on his efforts but also the total performance of the organisation, and the relative efforts of his colleagues, etc. In terms of another important organisational concern, utpaadakata, productivity, also, this concept is relevant. It is only when each employee works with total dedication, without anxiety for rewards, that his total energies and competences can be focussed one hundred percent on the work, leading to optimum productivity. Relationships Vedanta prescribes “parasparam bhaavanyantah”, with mutual feelings of care and concern for each other. Modern behavioural science also advocates empathy and cooperation as a corrective to the damage from ego, selfishness and interpersonal conflicts. Inclusiveness

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v.

vi.

M. Athreya

Vedanta is very broadminded in speaking of “Vasudaiva kutumbakam”, the world as one human family. This is very necessary and useful for nations and organisations to succeed in the context of globalisation. It is also a valuable aushadham, medicine in our modern world threatened by terrorism, violence, and civilisational conflicts. Samyama, Self-control Within the broader concept of Self-Management, the Vedas put particular stress on self-control. Modern psychology also points out the tension from individuals trying to control others, without realising that their only possible control is over themselves. The Mundaka Upanishad gives the allegory of a charioteer. The buddhi, wisdom has to control the manas, mind, with thoughts as wild horses, running after vishayaas, objects of desire in the world. The control has to be over the pancha karma indriyaas and the pancha gnana indriyaah—over the five senses of acting and knowing. Yoga, Total Engagement The pinnacle of thought in self-management is the concept of Yoga. As Patanjali Muni brings out in his Yoga Sutras, aasanas, postures, are only the rudimentary first step of yoga. There are seven more steps, leading to Samaadhi, the state of total aatma gyaanam, self-realisation and merger of the jeevatman, the individual soul, with the Paramaatman, the Cosmic Soul.

6 Conclusion The ancient Vedas have dealt with diverse aspects of the existential problems of individuals, communities and the state. Many of these thoughts are still relevant to modern management. This paper has illustrated some of that relevance for SelfManagement; Organisational Management; and Administrative Management.

Business Ethics and Management

From Professional Ethics to a Spiritual Search for Meaning: Some Reflections Luk Bouckaert

1 The Structure and Purpose of a Professional Ethic Each profession has its own specific context of action and hence its own particular ethic or deontology. A professional ethic is a set of norms, values, and procedures that guide professional actors in making the right decisions and taking the right actions. We need professional ethics for cases where different values and interests have to be balanced and difficult choices must be made. The main ingredients of a professional ethic are threefold: (1) (2) (3)

A set of shared values supported by some (often implicit) worldview or metaphysical concept. A set of rules in order to apply the fundamental values and concepts to concrete situations and actions in the professional field. An institutional authority that controls and sanctions the decisions and behavior of the professional actors.

In many Western countries, the medical profession has the most fully developed professional ethic characterized by the required threefold structure of values, rules, and institutional authority. Other professions mostly have a fragmentary or an implicit professional ethic or code of conduct. The paper draws some reversed and shortened parts from two earlier publications of the author: Luk Bouckaert: “Spiritual Discernment as a Method of Judgment” In: S. Nandram & P.K. Bindlish (eds.), Managing VUCA Through Integrative Self-Management, Springer International Publishing AG, pp. 15–25. And Luk Bouckaert: “Authenticity and Sustainability. The search for a reliable earth spirituality” In: Ove Jakobson & Laszlo Zsolnai (eds), Integral Ecology and Sustainable Business (), Emerald Publishing, Bingley, UK, pp. 15–31. The author sincerely wishes to thank Mr. Henri Ghesquiere for his carefully reading and correcting the text. L. Bouckaert (B) Catholic University of Leuven and European SPES Institute, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_4

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Why do we need a professional ethic? The answer is simple: to solve difficult conflicts of interests, rights, and values. If everybody strives for the maximization of his/her own self-interest, we end up in complete distrust and in worse case scenarios. Prisoners dilemmas illustrate this well. We will perish, unless we compromise. It is very difficult, however, even impossible to compromise if we don’t agree on some shared foundational values and principles. Ethical codes and professional ethics formulate rights and duties of all relevant stakeholders to avoid a clash of interests or war of values. But there is a zone of wicked problems or what Schumacher calls divergent problems that remain unsolvable and very difficult to overcome (Schumacher, 2004). By divergent problems, Schumacher means problems which are linked with antagonistic and unconciliatory value premises. Divergent positions about abortion, euthanasia, migration, eco-idealism, the role of religion, or government in public life, etc., always crop up again. Ethical codes which mostly protect the interests and power of the regulating authorities, do not solve them. At best, they help us to keep value conflicts under control. We need other ways to overcome deep-rooted value conflicts. It is my strong conviction that spirituality as a discipline has the potential to disclose meaning and purpose in life that overcomes the innate drive for self-interest, polarization, and war of values (Bouckaert, 2011). I consider spirituality as a discipline of intuitive and non-rational thinking that opens our mind to the intrinsic and creative meaning of life. Its methods include empathy, dialogical thinking, storytelling, symbolic visualizations, meditation, self-reflection, prayer, etc. Its aim is to disclose new perspectives that enable us to transcend the existing self-definition and look at problems and conflicts in a new and creative way. Of course, spirituality is not a deus ex machina. As all human practices, it remains ambiguous and can be (mis)used in different ways. It needs the guidance of critical reflection and spiritual discernment. We need a spiritual foundation to transform professional ethics into a real search for meaning. Rational arguments in favor of spirituality are of very limited use and seldom do they convince people. Storytelling is a better method. A hint given by my wife, professor of Literature, Rita Ghesquiere (who unexpectedly passed away in 2018) helped me to find an appropriate story.

2 The Limits of Professional Ethics. The Case of “The Children Act” The Children Act is a novel by the English writer Ian McEwan, published in 2014. The title is a reference to the Children Act 1989, a UK Act of Parliament which proclaims that children’s well-being must prevail in cases of conflicting interests. The central character of the novel is Fiona Maye, a High Court judge in London who presides over cases in family court. She is married to Jack but, due to her strong dedication to her career, there was not much time for sexual intimacy and

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affection nor for children. Jack asks her to consider an open marriage and would like to embark on a sexual affair, with her permission, with a 28-year-old statistician. Fiona is horrified and refuses to consent to the terms. His departure leaves her adrift, wondering whether what she had lost was perhaps not so much love but a modern form of respectability. In the middle of her fight with Jack, Fiona receives a call about an emergency case of a teenager, Adam Henry, struck with leukemia who refuses a blood transfusion as a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The hospital needs an authorization from the court to administer the blood transfusion against the will of the parents and their son who is only 3 months shy of the adult age of 18. Fiona decides to visit him in the hospital to try to ascertain whether he is well informed and capable of refusing treatment or not. She finds him a precocious and kind boy. Instead of doing the routine questioning, she invites him to read some poetry and to play a tune on his violin with Fiona joining in by singing to his playing. Back in court, she rules that the hospital be allowed to give the blood transfusion, based on the argument that despite the maturity of Adam and his capacity to decide, the Children Act gives precedence to life over personal autonomy. Months later Fiona’s marriage is still tense. She begins to receive letters from Adam Henry who tells her that he is now grateful for her ruling and that he sees the hypocrisy in his parents and has become disillusioned with their religion. Fiona decides to ignore the letters. When traveling to Newcastle to oversee local cases, to her surprise she finds that Adam has followed her and is desperate to talk to her. Adam eventually confesses that he has left home and wants to live with Fiona. She refuses his request and tells him to call his mother. After arranging for a taxi and a train ticket, she sent him back home. However, by kissing him goodbye, she reaches out to kiss him inadvertently on the lips. Panicked after the kiss and afraid that someone has witnessed it, Fiona grew anxious about her good reputation and integrity. She calls her husband to arrange for dinner upon her return and the two begin to reconcile. Back home, Fiona receives another letter from Adam, this time a religious poem that implies that he now thinks of her as Satan for tempting him away from religion and leaving him forlorn without any meaning in life. Therefore, he has returned to the faith. Like his other letters, Fiona ignores this one. At Christmas time, when she prepares to perform in a Christmas concert, she received notice that Adam has died after the leukemia returned and he refused treatment, now having reached majority age. After the performance, Fiona heads home. When Jack returns she tells him all about the court case, the kiss, her guilt feelings for this mishap and for turning Adam away causing him to go back to his religious convictions and ultimately his death. She falls asleep crying in her own bed, but when she wakes up Jack had followed her and promises to love her as she reveals further details about her guilt. So far, the story which enthralls the reader to the end. What can we learn from it? First, Fiona is a very committed, sensitive, and intelligent judge who applies the highest ethical standards of her profession. However, the case ended in drama. In fact, Adam’s death as a result of his refusal of blood transfusion was not inspired by religious motives. When reading Adam’s poem written at the end of his life, Fiona realized that it was a disguised suicide prompted by a failing promise of hope awoken

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in Adam by her sentence as a judge. Her professional ethics may have been correct, but it lacked a sense of responsibility for the vulnerable life of Adam. At the end of the book, Fiona declares herself guilty: She thought that her responsibility would end with the walls of the court. But how was this possible? He came to her because he wanted what everyone wants and what only free human beings can give and not a supernatural authority: meaning (p. 205)

It is important to carefully analyze the two scenes where Fiona meets Adam in person. The first scene is the moment she decides to see Adam in the hospital to verify if he can take such a far-reaching decision as to refuse a life-saving blood transfusion. Instead of checking a standard list of points or discussing theological arguments, she listens to a poem read by Adam and to his violin play while singing herself the melody. They celebrate life together through the non-professional and non-rational language of poetry and music. After this strange meeting, despite the firm will of Adam and his parents, Fiona decides that within the framework of the ‘Children Act’ life of Adam must be prioritized over personal choice. Her encounter convinced her that his “will to live and to create meaning in life” was deep rooted and must be protected against rational and religious arguments. This decision not only saved his life but also freed Adam from the burden of religious social pressure. He started a new life. The second encounter took place—months after the court sentence—when Adam finds her after a difficult search in Newcastle. He asks Fiona if he can live with her, hire a room, and possibly help her with household chores. For Fiona, this is a bridge too far. She can’t accept this transgression of her private sphere: “It stops here.” Moreover, after kissing Adam half by accident on his lips, she turned anxious about her professional reputation and integrity. Whereas the first encounter was a scene of life or “reverence for life,” the second was a scene of death masked by her professional code that confined her responsibilities to the walls of the Court. Ultimately, it was again music and poetry that awakened her sensitivity for life and capacity to disclose its meaning. By sharing her story with Jack, who listened without judging, she opened at least her marriage for a new search of meaning.

3 The Spiritual Foundation of Professional Ethics The case of The Children Act illustrates that a professional ethic based on a set of specific rules designed to control conflict situations, lacks the sense of life and compassion that are needed to understand people in their real situation. Can we on a philosophical level formulate a principle that creates at the same time a sense of life and a method of managing conflicts of interests, rights, and values? I could present many postmodern philosophers such as Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Lyotard who disclose new horizons for professional ethics. But their discourse is difficult, intellectual, and requires academic training. These thinkers do not offer us an elementary and inspiring principle that is accessible for everyone and can orient

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our actions and choices. The best answer I found is the principle of reverence for life of Albert Schweitzer (See Bouckaert 2017b: 20–24). Albert Schweitzer is world renown for his humanitarian work as a medical doctor in Africa where he started in 1913 a missionary hospital in Lambaréné. For this pioneering work, he earned the Noble prize (1953) and the Goethe prize in Germany. Besides this, he received much recognition for his exegetic studies of Jesus’ life and for his artistic interpretations of Bach’s music. Less well known are his philosophical writings which he started in Lambaréné at the beginning of the First World War. Schweitzer was convinced that the war was a symptom of a much deeper moral and spiritual crisis in Europe. Being a German citizen, he was arrested by the French army (Gambia was a colony of France) and he could no longer lead the medical hospital. Hence, Schweitzer started his search for a new foundational and inspiring principle for the failing Western ethics. This project was not new. Already during his studies in Strasbourg (at that moment part of Germany), he wrote a doctoral dissertation on Kant’s moral and religious thought. Although he admired Kant very much, he realized that Kant’s rational and anthropocentric philosophy was insufficient for an inspiring postwar moral renaissance in Europe. Moreover, contemporary Western philosophy in his perception had degenerated into a form of academic entertainment and had lost its social and cultural mission. He advocated a non-academic philosophy closely related to a new and committed way of life. It is no accident that reading Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Goethe was for Schweitzer an eye opener. He discovered in Nietzsche that the will is a human faculty sui generis which precedes reason (but does not substitute for reason). But he reproached Nietzsche to leave the will devoid of any inspiring principle of direction. Without such a principle, the will is unable to overcome its own ego-centric motives or the chaotic flow of irrational emotions. Or expressed in a positive way, according to Schweitzer we need a principle that relates our will to the will of all other living beings, that creates a sense of cosmic unity and that commits the will to ethical action. The quest for such a basic truth was the philosophical mission of Schweitzer. During the long nights in Lambaréné, he read carefully most of Western and Eastern philosophy. However, he did not find the unifying principle that could guide the will to act. He was confused, until the moment of disclosure. In his Autobiography, Schweitzer tells us the story of his discovery of the principle of Reverence of Life. Called to visit a colleague who had fallen ill, he took a journey up the Ogooué River from Lambaréné. At that time, he was very focused on his philosophy of civilization and determined to find the unifying principle for his project. Lost in thought I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal concept of the ethical that I had not discovered in any philosophy. I covered sheet after sheet with disconnected sentences merely to concentrate on the problem. Two days passed. Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase ‘reverence for life’. The iron door had yielded. The path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the principle in which affirmation of the world and ethics are joined together! (Schweitzer, 1998: 155).

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The principle of reverence for live is first of all the expression of a subjective and existential experience of life, a disclosure of the inner harmony and interconnectedness of nature. Schweitzer resumed his eco-experience with the iconic phrase “I am life, that wills to live, in the midst of life that wills to live.” By this formula, Schweitzer expresses that the real self can only be experienced as a part of a web of Life. But “being part of” does not mean being reduced to an element in a complex causal biosystem (bio-centrism). Life manifests itself as an individual will to live shared by all other living beings, humans and non-humans alike. It is important to realize that Schweitzer’s eco-experience is a disclosure of meaning before and beyond action. It is a kind of inner revelation that opens a common ground for action but is itself not an action. Neither is it the result of scientific observation nor deduction. Seen from an external and scientific point of view nature can be explained as a physical struggle for life and a competition for the best reproduction. Reverence for life is not a physical law but first a spiritual intuition of the meaning of life and second, an ethical norm for action. The ethical norm can be summarized as follows: do always respect the potential of life in everything and do never destroy it. Schweitzer was inspired by Gandhi’s principle of ahimsa (non-violence). He recognized the similarity of both principles while considering reverence for life as more oriented towards positive ethical action than to avoid violence. Schweitzer always defended the need of an absolute spiritual and ethical principle because without such a principle, we will not resist the temptation to conform our ethical behavior to our own interests, ideologies, and comfort. Only in the light of an absolute principle do we have a permanent incentive to strive for a higher moral order and harmony. Yet Schweitzer was aware of the fact that he, as a physician, has to kill viruses or to reduce drastically the overpopulation of cats in Lambaréné, absent natural predators. How does he combine these practices of killing with an absolute claim of reverence for live? Schweitzer’s answer is that although all living beings are equal in dignity, we must compromise where necessary. Those unavoidable compromises cannot be deduced in a logical way from the principle of reverence for life. They need a contextual discernment based on our personal and subjective intuition of reverence for life. Moreover, when a compromise is necessary, we should according to Schweitzer accept some feeling of guilt and failure. This is a stimulus to look for better solutions that avoid future violence and destruction. Unfortunately, Schweitzer did not develop a reflection on the nature and pitfalls of this kind of discernment which for ethical decision-making is very crucial. The case of Fiona illustrates very well the need of such a process. Lack of empathy and discernment after her sentence in the court, was the indirect cause of the disguised suicide of Adam. Only after his death, stimulated by feelings of guilt, she realized her lack of compassion and regained her capacity to create true meaning in life.

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4 The Art of Spiritual Discernment Discernment is a practice with a long spiritual tradition. Well known are, e.g. the guiding rules of spiritual discernment which Ignatius of Loyola (the founder of the Jesuit Order) has delivered in his Spiritual Exercises (1548). Basically, this approach entails that the individual examines his or her deeper moods and feelings when considering in their imagination the available options and discerning which of the moods associated with the options leads to an inner enhancement of the spirit (dilatatio) and feelings of inner peace (consolatio). Because individuals can easily be misled by the interpretation of their inner spirits and affections, Ignatius formulates some guidelines to be respected when applying the method of spiritual discernment. What at first seems to be a good and euphoric motivation, may lead to disaster. The art of discerning the spirits is very subtle and needs therefore some spiritual coaching. Ignatius regarded ‘rational’ and ‘spiritual’ methods of decision-making as complementary, but in cases where we are confronted with a relatively unknown and unpredictable future, spiritual discernment is more appropriate. I believe that this field of spiritual-based decision-making in ethics remains largely unexplored.1 As I explained elsewhere Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment might be considered as a secular version of the spiritual method of discernment (See Bouckaert, 2017a: 15–25). In her posthumously published Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1992), we find the main lines of what she meant. At least three points are highly innovative and worth exploring: (1) the difference between reasoning and judging; (2) the role of taste, imagination and emotions; and (3) the validation of subjective judgements of taste.

4.1 The Difference Between Reasoning and Judging Science is based on the logical operations of induction and deduction. In science, we try to explain a particular phenomenon by subsuming it under a more general and empirically tested law. When the particular occurrence can be deduced from a general law, we consider it as explained. In moral reasoning, we do a similar thing as we do in science in order to legitimate our behavior. We try to see if our behavior can be subsumed under a general normative principle (Kant will call it an ethical imperative or we may call it a universal human right). If we can understand and justify our behavior as an application of a general normative principle, it is morally justified. Kant’s Critique of Moral Reasoning was a search to find the most general principles or moral laws that inform and legitimate moral behavior.

1

There are of course some interesting exceptions. Daniel Goleman, author of the bestseller Emotional Intelligence, studied the older spiritual methods of discernment of spirits before developing his concept of emotional intelligence. His basic assumption is that feelings and emotions help us discern what really matters.

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Once subsumed under a general moral law, we do not need further discernment. There is a compelling logic in deductive reasoning which precludes the process of discernment, and thus economizes effort. But in many cases, such logic fails to compel because there is no consensus about the choice, the ranking or the interpretation of the first general principles. We are confronted with antagonistic and unconciliatory value premises and with great uncertainties about the outcome of our choices. What is left is a confused spectrum of partly overlapping and partly contradictory ideas. We need another faculty than reasoning to judge the situation and to decide. We need the faculty of ‘taste’ or discernment.

4.2 The Role of Taste, Imagination, and Emotions Originally, Kant’s idea was to call his Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) the Critique of Taste. Here he distinguishes between different senses. Through seeing, hearing, and touching we experience the objects of the outer world in a direct and objective way. By contrast, smell and taste give us inner sensations that are private and very subjective. They give us feelings of it-pleases-or-displeases-me but it is difficult to communicate them in an objective way as we do for the object of the other three senses. It is said: de gustibus non disputandum est. But, notwithstanding this subjectivity of taste, we like to communicate our judgments of taste. The imagination helps us to represent the objects which are absent as well as the feelings of pleasure and displeasure they evoke. Moreover, through empathy, we can imagine and represent the feelings of other people. By sharing and testing our aesthetic judgments with other people, we can enlarge our mind and enjoy what Kant calls a ‘contemplative pleasure’ which is the aim of sharing aesthetic judgments. By introducing feelings of pleasure and displeasure as reference for judgment and discernment, Kant and Arendt run the risk of becoming servants of utilitarianism. However, the aesthetic feelings of pleasure and displeasure are different from the well-known utilitarian feelings of pleasure and displeasure. The latter result from the satisfaction of our needs and the reduction of things to their functional use. The former are disinterested. They do not evaluate things for their functionality but as nonfunctional, as intrinsically beautiful and right in their own appearance. According to Arendt: “The activity of taste decides how this world, independent of its utility and our vital interests in it, is to look and to sound …; its interest in the world is purely ‘disinterested’” (Arendt, 1992: 105, quoted by Ronald Beiner). Kant would say it is a purely contemplative pleasure. Art is a vehicle to communicate the intrinsic meaning of things. While Kant’s analysis of taste was applied to aesthetics, Hannah Arendt was interested in extending the model of aesthetic judgment to moral and political judgment. But can we trust our subjective feelings in moral and political choices? Do moral tastes have some general validity?

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4.3 The Validation of Judgments of Taste Arendt indicates two tracks to strengthen the communicability and hence the validity of moral judgment. The first one is to stimulate representative thinking. This means that I should make present to my mind the subjective standpoints of all those who are involved. According to Arendt: “The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion.” Representative thinking does not mean that I conform my judgment to the actual statements of the majority. “I still speak with my own voice and I do not count noses in order to arrive at what I think is right. But my judgment is no longer subjective either” (Arendt, 1992: 108). The other test of validity which Arendt found in Kant is the idea of exemplary validity. To formulate judgment we often use as a reference a good example or a best practice. A good example or a best practice is not a general or abstract principle. We refer to a particular situation, person or case. But the particular case helps us to disclose a more general meaning. “The exemplar is and remains a particular that in its very particularity reveals the generality that otherwise could not be defined. Courage is like Achilles” (Arendt, 1992: 77). Good narratives guide our actions better than modelling them according to principles and abstract rules. The case of The Children Act, let us grasp in an intuitive and direct way the limits of a rule-driven ethic and the role of a professional sense of meaning and compassion.

5 Conclusions (a)

(b)

(c)

Deep existential moral problems cannot be solved in a rational way. Antagonistic differences in value systems and rankings make it impossible to find a common ground for rational arguments and moral deductions. This paper explored the possibilities of a meta-rational or spiritual ethic which can also be applied in specific fields of professional ethics. Spirituality presupposes the belief/intuition that life has an elementary and intrinsic meaning preceding rational reconstructions. Schweitzer’s principle of reverence for Life is an expression of that belief. Instead of founding professional ethics exclusively on moral reasoning guided by Kant’s ethical imperatives and/or the principle of maximizing utility/happiness, we may introduce spiritual discernment as a method to transcend and redefine ‘divergent’ problems in professional context. As Hannah Arendt extended Kant’s theory of judgment from aesthetics to the moral and political domain, we can extend Arendt’s theory of judging to the field of professional ethics.

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Spiritual discernment requires non-rational and intuitive methods of thinking such as representative empathy, dialogical praxis, storytelling, art and music, meditation, and prayer, etc. (In the Children Act, dialogue, poems, and music play a crucial role in the decision process).

References Arendt, H. (1973). Responsibility and judgment. Shocken Books. Arendt, H. (1992). Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. The University of Chicago Press. Bouckaert, L. (2011). Spirituality and rationality. In L. Bouckaert & L. Zsolnai (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of spirituality and business (pp. 18–26). Palgrave Macmillan. Bouckaert, L. (2017b). Authenticity and sustainability. The search for a reliable earth spirituality. In O. Jakobson & L. Zsolnai (Eds.), Integral ecology and sustainable business (pp. 15–31). Emerald Publishing. Schweitzer, A. (1987). The philosophy of civilisation. Prometheus Books. Schweitzer, A. (1998). Out of my life and thought: An autobiography. John Hopkins University Press. Beiner, R. (1992). Hannah Arendt on judging. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy (Part 2, pp. 88–156). The University of Chicago Press. Bouckaert, L. (2017a). Spiritual discernment as a method of judgment. In S. Nandram & P.K. Bindlish (Eds.), Managing VUCA through integrative self-management (pp. 15–25). Springer International Publishing AG. Bouckaert, L. (2017b). Authenticity and sustainability. The search for a reliable earth spirituality. In O. Jakobson & L. Zsolnai (Eds.), Integral ecology and sustainable business (pp. 15–31). Emerald Publishing. Ignatius of Loyola. (1548). Spiritual exercises. Kant, I. (1790). Kritik der rteilskskraft. Berlijn & Libau: Lagarde & Friederich. Mc Ewan, I. (2014). The children act. Jonathan Cape. Schumacher, E. F. (2004). A Guide for the perplexed (1st ed., 1977). Harper Perennial.

On Ego and Economics Subordinated by Spirit: Reflections on the ‘Spirinomics’ of S. K. Chakraborty Mike Thompson

So, what about the ego? Western management and business practice has developed on what might be regarded as providing returns on capital employed for the work of management and labour in producing profit through the economic ‘machinery’ of supply and demand. But the ‘machinery’ is in the hands of self-interested individuals who compete for their interests in the marketplace—if they can. The competition is for material rewards for their Body, their Life, and their Mindset (or, ego). It is at this point that S. K. Chakraborty makes his challenge to the role of the self in self-interest. He regarded Western management and business practices as being exploitative of the human condition and the greater wellbeing. The ego, he argues, must be subject to the development of the spiritual or higher self. Management needs to be unleashed from Western economic paradigms to find better pathways to manage business which are more in keeping with Indian spirituality, culture, and its wisdom traditions. To what extent can those outside the Indian heritage, and part of the very economic systems eschewed by Chakraborty complement the ideals of his ‘spirinomics’ in their work and practice? This chapter brings together a few key Vedic themes as synthesised by Chakraborty together with complementary insights selected from a few contemporary and historic Western sources. The aim is to promote reflection on the applicability of Chakraborty’s work to the globalised world of business practices that indicate shifts towards the ideals of Chakraborty’s spirinomics albeit from different sociological and economic roots. The chapter begins by outlining the key themes of Chakraborty’s work and his ancient and more recent sources followed by a discussion of four major themes which are interplayed with perspectives drawn from Western contemporary and ancient sources and Christianity. Specifically: M. Thompson (B) Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_5

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Detachment of the Ego-self; Managing the Ego-self; Rajarshi Leadership—Wise Leadership; and The Nature of Desire and Economic Paradigms.

1 The Sources for S. K. Chakraborty’s ‘Spirinomics’ Chakraborty has become renowned for distilling and applying the classical literature of Indian religions, traditions, and culture to the contemporary practice of organisations, management, and business economics. Chakraborty was convinced that Indian professional management needed to recover the sources of human values in the practice of spirit-centred leadership and management. He rejected the dogmas of rationalist approaches to economics which relied upon Western behavioural scientific hegemony grounded in the assumptions of logical positivism which, he argued, denied the subjectivity inherent in managerial decision-making. From the corpus of Indian philosophical wisdom, Chakraborty was able to establish alternative methods of management that best exercised the Spirit-Self over the ego-self and its particular desires. Chakraborty was founder-convener of the Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV) based at the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta. The aim of the MCHV was to forward the teaching and application of spiritual philosophy and practice drawn from ancient Vedic literature such as the Veda Samhit¯as, Katha Upanishad, Mahabharata, Kautilya’s Arthash¯astra, Manusmriti, and the Bhagavad Git¯a. He also drew extensively from three Indian spiritual sages: Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, and Swami Vivekananda to develop an Indian alternative to economics and managerial practice. Chakraborty’s synthesis involved the separation of religious rituals to discern the fundamental goal of human self-transformation to achieve ‘human values’ in contrast to the preoccupation with the desires associated with what he called the ‘bodylife-mind’ (BLM) triad which ‘harmfully prunes the scope of human endeavour’ (Chakraborty, 2011: 23). In 1998 Chakraborty spelt out his synthesis of Vedic principles in his Foundations of Managerial Work which was infused by indigenous Indian beliefs such as the ‘doctrine of karma’, the triune ‘guna’ composition of the human being and the philosophies associated with Atman, the spiritual essence ‘which dwells in each one of us’ (Chakraborty, 2006). Later, possibly to reach wider audiences, Chakraborty summarised various schools of the Hindu-Vedic ontology into five characteristics: The Spirit-Self is eternally perfect; constantly blissful; entirely self-sufficient; Truth and Light in itself and, in an individual is identical with the Spirit-Self of All. To free oneself from ego-centred individualism, which Chakraborty regarded as the barrier to human development, one needs to practice meditation techniques of silencing. According to Chakraborty, it is in this state that one can separate one’s ‘identifications with the BLM-ego’ and grow and strengthen the Spirit-Self (Chakraborty, 2011: 25–27).

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Chakraborty coined the term ‘spirinomics’ (economics subordinated to Spirit) which, according to Sakar (2019: 30), ‘is a combination of socialism, Vedanta, Gandhi’s Sarvodaya and trusteeship concepts and enlightened capitalism’. His challenge begins with the business or organisational agent in which ‘the dualistic conditioning of success and failure, or praise and blame - which constitutes the experiential base of work-life for all of us – cannot generate joy or bliss’ (Chakraborty, 2011: 35). Chakraborty’s work continues through the work of the support of the MCHV at IIM Calcutta and significant support from a range of Indian companies including the House of Tatas. Chakraborty spoke highly of Chairman Ratan Tata under whose leadership the Tata group ‘breathes this Wisdom Spirit’ (Chakraborty, 2011: 33).

2 Detachment of the Ego-Self Whilst the adoption of Chakraborty’s spirinomics as an alternative to corporate practice has been very limited in India, many scholars and business professionals have elevated the importance of recognising the uniqueness of Indian culture and heritage in management and business. The understanding of the nature of the agent and the importance of detachment from the ego-self is, perhaps, the strongest challenge to Western models of management despite the increasing evidence in management practice that responsible leadership and stakeholder management are a more just and effective approach to making decisions. Pande and Kumar (2019: 34–44) illustrate the distinctive Indian approach in their work to integrate Indian philosophical tenets in contemporary management thought such that agency conflicts may be better managed. They note the distinctive characteristics of Indian philosophy that form a ‘mind management framework’ to mitigate agency conflicts such as moral hazards, earning retention, risk aversion, and time horizons. They show that Indian philosophical tenets enhance the capability to undertake dispassionate action as a solution to agency conflicts. The ability to detach one’s self to make wise and dispassionate decisions is, of course, an aspiration for all governance systems.

3 Managing the Ego-Self For Chakraborty, Vivekananda, and Aurobindo, the BLM lower self is the force of egoism and greed that underpins ‘left-brain management practices, founded on rationalist orthodoxy’ (Chakraborty, 2011: 28). This force is regarded as deeply damaging to managerial decision-making. Aurobindo (as cited in Chakraborty, 2006: 29) claimed that ‘An impurified heart, an impurified sense, an impurified life confuse the understanding, disturb its data, distort its conclusions, darken its seeing, misapply its knowledge …’. In heterodox traditions like Buddhism, the mind is purified by progressive practices that sometimes begin by observing the breath and culminate in insight practices such as vipassana or advanced stages of the Mahayana and Vajrayana

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schools. These paths address ‘suffering and the causes of suffering’ which includes egoistic work done from desires for fame and recognition. Through self-discipline, meditative and yogic practices, a person develops to a point in which all attachments disappear so wise decisions can be made. In contemporary terms, the aim is selftranscendence rather than self-actualisation. Ancient Greek philosophy has strongly influenced Western culture and although amongst some works there is an implicit vision for human life to reach a pinnacle of self-realisation and fulfilment, it is not situated in a defined ontology that distinguishes a reformulation of the self, or indeed, a transcending of the self we know as ‘I’. However, the Christian faith has influenced Western thought concerning the nature of humanity and at its heart brings out the suffering and conflict caused by selfish egoistic behaviours that conflict with love of neighbour and love of God. Love is the fundamental Christian theme, and it is the ego (‘lusts of the flesh’) that has distorted relationships and created hatred, war, and injustice in the world. The Christian faith contrasts the deeds and motivations of the body-flesh/sinful nature with the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ listed by St Paul as ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control’ (New International Version, 1992, Galatians 5:22). The conflict for St Paul is to please his sinful nature or to please the Spirit in which the redemptive work of Jesus Christ is applied to the individual and the Holy Spirit given as the empowering agency available through prayer and worship. The spirit is alive to God ‘being renewed every day’ (2 Cor 4:16) and thus ‘the sinful nature’ is overcome. Thus, desires are not intrinsically wrong but rather can be of the flesh or of the Spirit (related to the Holy Spirit/God). The sign of life in the Spirit is the action of going out to the other in love. Francis (2020) in his recent encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, highlights the practical meaning in the universal example of the Good Samaritan: love does not care if a brother or sister in need comes from one place or another. For “love shatters the chains that keep us isolated and separate; in their place, it builds bridges. Love enables us to create one great family, where all of us can feel at home … Love exudes compassion and dignity”. (Francis, 2020, section 62)

From the Rajarshi perspective, leaders see themselves in others and thus establish loving relationships (Vats et al., 2015). This is a very similar ideal to that espoused by the humanist philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s humanism is based on respecting the other in their otherness (‘alterity’), receiving the other as they are. Labour is not just a means of profit, but also an end in itself, with an eye on respect for the worker. ‘Such a demand transcends our intellectual and/or rational potential; it involves us in a carnal and somatic bodily experience of otherness’ (Bevan & Corvellec, 2007: 208). Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is predicated on what it means to live a good life. The actions of a generous and just person and is couched in terms of a person’s desire to flourish through habituating the virtues (internal goods) and to achieve the highest good (or, perhaps, the spiritual state) of εÙδαιμoν´ια (flourishing in life and spiritual happiness). But Aristotle is clear that ‘it is not possible for a man to be supremely

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happy without external goods’ but ‘self sufficiency and moral action do not consist in excess (of possessions)’ (Aristotle [350 BCE], 1999: 1179a). For Aristotle, the higher good life requires two components: character and right training: … a character that has an affinity for excellence or virtue, a character that loves what is noble and feels disgust at what is base … … the right training for virtue from youth up is difficult unless one has been brought up under the right laws. To live a life of self-control and tenacity … (Aristotle [350 BCE], 1999: 1179b30)

Of course, there are other and less influential Western voices who reject any attempt to acclaim unselfishness, morality, or spirituality as good. Nietzsche dismissed ‘unegoistic morality’ and proclaimed that ‘every virtue tends towards stupidity’ (Nietzsche, 1885/1973: 132–138). But in contemporary Western society the voices that believe that ‘man needs no morality, no values, no code of behaviour’ (Rand, 2007: 1014) are marginal. More prominent are the voices that explicate the multitudinous themes that require a commitment to personal and corporate responsibility and accountability, as evidenced by the rise in global codes of corporate compliance on safety and environmental/climate risk, social impacts, social inclusiveness, and financial controls.

4 Rajarshi Leadership—Wise Leadership Chakraborty’s aim was to promote spirituality as the essence of a transformational leader to promote performance, role-effectiveness, and quality of work-life within organisations. He deployed the ancient Indian model leader of the Rajarshi. Rajarshi combines the titles of king (secular role) and sage (sacred role), a leader who had undergone a spiritual transformation. He drew inspiration from the Rajarshi Leadership of Swami Vivekananda ‘was much beyond careeristic transactional leadership and the source of his charisma was a combination of sanyam (self-control) and ty¯ag (renunciation)’ (Sarkar, 2019: 41). Chakraborty, with colleagues, reformulated an approach to management from an Indian worldview with economic and business models such as the Business Ashram that prioritises values over skills deploying principles set out by the poet-sages Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. Chakraborty’s insistence on spirituality and values opened new pathways for performance effectiveness and quality of worklife within organisations: ‘values vs. skills aspects of role-effectiveness, teamwork, cooperation, sharing and trust, leadership and leading, stress, burnout and inner harmony, ethics of decision-making, motivation, commitment, work-ethic, creativity and counselling’ (Sarkar, 2019: 13). The focus on an individual’s character (‘human values’) and spiritual transformation was, for Chakraborty, an essential determinant of wise leadership: ‘only a transformational leader can transmit transforming influence’ (Chakraborty & Chakraborty, 2008: 29). When a leader achieves a non-egoic

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state of compassion, wisdom, and selfless desires he fulfils the ideal of the Rajarshi leader. From a Western perspective the virtues of practical wisdom and spirituality in management have become more prominent in academic studies and practitioner media in recent years (Business Roundtable, 2019; Collier & Kay, 2020; Intezari & Pauleen, 2018; Rocha & Pinheiro, 2020). Rooney et al. (2010), for example, have developed five social practice wisdom principles inspired by an Aristotelian virtues foundation that show similarities with the ideals of the Spirit-Self. Their principle two is: ‘Wisdom incorporates non-rational and subjective elements into judgment’ with several dimensions including the following: Is sensitive, mindful, and understands that emotions and their corresponding passions (commitments and drives to act) are significant. Anger at injustice and passion or love for humanity for example, can guide and motivate one to speak and act for the good. (Rooney et al., 2010: 57)

In principle three they posit that wisdom is directed to authentic humane and virtuous outcomes ‘through empathy, interpersonal insight, humility and social conscience leading to social action’ (Rooney et al., 2010). The five social practice wisdom principles were supported by the findings of a survey involving 181 senior executives from East and West which showed that they understood wisdom as the ability to integrate five capacities in decision-making: Rational and analytical capability, Intuitive Insight, Values/humane character, Self-awareness, and Emotional Regulation (Thompson, 2016). In their study on wise management decisionmaking, Intezari and Pauleen (2018: 354) identified the following components: Multi-Perspective Consideration, Self- and Other-awareness, Cognitive-Emotional Mastery, and Internal–External Reflection. The recognition for subjectivity, empathy, justice, and love for positive social good in the principles for wise leadership parallels the vision for Chakraborty’s spiritcentred leadership following the Rajarshi model but without a spiritual embeddedness and discipline that Chakraborty regarded as essential to change from the BLM triad. Chakraborty called for corporate character grounded in higher consciousness: leaders of pure and high character and relentless vigilance and investment in human values (2019: 30–32). The dominant paradigm of management education has been Western models of business almost exclusively based on techno-economic rationality summarised by Mukherjee as ‘founded on the pillars of predictability, measurability and objectivity’ and a ‘cock-sure attitude of the techno-managerial mind that there is no space for “the other” or alternative solutions to any particular problem’ (Mukherjee, 2018: 149). Business Schools dominated by the prevailing management paradigm have been repeatedly challenged to inculcate responsible and ethical leadership to make wise decisions that go beyond self-interest or even company interest to considerations for the common good. The former CEO of Unilever, Paul Polman, has been put forward as an exemplar of this kind of corporate leadership (Moore, 2020). De Bettignies has regularly called for an elevation of moral leadership in organisations:

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Leaders, in all walks of life, should see their contribution in making the future better as a categorical imperative embedded in the very nature of their position. Moral leadership thus becomes a prerequisite ingredient in any contemporary effort to further sustainable development. Today, in a world which is confronted by so many fast-changing and difficult issues moral leadership is indispensable to induce change but in a direction that will further the common good. (de Bettignies, 2017: 78)

5 The Nature of Desire and Economic Paradigms Is desire necessarily selfish? The question arises from the dialogue between kRSNa and Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 3, verses 36–41). Arjuna asks kRSNa: ‘What is the force that binds us to selfish deeds … even against our will?’ kRSNa replies: ‘It is selfish desire and anger … Arjuna, this unquenchable fire for self-satisfaction is the biggest enemy of the wise. Selfish desire is found in the senses, mind and intellect misleading them and burying wisdom in delusion’ (Easwaran, 2007: 108–109). The association of wisdom with the nature of desire recorded here is instructive in comparing Chakraborty’s BLM triad with the contemporary economic and investment trends. The English meaning of desire is the ‘strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen’. The desire to be warm, sheltered, loved, and fed arrive with human birth. These desires are extended within the family and might be regarded as biological desires of self-interest and survival. Acquisitive desires develop beyond biological desires are shaped by ‘mimetic desire’ (Girard, 1961/2001) for objects of consumption possessed by a perceived rival and are desired to meet ego needs that drive the ever-increasing spiral of consumption and production present in our economies today. It is this economic desire that is acknowledged in both Indian and Western traditions the threat to the development of the spirit. To fulfil economic desire, natural, labour, and capital resources are marshalled in response. Market capitalism operates as financial and market exchange mechanisms to ensure that returns to labour and capital are paid to incentivise production. New consumption demands are created by leveraging the mimetic desire through new product and service innovations communicated through marketing, media, and sales promotion channels. It is here that the ego is encouraged or, as MacIntyre would have it, is ‘miseducated’, wrongly directing desire such that agents want more and more and become consumed by their desires (MacIntyre, 2016: 108–109). This account of economic desire appears to be a parallel narrative to the Gita’s reference to ‘selfish desires’ of which the market economic system is simply a macro reflection of micro-economic mimetic desires. Economic desires grow with appetites that result in an ever-demanding ego which dominates and suppresses the spiritual desires. Wisdom and religious traditions bear witness to these conflicts that pull between the higher interests that have in view the other/Other and self-interests. Chakraborty’s ideal of the firm as a Business Ashram is based on the spiritual principles of ancient Indian ashram or hermitage with localised, decentralised production;

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emphasis on cooperation rather than competition amongst employees; constraints on advertising and lower levels of over-consumption and under-nourishment. The Business Ashram is based on ‘duties–consciousness’ and the spiritual practice of lokasamgraha in which the outward going senses are cultivated to the benefit of others ‘in everything, all the time, thus, reducing selfishness or self-centeredness’ (Bhawuk, 2019: 18). The Business Ashram hold some parallels with Moore’s vision of the virtuous enterprise to respond to the challenges of Climate Change, Desire, and Consumption. He argues for the reformulation of businesses as ‘virtuous enterprises as a location for the redirection and re-education of desire’ and to enable human flourishing (Moore, 2021). Drawing from MacIntyre (2016: 168–176), Moore understands desire in the virtuous enterprise to be comprised of three different kinds of goods: internal, external, and common. Internal goods, such as relationships of giving and receiving; external goods such as survival, reputation, power, profit, and success; and common goods such as family, school, and workplace. Moore sees apprenticeships for employees in such enterprises providing the skills required to produce the goods or services but also an ‘apprenticeship into internal, external, and common goods, their right ordering and inter-relationship, and an apprenticeship into the pursuit of human flourishing’ (Moore, 2021). The main difference between the two models is that the Business Ashram cannot flourish in the prevailing economic climate which relies on the production of consumer goods. The Business Ashram is fundamentally a spiritual enterprise (low ego, higher self-consciousness, and a place for the Divine). As Chakraborty says, Spirituality cannot be asked to prove its credentials before the tribunal of economic growth, enterprise bottom line, shareholder value and the like. Rather, it is technology, economics, business, and their cohorts, which have to pass the test of Spirituality. Spirituality has to be the remedy for the growing malignancy in our material affairs. (Chakraborty, 2011: 37)

But this is to bifurcate spirituality and economics rather than to recognise the role of spirit-motivated individuals to be change agents in the messy economic world as it currently exists rather than as it could be in an idealised state. The example of sustainability and profit is instructive. Chakraborty has argued that the issue of sustainability should get priority over shareholder value. Stakeholder groups, including shareholders, have been change agents in the transformation of business enterprise towards tackling sustainability and climate risk issues. The motivations for this change can be observed as ethical but we cannot know the extent to which spiritual desires may have played a part in effecting the change. Chakraborty’s challenge to Western models of economics and capitalism is placing the profit goal above all. But Western models of economics and capitalism have been changing. New economic paradigms and behavioural models have largely dispensed with rational choice theory as economic analysis shows that decision-making cannot always be attributed to self-interest alone. The cognitive biases and heuristics natural to human decision-making are acknowledged as more realistic and homo economicus is proclaimed ‘dead’ following the first serious wounds inflicted by Sen (1977) in his Rational Fools and by Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) Prospect Theory. Behavioural

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economics (Sacconi et al., 2011) of collaboration is alive and ‘belief in the ultimate rationality of humans, organisations, and markets crumbled’ in the 2008 financial markets crash (Ariely, 2009). Signals of a changing economic paradigm are emerging in which an interdependent responsibility is being realised between the principals of private goods and the principals of public goods. Motivations for greater alignment between the private and public sectors appear to incorporate both self-interest and public interest. Longterm business success depends on pricing in the externalities of environmental and societal impacts driven by ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investment funds and private equity investors requiring detailed data on the management of externalities de rigueur. The idea that shareholders own the firm and can order managers to profit-maximise has also been debunked by the reality of managerial obligations to act on behalf of the firm in managing the claims and interests of all stakeholders and primarily the legal obligations of the company itself under increasing regulation and scrutiny by governments and a range of sector-specific regulatory organisations. Societal norms, whether expressed formally in law or regulation or by communitarian obligations, represent societal restraints on unfettered self-interest. The hope for a new economic paradigm is that different forms of ‘socialised’ capitalism are emerging with moral agents of sustainable enterprise deploying technological, productive, and innovative goods for the wellbeing of all and in the most efficient way possible. Profit is a motive but not the motive. The hope is represented in the various modifiers used with capitalism that signal its socialisation: Stakeholder Capitalism (Freeman, 1984); Inclusive Capitalism (Prahalad, 2009); Conscious Capitalism (Mackey & Sisodia, 2013); Moral Capitalism (Young, 2003) and Virtuous Capitalism (Barnes, 2018). These modifiers represent different approaches that drive socially concerned moral agents to use the levers of capital in financial, trading and market exchanges to innovate and invest in the creation of new and accessible markets to the marginalised and poor. But, most importantly, the modifiers counter the assumption that most people expect to free-ride over the welfare of others in order to maximise their self-interest and appear to be motivated for a world of greater social justice that reaches beyond their immediate borders of self-interest. Wise decision-making by morally responsible executive management (Rajarshi leaders) is no longer a ‘nice to have’. It is a question of corporate survival that the so-called ‘Decisive Decade’ requires a higher quality of managerial character and intelligence than ever before. It is at this point that we might observe the connection between Chakraborty’s synthesis of Vedantic philosophy and the poet-sages which observes that the ego of self-interested behaviour must become the servant to one’s higher self or spirit. New paradigms of economics are emerging which are no longer dependent on neoclassical or positive methodologies but combine economic modelling of data with a better understanding of the economic actor as a human being motivated not only by biological and economic desires but also by desires of the spirit or in defined in terms akin to the social responsibility and the common good.

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Agency in economic systems is the interplay of the desires of roles in the system such as consumer, manufacturer, government, company, university, and government. Peter Rona argues that the subject matter of economics … is not the formulation of law-like generalisation with which technocratic predictions can be underpinned, but rather the interpretation of the roles and rules giving rise to economic action … the acts of the agents should be understood in the context of the agent’s relevant authorised role. (Róna, 2018: 190)

And so, we return to the case of the individual and their level of consciousness. As Mukherjee (2007: 132) has pointed out, the crisis of Arjuna is commonly experienced in the conflict of values arising from two sets of human faculties—the rational and the emotional. However, as Bhawuk says, ‘those who know the self, the wise ones, should perform actions without attachment to their actions … lokasamgraha is about leadership where the leader works for the benefit of the society. We see again that the focus is not on the person as the leader but on the society and its wellbeing’ (Bhawuk, 2019: 8). From Chakraborty’s perspective it is the agent who is detached from the power of the ego and is free to choose without conflicts. Chakraborty followed the Vedantic assertion that cause is always superior to the effect and the individual agent is the cause. According to him, subjective is the cause and objective is the effect-therefore the cultivation and purification of individual’s inner domain (chittashuddhi), the realms within which subjective decisions are made, is of paramount importance to effective management (Sakar, 2019: 16).

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Spiritual Turn in Business and Management László Zsolnai

The paper argues that a spiritual turn in business management is needed. With its instrumental rationality and extreme materialistic orientation today’s business management produces large-scale ecological, social, and ethical “ills”. Business management needs a more spiritual foundation to solve the failure of rational and materialistic management. The contributions by S. K. Chakraborty on Vedantic ethics and management have vital importance to make the required changes in management. The paper presents real-world examples from India and Europe to show the feasibility of spiritually inspired business models. The main conclusion is that spirituality and rationality are not antagonists in good management but materialistic value orientation cannot be reconciled with spirituality.

1 Why Spirituality in Business? In 2001, I organized an international conference in Szeged, Hungary, which was probably the first-ever European academic gathering focusing on “Spirituality in Management”. For the conference I invited S. K. Chakraborty. He came to Hungary and participated in the dialogue with leading European scholars including Peter Pruzan (Copenhagen Business School), Luk Bouckaert (Catholic University of Leuven), and Josep Lozano (ESADE Business School, Barcelona). The presented cases in this paper are from the author’s book “Post-Materialistic Business: Spiritual Value-Orientation in Renewing Management” (Palgrave, 2015). Some arguments are used from the author’s paper with Katalin Illes “Spiritually inspired creativity in business” (International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 195–205). The paper is also benefited from the author’s decades long collaboration with Luk Bouckaert (Catholic University of Leuven). L. Zsolnai (B) Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest, Hungary e-mail: ; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_6

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Chakraborty contributed to the debate with his conception of Spirit-centered, Rajarshi Leadership. He recalled the Sanskrit dictum that says: “svarat samrat bhavati”. It means one who can rule or govern oneself can also lead others well. That is, the ideal or model leader exercises leadership on himself or herself first. This entails bringing forth the hidden Spirit into the forefront of the leader’s personality. Then the leader becomes empowered to lead others. In Chakraborty’s view Indian civilization is based on the groundwork laid by such leaders, called Rajarshi’s, which literally means a king and a sage. In this model, the schism between the secular and the sacred vanishes (Chakraborty, 2011). After the Szeged conference the cooperation among different European centers involved in business ethics resulted in setting up the European SPES Forum in 2004 in Leuven, Belgium (SPES, the Latin word for Hope, is also an acronym for “Spirituality in Economics and Society”). The aim of the Forum is to promote spirituality as a public good and as a source of non-instrumental reasoning in business. The European SPES Forum was just one among other new networks in the field of applied spirituality. In the United States, Asia, and Australia similar initiatives took place. Business spirituality is not a European discourse but is embedded in a broader intercultural and intercontinental development. Our Palgrave Handbook of Business and Spirituality (Bouckaert & Zsolnai, 2012b) is a response to developments that simultaneously challenge the “business as usual” mindset. We do not believe that spirituality can be captured in one standard definition. Moreover, if we want to keep the notion of spirituality experience-based, we have to accept that spirituality is a rich, intercultural and multilayered concept. As a guideline we used the working definition of the SPES Forum: Spirituality is people’s multiform search for a deep meaning of life interconnecting them to all living beings and to “God” or “Ultimate Reality”. Most definitions of spirituality share a number of common elements: reconnection to the inner self; a search for universal values that lifts the individual above egocentric strivings; deep empathy with all living beings; and finally, a desire to keep in touch with the source of life. In other words, spirituality is a search for inner identity, connectedness, and transcendence.

2 Materialistic Management Versus Spiritual-Based Management The dominant management model of modern business is based on a materialistic conception of man. Human beings are considered as body-mind encapsulated egos with only materialistic desires and motivation. This kind of creature is modeled as “Homo oeconomicus” in economics and business. Homo oeconomicus represents an individual being which seeks to maximize his or her self-interest. He or she is interested only in material utility defined in terms of money. The materialistic management model assumes money-driven extrinsic motivation and measures success according to profits generated. The current economic

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and financial crisis has deepened our understanding of the problems of mainstream businesses which base their activities on unlimited greed and the “enrich yourself” mentality. American psychologist Kasser (2011) states that a materialistic value orientation reflects the priority that individuals give to goals such as money, possessions, image, and status. Confirming the concerns of many spiritual traditions, empirical research supports the idea that materialistic and spiritual value orientations are relatively incompatible. Psychological research shows that the more people focus on materialistic goals, the less they tend to care about spiritual goals. Further, while most spiritual traditions aim to reduce personal suffering and to encourage compassionate behaviors, numerous studies documents that the more people prioritize materialistic goals, the lower their personal well-being and the more likely they are to engage in manipulative, competitive, and ecologically degrading behaviors (Kasser, 2011). Pruzan (2011) emphasizes that spiritual-based leadership is emerging as an inclusive, holistic and yet highly personal approach to leadership that integrates a leader’s inner perspectives about identity, purpose, responsibility, and success with his or her decisions and actions in the outer world of business. While traditional managerial leadership aims to optimize economic performance subject to both self-imposed and societal constraints that mandate paying attention to the well-being of the organization’s stakeholders, spiritual-based leadership essentially reverses the means and the ends. The “why” of organizational existence is no longer economic growth but the spiritual fulfillment of all those affected by the organization, although a major restriction is the requirement that the organization maintains and develops its economic capacity to serve its stakeholders. In other words, spirituality provides a framework for leadership that can serve as the very source of an organization’s values, ethics, and responsibility (Pruzan, 2011). The spiritual-based management model employs a spiritual conception of man. Human beings are considered spiritual beings embodied in the physical world who have both materialistic and non-materialistic desires and motivations. For them, materialistic desires and outcomes are embedded in and evaluated against spiritual convictions and experiences. Bouckaert (2011) writes that the “Homo spiritualis” is not characterized by preferences for and striving after maximum utility but by the awareness of being related to others. This inter-existence of the self and the other cannot be reduced to a shared group interest or a collective welfare function. We are interconnected on a level of being, prior to our acting within and making the world. The spirit in each of us is the point of awareness where we feel related to all other beings and to the Being itself. This spiritual self-understanding is not a matter of abstract philosophical thinking but a feeling of universal love and compassion that gives our lives and actions an inner purpose and drive. It transforms our materialistic ego into a responsible and compassionate self (Bouckaert, 2011).

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3 Working Models of Spiritual-Based Businesses I present working models of spiritual-based businesses from India and Europe that inspired by Hinduism, Christianity, and Anthroposophy. These models show the viability of spiritual-based management in different socio-economic settings. The presented Indian models are Organic India and Aravind Eye Care System, while the European models are Focolare entrepreneurs and Triodos Bank.

3.1 Indian Models Organic India is an India-based producer of organic agricultural products. The company was founded in 1997 in Lucknow, India, by Bharat Mitra. It is currently operating on about 50,000 acres of certified organic land and is thus the largest and most widely-spread certified organic cultivation system in India. The company produces a wide range of agricultural products, all of which are 100% organic. Originally, the main products the company offered were tea and medicinal herbs. Nowadays, this assortment has been extended to many other consumables such as spices, honey, and ginger. In addition, Organic India has created a venture for selling fresh organic vegetables. The vision of Organic India is as follows: “To be a vehicle of consciousness in the global market by creating a holistic sustainable business modality, which inspires, promotes and supports well-being and respect for all beings and for Mother Nature” (Organic India, 2018). For Organic India, organic agriculture is thus considered to be a tool to promote sustainable development for all beings. In order to reach these objectives, Organic India has developed its mission: “To be a trustworthy and innovative global leader in providing genuine organic products and solutions for conscious, healthy living” (Organic India, 2018). The basis of Organic India’s business is “tulsi” (also called “holy basil”), a herb that is known for its health-promoting, medicinal value. It is a herb of principal importance to Ayurvedic medicine, an ancient traditional holistic health system that is in widespread use in India. The Ayurvedic approach pays great respect to all creation and sees the whole universe as one divine unity. In many ancient texts, tulsi is mentioned as one of the main pillars of herbal medicine. Today, tulsi is worshipped and is venerated daily by traditional Hindus, and its use is common in many Indian households. Apart from tulsi, Organic India engages in growing many other products, such as organic spices, seeds, beans, and grains. These are grown without using chemical fertilizers or chemical pesticides, with avoidance of genetically modified strains. The focus on the overall quality of operations and organic products has resulted in the acquisition of many types of third-party certification, such as USDA Organic,

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EU Organic Farming, and Indian National Standards for Organic Production. All Organic India products comply with these standards. Organic India’s employment ethic supports the principles of fairness, respect, dignity, and encouragement. The company was founded with the intention of providing a sustainable livelihood to farmers in India. It works with thousands of farmers, directly supporting and training them in organic agricultural practices. The company pays the farmers a premium over the market price. It also provides them with the materials and finances they need to meet the rigorous requirements of USDA and other international certification systems. Organic India provides opportunities for poor and disadvantaged people to become self-sufficient and empowered by improving their skills and economic security. Its business model is designed to support the livelihoods of farmers and their families year-round. Organic India has deliberately decided not to apply for fair trade certification. The company argues that its labor and trade practices are superior to those required for most fair trade certification schemes. Today, Organic India provides thousands of farmers and landless workers with jobs and a sustainable income. Farmers’ high willingness to work with Organic India is an indication of the company’s positive influence on local communities. Due to its positive reputation for preserving the environment and its commitment to the wellbeing of local farmers, Organic India has built trust and relationships with many stakeholders, resulting in important benefits. For example, it has been given the exclusive rights to harvest crops from certified organic forests throughout the plains and mountains of Central and Northern India. Organic India is a company that has one of the most intrinsically inbuilt, sincere approaches to ethical business in the industry. It is a clear example of progressive entrepreneurship that challenges the business models behind modern agribusiness. The company is committed to environmental sustainability. It takes a holistic approach to promoting the long-term well-being of farmers and is especially sensitive toward meeting the needs of female employees. This has resulted in the creation of positive relationships with many social actors and a high willingness to cooperate. Aravind Eye Care System, founded in Madurai (Tamil Nadu), by Dr. G. Venkataswamy—otherwise known as ‘Dr. V’—has implemented an alternative model of health care in India, and is now one of the largest providers of eye surgeries in the world. Aravind’s foundational principles and work ethics set it apart from the usual health organizations run on business lines. The firm is a market driving, not a market-driven firm. Aravind adopts and successfully applies the idea that individuals should pay for services according to their means. Through its focus on service to the individual as the exclusive motor of business operations, Aravind’s business philosophy diversifies away from traditional economic logic by manifesting a pattern of entrepreneurial action and a management style that break away from profits, markets, products, and consumers. Individuals are no longer considered to be a variable that must be adjusted to the imperatives of expansion, viability, or numbers (Virmani & Lépineux, 2014). Aravind’s adoption of the spiritual principles of service and compassionate care distinguishes it from other health care actors. Its eye camps in villages are one

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example of how public health interventions can promote solidarity among the population. As a young man Dr. V was a disciple of Sri Aurobindo, an Indian philosopher and saint who lived in service to God and man. The name “Aravind eye care system” is inspired by this sage, whose philosophy may be summed up as belief in the interconnectedness of human beings. Aravind has initiated a shift in the social contract with people. As distinct from the traditional view of the social contract in which individuals are isolated from each other, they promote an interconnected form of social contract which encourages individuals’ involvement, commitment, and responsibility for community welfare. By its understanding of eye care as public good rather than a market good, Aravind illustrates how transformational entrepreneurship can contribute to the common good (Virmani & Lépineux, 2014). Thirty years after Dr. V’s modest start with Aravind, the system now consists of a network of five regional hospitals which perform over 200,000 cataract operations per year, 70% of them at no cost to the patient. Aravind is not funded through government grants, aid-agency donations, or bank loans since Dr. V has chosen to pursue a strategy of increasing operational efficiency to an unusually high level which has had the consequence of reducing costs enormously. Thus the organization is supported by the average contribution of 40 dollars that is given by the 1/3 of its patients that can afford it. Another innovative element of Aravind is its use of “Screening Camps”. In India there are large populations of untreated patients who cannot afford to travel to central hospitals. In order to solve this problem, Aravind sets up temporary screening camps in villages. These camps classify patients and offer free transportation to hospitals for those patients who require specialized treatment. In 2006, 1793 screening camps were established which examined more than 2.3 million patients and performed 270,000 on-site restoration surgeries. This initiative has been extended to other special areas of healthcare (during, for example, school screening camps) and includes the use of innovative technology such as teleophthalmology. Internationally, Dr. V was also one of the founding directors of the Seva Foundation, based in the United States. Seva was created by veterans of the smallpox eradication program which came out of Nepal and India, one of the goals of which was the elimination of needless blindness. Seva’s collaboration with Aravind began with the provision of small grants to subsidize the cost of cataract surgery, but soon developed into a partnership. Seva eye care workers from Nepal, China, Cambodia, and Tanzania were trained at Aravind. In addition, Aravind sent senior staff to assist in program development, hospital design, and operational training at no cost to “nurture a growing network of effective eye care centers” (Brilliant & Brilliant, 2007). Aravind has shaped international eye care practice through its emphasis on understanding the human relationship to sight restoration using research from social science. Dr. V insisted that such research should be done to explore why rural patients who could benefit from surgery were not coming for treatment. One of the findings was that literacy and gender largely determined who received surgery and who stayed blind. “Globally, women carry a greater burden of blindness than men; Two out of every three blind are female (…) not because of genetic propensities, but because worldwide, utilization of preventive and restorative eye care for females has not

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Table 1 Organizational characteristics of Organic India and Aravind Eye Care System Inspiration

Vision

Means

Outcomes

Organic India

Hindu spirituality

Holistic sustainable business which supports human well-being and respect for Mother Nature

Supplying genuine, organic products and processes for sustainability-aware, healthy living

Sustainable livelihoods for farmers in India

Aravind Eye Care System

Aurobindo’s philosophy of human interconnectedness

Eye care as public good

Individuals pay for New social services according to contract for the their means common good

been equal to [that given] their male counterparts. This inequity begins in childhood” (Brillliant & Brilliant, 2007: 52). A number of international organizations such as the WHO have affirmed that the “right to sight” should be equally applicable to women and men (Table 1).

3.2 European Models Focolare entrepreneurs represent an innovative example of Christian way of doing business. Linard (2003) describes The Economy of Communion (EoC)—founded by Chiara Lubich in May 1991 in San Paolo, Brazil—as a business paradigm which arises from the spirituality and social praxis of the Focolare Movement. This paradigm represents a “third way” between Marxism and Capitalism and is a genuine contrast to many earlier business movements such as Cooperative or Quaker businesses which have been successful on a national as well as international scale. The problem with those movements, according to Linard, is that “They have generally merged with the prevailing business ethos to the extent that their outward face to the world is indistinguishable from that of their Capitalist competitors” (Linard, 2003: 166). The praxis of the Focolare enterprises thus stands in sharp contrast to those movements, with practitioners living an “ideal” life, and creating economic theory as they do so. EoC is no longer a localized phenomenon, but “part of a global praxis—a living ‘Third Way’”. Within the first decade of its existence, 800 businesses operating according to the Focolare paradigm could be found across 100 countries. The Focolare entrepreneurs, workers, directors, consumers, savers, citizens, scholars, and economists are all committed, at various levels, to promoting and practice a form of economic culture founded on the principles of communion, gratuity, and reciprocity. Entrepreneurs are invited to share their profits to sustain the goals of the EoC: namely, to reduce exclusion and related poverty, diffuse the culture of giving and promote the communal development of businesses and the creation of new jobs. This requires businesspeople who can conceive of and treat their activities

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as part of their vocation in the service of the common good, with the goal of empowering the excluded in every part of the world and every social context (Economy of Communion, 2014). The 3-way sharing of profit is carried out according to the following proposal: (1) one part of profit should be reinvested in the business in order to develop and create new jobs; (2) the second part should be used to create a new culture which can inspire women and men to incorporate communion into their lives; and (3) the third part goes directly to the poor so as to reintegrate them fully into the dynamics of communion and reciprocity (Bruni & Hejj, 2011). Focolare businesses are involved in an economy of communion, even when they have no profits to donate, so long as they are operational and are producing a culture of fraternity. Chiara Lubich, who started this movement, is very explicit about how this type of redistribution took place in the community: “The spirit of unity in charity was the ever-living flame that kept this fraternity alive … it did not require everyone to sell all that they possessed, depriving themselves of what they could without causing themselves harm … Everyone brought the extra that they had, above all in money, and committed themselves to giving a monthly sum. The donor and the amount promised remained secret. With the money received, the committee would help, month by month and in secret, those families in the community in need, carrying out this delicate task with the greatest charity and discretion” (Gold, 2003a: 148). People have a vital need for communion, happiness, relational goods, and the gift economy. By remaining faithful to its vocation, day by day, the EoC is increasingly capable of producing these kinds of “goods”. As the movement is concerned with unity with God and thinking in terms of community, it relates to the essence of the Economy of Communion (Bruni & Hejj, 2011). Gold (2003b) emphasizes that this model generates a high level of “relational goods” in the sense of “relational capital”, and involves a wide client base and high standards of loyalty from both employees and clients, especially given this age of crisis. Gold states that an important aspect of the communitarian ethos of Focolare is the building of relationships based on communion. This ethos may be called a culture of giving, and rests on a different anthropology of the human person than is currently dominant within economic theory. Thus the EoC stresses an anthropology which sees human beings as beings “in search of the others’ gaze in search of communion” (Gold, 2003b: 171), not as isolated beings, but beings that find fulfillment in meaningful relationships with others. As a consequence, barriers that arise due to the distrust that often exists between businesses and NGOs in formal partnerships have not been a problem for EoC due to the high level of pre-existing knowledge about the work of the Focolare. The aim of Focolare enterprises is not poverty alleviation per se, but the building of relationships that are based on mutual care and solidarity. Triodos Bank is a pioneer in ethical banking in The Netherlands. Ethical banks, also known as sustainable banks, are concerned with the social and environmental impacts of its investments and loans. The model is part of a larger societal movement toward more social and environmental responsibility in the financial sector including ethical investment, socially responsible investment, corporate social responsibility, and also relating to fair trade movement, ethical consumerism. Ethical banks are

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regulated by the same authorities as traditional commercial banks and have to abide by the same rules while the main differences are being transparent and having social and environmental aims of the projects they finance (Lynch, 1991). The Triodos Bank is inspired by Anthroposophy. Peter Blom, CEO and Chairman of the Board of the Triodos Bank Group, is a pioneer of sustainable and ethical banking. After studying Economics and helping to run one of the first organic food centers in the Netherlands, Peter Blom joined Triodos in 1980, the year the bank first opened for business. Having worked at Triodos since its inception, he was appointed Managing Director in 1989 and has been CEO since 1997. He is Chair of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values and also a member of the Board of the Dutch Banking Association. He maintains his interest in food and farming, chairing the Organic Food and Agricultural Council of the Netherlands (Triodos, 2022). Triodos Bank’s mission is to make money work for positive social, environmental, and cultural change. More specifically, the bank helps create a society that protects and promotes the quality of life of all its members, enables individuals, organizations and businesses to use their money in ways that benefit people and the environment, and promotes sustainable development and provides its customers with innovative financial products and high quality services. Triodos only lends to and invests in organizations that benefit people and environment. It connects savers and investors who want to change the world for the better with entrepreneurs and sustainable companies doing just that. Triodos is the only specialist bank to offer integrated lending and investment opportunities to sustainable sectors in a number of European countries (Eco Question, 2013). In consonance with its name Triodos (or ‘three way’), Triodos Bank has built its business model on the three pillars of people, planet, and profit. The belief of the bank is simple and its mission is lucid—it finances companies, institutions, and projects that add cultural value and benefit people and environment with the support of depositors and investors who wish to encourage social responsibility and a sustainable society. It is influenced by the anthroposophical movement (Worldinquiry, 2022). The money of socially and environmentally conscious depositors and investors is channeled toward businesses that are committed to making positive changes in the world through personal banking, business and charity banking, and investment banking options provided by the bank. The personal banking options ensure that a saver receives a healthy return on their deposit, while being a part of a community that wants to make a genuine change. Through its business and charity banking offerings the bank partners with organizations that share its values. The investment banking service helps raise capital, manages venture capital funds, and brings together likeminded investors by providing information about investment opportunities. The bank has established a benchmark for financial transparency and in the process has raised the financial literacy of its customers. It also has the honor of being a pioneer in the creation of green investment funds in the Netherlands. In partnership with the insurance company Delta Lloyd, the bank launched the first Dutch combined life insurance and pension insurance product that screens its investments using social and environmental criteria. Other creative

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ways for generating opportunities for investors to make a profit by investing in environmentally conscious projects are done via its “Wind Fun” and “Solar Investment Funds” that finance solar energy projects in developing countries. Further, “Triodos Fair Share Fund” offers private individuals and institutions the chance to invest in microfinance institutions in developing countries. Continuing its tradition of innovative and conscious financial products, the bank designed a “Real Estate Fund” that invests exclusively in sustainable buildings. Living up to its belief of adding cultural value, the “Triodos Culture Fund” was launched to provide loans for promoting art and culture (Worldinquiry, 2022). In addition to such creative investment opportunities, the bank finances practical and well-grounded initiatives that are dedicated to making positive changes. The bank lends to organizations such as charities, social businesses, community projects, and environmental initiatives that benefit the community, environment, and human development. More specifically, investing in the environment is done through organic farming, organic food, and environmental technology projects. The areas of social business that are served through the bank’s offerings include trade, manufacturing, services, catering, and business enterprise centers. Culture and welfare are encouraged through lending to borrowers who work to meet individual and community needs such as providing healthcare and education, as well as to those working in the arts and on social projects. The bank also gives money to innovative social housing projects in response to the acute shortage of adequate housing in the UK. Religious and spiritual groups that respect human freedom also feature on the bank’s list of borrowers. Realization of the power of partnerships has encouraged the bank to network with organizations that help connect people’s money with the causes closest to their hearts. The bank has successfully been able to harness the commitment of its depositors and investors by working with groups like “Friends of the Earth” and “The Soil Association” to create a powerful force for change. The bank’s success in spearheading a green funding initiative has snowballed into a market for green investment funds totaling more than six billion euros in the Netherlands alone, which has also spread across the developed West over the last 15 years. Since its inception, the bank has helped many microfinance institutions to become microfinance banks by providing both funding and training. By being a bridge for more traditional institutions between the green sector and poverty alleviation, the bank has truly made a sustainable positive impact (Worldinquiry, 2022) (Table 2).

4 Conclusion The materialistic management model does not produce true well-being for people but actually undermines it. By advocating economic action on the basis of moneymaking, and by justifying success in terms of profits made, the materialistic management model encourages the opportunistic and irresponsible behavior of economic actors, contributes to ecological destruction, and disregards the interests of future

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Table 2 Organizational characteristics of Focolare enterprises and Triodos Bank Inspiration

Vision

Means

Outcomes

Focolare enterprises

Christian love, spirituality of unity

Serving the poor and the needy

Building relationships based on a culture of giving, solidarity and sharing

Restoring the dignity of people and communities

Triodos Bank

Anthroposophy

Banking for positive social, environmental and cultural change

Screening investments using economic, social and environmental criteria

Financing more than 40,000 sustainability and community development projects

generations. The presupposed “rational management model” appears to be highly irrational as it produces non-rational outcomes for society, nature, and future generations. Acknowledging the primacy of the spiritual over the material, the non-materialistic management model activates the intrinsic motivation of economic actors to serve the common good and promotes multidimensional ways of measuring success. According to this model profit and growth are not final ends but only elements of a broader set of goals. Similarly, cost–benefit calculations are not the only means by which to make managerial decisions but are integrated into a more comprehensive scheme of wisdom-based management (Bouckaert & Zsolnai, 2012a, 2012b). Spirituality and rationality are not antagonists in good management.

References Bouckaert, L. (2011). Spirituality and rationality. In L. Bouckaert & L. Zsolnai (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of spirituality and business (pp. 18–25). Palgrave-Macmillan. Bouckaert, L., & Zsolnai, L. (2012a). Spirituality and business: An interdisciplinary overview. Society and Economy, 34(3), 489–514. Bouckaert, L., & Zsolnai, L. (Eds.). (2012b). The Palgrave handbook of spirituality and business. Palgrave-MacMillan. Brilliant, L., & Brilliant, G. (2007). Aravind: Partner and social science innovator. Innovations (Fall), 50–52. Bruni, L., & Hejj, T. (2011). The economy of communion. In L. Bouckaert & L. Zsolnai (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of spirituality and business (pp. 378–386). Palgrave-Macmillan. Chakraborty, S. K. (2011). Spirit-centered, Rajarshi leadership. In L. Zsolnai (Ed.), Spirituality and ethics in management (pp. 23–30). Springer. Eco Question. (2013). Retrieved November 9, 2013, from http://www.eco-question.com/triodosbank-the-world-leader-in-sustainable-banking-2#more-5922 Economy of Communion. (2014). What is the EoC? Retrieved September 6, 2014, from http:// www.edc-online.org/en/eoc/about-eoc.html Gold, L. (2003a). The roots of the Focolare movement’s economic ethic. Journal of Markets & Morality, 6(1) (Spring), 143–159.

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Gold, L. (2003b). Small enterprises at the service of the poor. The economy of sharing network. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 9(5). Kasser, T. (2011). Materialistic value orientation. L. Bouckaert & L. Zsolnai (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of spirituality and business (pp. 204–211). Palgrave-Macmillan. Linard, K. T. (2003). Economy of communion: Systemic factors in the rise of a new entrepreneurship. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 20, 163–175. Lynch, J. J. (1991). Ethical banking: Surviving in an age of default. Macmillan. Organic India. (2018). Retrieved October 31, 2018, from http://organicindia.com/ Pruzan, P. (2011). Spiritually-based leadership. In L. Bouckaert & L. Zsolnai (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of spirituality and business (pp. 287–294). Palgrave-Macmillan. Triodos. (2022). Retrieved April 2, 2022 from https://www.triodos.com Virmani, A., & Lépineux, F. (2014, January 9–10). Aravind Eye Care Hospital as transformational entrepreneurship: Breaking free from economic logic. Paper presented at the Ethical Leadership: The Indian Way Conference, Bangalore. Worldinquiry. (2022). Retrieved April 2, 2022 from https://aim2flourish.com

From Reason-Based Decision-Making to Intuition-Based Management Sraddhalu Ranade

Humanity is undoubtedly passing through the most rapid pace of change in recorded history, and all existing trends point to exponentially increasing and disruptive changes. The fields affected by this disruption include technological, social, economic, political, legal, academic, moral, ethical, and, of course, environmental; the scope of this disruption is global, transcending national, linguistic, cultural, and civilisational boundaries; the nature of this disruption is so radical as be equivalent to what are celebrated in history as “revolutions”, but which are now taking place globally every decade, and emerging in a rapid series of waves. The disruptive and revolutionary effect of the smartphone in the hands of every human being is a case in point. The practical result of this disruption is multi-fold and among other things has led to (i) information overload, (ii) growing unreliability of future “projections”, (iii) increasing all-round uncertainty, (iv) loss of confidence in our ability to meet with surprises and manage our lives, and (v) consequently an existential crisis, of which the growing number of neuro-psychiatric disorders is just one stark indicator (DeVries & Wilkerson, 2003). The greatest impact has been on the individual, demanding a pace of adaptation that we as a species seem incapable of keeping up with, and imposing stress that has so overwhelmed us physically and psychologically as to push to the brink of breakdown and threatening a civilisational collapse and provoking what is now recognised as the sixth global extinction event (Carrington, 2017). Hence, the greatest result of this disruption has been to compel humanity to a spiritual change—a change that requires us to re-assess who we truly are and why we are here, but more importantly requires us to discover our latent inner potential and draw on it in order to survive and keep up with the demands of the Age, or else perish because overwhelmed by the relentless tidal waves of change. S. Ranade (B) Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_7

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1 Limitations of Human Intelligence The total body of published medical literature is currently doubling every two-andhalf months, with similar trends in every field of research as also in media content. Effectively managing a business (or for that matter our lives) requires us to exceed our current human mental capacity. We have to stay informed of global events and trends because the dependencies of our supply chain span the planet; but understanding and utilising the complexity of these inter-dependencies exceeds our mental faculties: our memory is unable to hold the informational content, our reason is unable to process their inter-linkages, and our logic and reasoning are unable to draw any firm or reliable conclusions from continuously changing data and shifting trends. Only a few decades ago we could rely on “experts” in their fields for advice, but the nature of disruptive change has made even expert projections unreliable. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has proved relatively more effective in predicting global trends and human behaviour, both individual and collective. A recent case made headlines when retail AI detected that a minor was pregnant based on a shift in purchase patterns even before her family was aware of her pregnancy. The superior performance and reliability of AI has led to its widespread use in customer support, news report generation, modelling customer behaviour, inventory optimisation, stock-trading, and market interventions. This last example shows the benefits and the dangers of relying on AI—when all trading computers act simultaneously on a shared market projection, they defeat their own purpose by causing high market volatility and triggering sudden market crashes. With all the conveniences that AI promises, it is still incapable of anticipating the nature of an emergent crisis or disruptive change, and we are led to recognise that Artificial Intelligence is only and at best the human intelligence operating on a larger dataset and handling a greater complexity. It is still inherently rooted in the limitations of logic and the intellect—logic which can only interpolate and extrapolate from given data, and intellect which can only recognise patterns based on prior experiences, whether its own or those of others. Both fail when the data or prior experience are faulty, incomplete, or radically changing. In their very nature, logic and intellect are incapable of processing more than a finite quantity of data, however large that quantity may be. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems assert that a finite system can never entirely describe or know itself entirely. Its implication in the domain of knowledge is that any cognitive means or process that is finite can never fully know or entirely understand its own functioning, and thus is ultimately incapable of recognising or overcoming its own errors. Hence, logic and intellect, as instruments of finiteness in an infinite universe, can never validate knowledge with certainty—there must always be some doubt, qualifier, or small print that attests to their uncertainty. Logic and intellect as a means of knowledge are inherently limited and error-prone, and so must fail eventually (Sri Aurobindo, 1920a). In a disruptive environment, they can at best serve as unreliable indicators of current trends in the short term. More generally, our present human evolutionary means of perception, cognition, and action (being rooted as they are in our life-instincts and intellect) are inherently instruments of ignorance and incapable

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of providing reliable and certain knowledge or guidance, especially in the present human crisis. A greater power of knowledge is needed that can (i) identify faulty data without prior reference, (ii) that can handle unlimited and even infinite information without getting overloaded, (iii) that can cut through the noise and seize upon hidden and essential patterns, and (iv) one that can know itself and reliably work around its own limitations—in other words, a power of perception and knowledge that is not dependent on data and can know what it needs without error. Does such a power of direct knowledge exist? Is it possible to activate, develop, and utilise it in our daily life? The Yoga tradition in India asserts that not only it exists but is in fact already operating secretly within our flawed and limited human intelligence, and that its full emergence and free operation as the power of Intuition is an inevitable step in the present evolutionary emergence of our latent human potential (Sri Aurobindo, 1920b). It is in this strict sense of the term that we will refer to Intuition hereafter.

2 Our Evolutionary Ascent Modern Western psychology, having initially rooted itself in a hard materialism, began with an assumption that all knowledge is acquired by the intellect and only through sensory means. Freudian psychology viewed intuition as merely a rapid operation of the intellect, rejecting all possibilities of direct knowledge (Walker Punerr, 1992). Jung considered intuition as an “irrational function” and as a “perception via the unconscious” but which can use our senses as a starting point (Jung, 1971). The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator refers to Intuition as a significant aspect of our personality yet considers it merely as a subconscious process (Martin, 1997). Terms such as “subconscious process” describe an appearance but explain nothing, and so offer no real value or usable insight. More recent explorations have attempted to measure, describe, and define intuition but always falling short of a model that explains the origin of intuitive knowledge and thereby describe the true character of intuition (Hutson, 2019; Nierenberg, 2016). The spiritual and yogic traditions of India not only offer a comprehensive model for intuitive knowledge but also advocate means by which it can be consciously awakened, developed, trained, and perfected. In modern times, Sri Aurobindo has been the pioneer in articulating the central teachings of the Vedic philosophy and the early Upanishadic and Vedantic traditions in terms that highlight their evolutionary message and their practical yogic implications for the divinisation of life (Sri Aurobindo, 1920a, 1920b, 1920c, 1920d)—an aspect that has been ignored by most of the later Vedantic schools which highlighted the illusoriness of the world and are therefore more concerned with an ascetic withdrawal from life. This spiritual perspective (or the Vedic model as we will refer to it hereafter) asserts that the entire universe is the manifestation of one indivisible divine Consciousness that is the only essential Existence, which conceives and perceives itself in every possible way in a play of utter Delight—the Sat-Chit-Ananda—Existence that

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is Consciousness that is Bliss. Each such “limited” self-perception further interacts with all other limited perceptions, creating a rich interplay of experiences in a multi-layered phenomenal unfolding that forms this universe. Each layer conceals the totality of the One even as it reveals an increasingly specialised aspect of it. Hence, these layers represent a progressive involution of the One all the way down to the most infinitesimally small particle of matter which is still nothing but the SatChit-Ananda brooding in an extremely narrow focus of immersion in its delight (Sri Aurobindo, 1920a). There is thus a hierarchy of layers (and thus worlds) of consciousness each with its characteristic powers of perception, knowledge, and action, the highest having all knowledge—because all is the One knowing itself entirely—and progressively reducing in both knowledge and power of action down to the most material physical domains in which consciousness seems to be lost in an inconscient “dead” material chaotic sub-atomic insubstantiality. But it is lost only in phenomenal appearance, its presence hidden by the apparent screen of chaos, instability, and chance. Evolution is then nothing but the gradual emergence of this concealed consciousness which struggles instinctively to reawaken to its own totality and to recover and express its original Oneness of which it retains still the distant memory. This progressive journey of self-recovery appears to us as an evolutionary emergence and unfoldment of the secret divine potential within all things. The first instinct of evolution is therefore to assert its existence, although now in and as a separate material form, the atom being the first stable form emerging out of the unstable flux of the inconscient substratum, and therefore establishing the exaggerated mechanical and rigid character of matter. Subsequent steps include the formation of the single cell, and progressively, the evolution of plant life, animals, and human beings, each embodying a higher level of consciousness and expressing its characteristic faculties and powers of perception and action, with the human mind as the most evolved so far, but not the last in the ladder of ascent. Every human perception or thought therefore is ultimately the same One narrowly perceiving itself in a limited aspect of its totality; all our thoughts already exist in the totality of the cosmic plane of Mind and appear to us as ours only because of our blinkered perspective of Reality and our complete self-identification with a very limited part of that Reality. Such is the broad overview of the Vedic model of the universe and Reality. Many of its insights have been re-discovered by modern quantum physics and many others are being confirmed in more recent physical and metaphysical explorations. The Vedic model not only offers a comprehensive description of the origin and development of the universe and life and mind in it, but it also provides a rationale for higher powers of knowledge than the human intelligence. Sri Aurobindo maps in detail the unfolding steps and processes of this evolution with special emphasis on its inevitable further ascent to the stages above and beyond the Intellectual Mind, through the Intuitive Mind in which all knowledge is found accessible, and all the way to its ultimate status of knowledge in what he calls the Supramental consciousness (Sri Aurobindo, 1950a). He describes in detail the steps and the means used by Nature in our evolution so far, and consequently the means by which we can consciously participate in this evolutionary process and thereby accelerate our ascent and most rapidly awaken to our full spiritual potential. This he considers a necessity as the

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present human crisis is not an accidental but an evolutionary crisis resulting from Nature’s attempt to take the next step in human evolution which is at least as radically different from the human mind as the animal mind is from the human (Sri Aurobindo, 1920b; The Mother, 1913).

2.1 The Nature of Intuition Three characteristics of the Vedic model stand out: first, that there is an implicit consciousness (and therefore knowledge) in all things which defines and guides their behaviour, and which we loosely name as a natural “instinct”. This instinct pushes all things from within to continue to grow, to evolve, and to exceed their current limitations. It is the prime driver of the evolutionary impulse and “knows” in a subliminal way precisely when and in which direction to grow so as to achieve its purpose. Its extraordinary operation in the plant and animal life is a wonder that a materialistic science simply cannot explain, whereas the Vedic model not only explains the source and success of the instinctive knowledge but also the cause of its equally dramatic failures outside the domain of its “expertise”—the weaver bird can perfectly weave its nest but is unable to apply its skill outside the domain of its instinct. Unlike animals, we as human beings, having evolved the powers of reason and self-awareness, can stand back from our instinctive impulse and extend, modify, and apply it to many other domains beyond the limits of its narrow automatic operations. Our human mind too is driven by the same natural instinct, but the priority of our mind’s deepest instinct is to know more and expand our domain of knowledge towards some as yet impossible ideal and a perfect power of knowing. The same original instinct that precisely guides the plant to grow towards the sun now guides our human mind’s steps, means, and direction of expansion to grow just as precisely towards higher powers of cognition and intelligence. Thus, in the deepest working of our mind’s intelligence, we discover a hidden operation that knows exactly how to lead our mind to greater knowledge, and yet this hidden operation is not known to our conscious mind. This hidden impulse knows when our mind errs and can guide it accurately because it is already familiar with that towards which it is leading our mind—it is familiar with that because it already secretly contains that! In other words, the instinct already contains the knowledge that it leads our mind towards, and yet this knowledge is not made explicit in the instinctive impulse. We recognise therefore that the instinct is an inferior and reflected operation of the higher intuitive knowledge working in a lesser grade of awareness that is incapable of expressing its full character. Hence, our instinct can only lead our mind to its higher potential through a slow and laborious impulsive evolutionary process. The ancient Indian teaching of the Kena Upanishad points directly to the higher intuition when it raises the profound question, “What within the mind leads it to its mark?” and answers cryptically, “That which thinks not with the mind; that by which the mind is thought”. It is a superior power of cognition that does not depend

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on the thought process and can therefore guide it unerringly. The distinctive character of intuition is therefore one of an inherent knowledge whose operation exceeds the bounds of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem with its capacity to know itself entirely, know what it knows without error, and know also what it does not yet know and therefore where it could err. Knowing its own boundaries and limits, it is effectively free of error even when it is limited in its scope in the lower grades of its operation. This at still higher levels of consciousness can therefore open to full and error-free knowledge. Our profoundest instinct is therefore to rise to these higher and more complete ranges of consciousness of which the full and free working of intuition is the immediate next step beyond the human mind. The second characteristic of the Vedic model is that it views intuition not as a phenomenon of mind, but as a self-existent but higher grade of consciousness of which the human mind is an inferior or derived operation. All knowledge already exists at this and still higher levels of consciousness. Our mind, of which the brain is only the physical instrument, is at best a receiver and organiser of knowledge, and not its creator—an idea that is now slowly percolating in modern Western consciousnessstudies (Gierer, 2008; Gillihan, 2019). This pre-eminence of knowledge fundamentally changes our relationship with it and the nature of our efforts to acquire it. It suggests that instead of reaching out to grasp knowledge through external means, we should rather prepare ourselves to receive it more completely and contain it without distorting it. The role of external data is merely as a focal point and trigger for evoking the knowledge that is already working secretly behind our intelligence or for invoking it from its higher station above the mind—this knowledge emergent then leads the mind to new insights and comprehension. The Vedic tradition formulates its entire educational system (of which very little survives today) on this insight, and all subsequently existent derived traditions of learning in India are formulated around this even today as seen in the traditions of guru-shishya parampara (ancient lineages that seek to transmit the living experiential mastery of the field from master to apprentice) in music, dance, philosophy, martial arts, traditional skills and technologies, etc. In the ancient treatise called the Chhandogya Upanishad, the enlightened Sage teaches his son “that by knowing which all is known”. The most significant aspect of this teaching is the graded training of the mind to exceed its current mode of cognition that divides and separates all things into pieces and reduces all to their distinctive form. Our intellect can only process knowledge through symbolic representations: we observe an object and retain in our mind its symbolic representation of word, image, or idea which is always different from the object itself and therefore flawed in the very means of retention. There is always the separation between subject, object, and the knowledge in between. One could never truly know if the object we observe actually exists or is a skilful illusory projection into our eyes, brain, or mind. Our knowing holds the roadmap but never the road itself. Hence, all purely mental seeking for true knowledge must eventually degrade into agnosticism or illusionism (Sri Aurobindo, 1950b). The world itself appears as a gigantic unreal simulation or illusion (Sri Aurobindo, 1920a). The means of cognition in the higher grades of consciousness such as the intuition is fundamentally different. The intuition knows by identification with that which it

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knows—the subject becomes the object in and as the very act of knowing, and the three can never be separated. The closest human experience is the act of knowing oneself. I know that I exist because I am one with myself. As the intuitive consciousness and its cognitive power develops within us, we experience a similar identity with all that we know and experience, and hence such knowledge is inherently real because it is not a symbolic representation but the-thing-itself. In the intuitive mind, the act of seeking to know must always culminate in an identity with that which is to be known. All such knowledge therefore also contains within it the spontaneous action that emerges from such an identity. Because I am what I know, I spontaneously and effortlessly express that which I am—the knowledge and its consequent action merge into a single movement. The Cartesian distinction epitomised in the famous idiom “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” exists only in the separative domain of the reasoning mind and ceases to be in the intuitive mind. The Indian civilisation which is profoundly shaped by the Vedic experience, therefore, lays great stress on preparing the intellect to receive this higher knowledge (as, for example, evidenced in the aforementioned Chhandogya Upanishad and the Mundaka Upanishad), but it asserts that all knowledge including skills of the body, life-energies, and the mind can thus be received by a direct intuitive transmission that embeds an entire experience and implied skillset into the receiving vessel of the student. This has profound implications for the future of humanity and pedagogy of future education, only a first hint of which is seen in recent techniques such as Suggestopedia or Suggestive Accelerated Learning and Teaching (SALT) or Superlearning which claim up to tenfold increase in learning speed and higher comprehension and retention by placing students in a relaxed non-rational state that assists direct absorption of knowledge bypassing intellectual processes (Ostrander et al., 1979). The third characteristic of the Vedic model is that it immediately and obviously suggests several methods and practices by which (i) the intellect can be prepared to be more receptive to intuitive insights, (ii) the rational mind can be taught to intentionally access the deeper intuitive operations already working behind its superficial reasoning faculties, and (iii) the human mind can be trained to deliberately raise its normal level of cognition from the intellectual mind to the intuitive mind and thus fulfil the deeper evolutionary urge within us. In this quest, Sri Aurobindo offers the largest and most comprehensive teaching and methods of practice both in his writings and in his correspondence with disciples who were practitioners of his Integral Yoga, although for him the development of the Intuitive Mind was only the first step towards a still higher level of consciousness that he called the Supramental which is the final and most complete step in the evolutionary ascent (Sri Aurobindo, 1920b). Sri Aurobindo’s posthumously published diary notes which he titled The Record of Yoga chronicle and evidence the steps and struggles of his own journey in fascinating day-to-day entries leading successfully to this attainment. As Sri Aurobindo explains, the Vedic framework goes still deeper into the nature of the Intuitive Mind and describes four distinct powers or faculties of its operation: intuition (characterised by a tangible direct contact with knowledge, corresponding

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to the sense of touch), inspiration (characterised by the knowledge flowing and spontaneously articulating itself in action, words, or music, corresponding to the sense of hearing), revelation (characterised by visionary perception), and discrimination (a spontaneous separation of essential truth from mixed or erroneous knowledge) (Sri Aurobindo, 1920b). Its complete presentation is beyond the scope of this paper. In summary, the Vedic model not only explains the true nature of intuition and its source of knowledge, but it also satisfactorily explains its working at lower and limited levels of consciousness, and consequently suggests means of accelerating our individual and collective evolution by consciously developing the power of intuition and recovering eventually our original Oneness and its life-fulfilling and life-transforming Delight in the divine Sat-Chit-Ananda.

2.2 The Role of Reasoning in Intuition We have distinguished three strata of knowledge in the human mind: instinctive, reasoning, and intuitive. Sri Aurobindo explains that instinct is only a lower and veiled operation of the intuition in our subconscious parts characterised by what is popularly called the “gut instinct” in which the impulse to act precedes knowledge of the action, whereas the higher intuition first reveals its knowledge which is then followed by the will to action (Sri Aurobindo, 1920b). This characteristic serves as a valuable reference and test for distinguishing between the two, especially in the initial stages of our training for intuition. The role of the reasoning intellect then is to serve as a transitional stage between these two by raising the lower instinctive knowledge out of its subconscious working and into our conscious awareness, and thereby purifying it from the mixture of other lower impulses (such as the survival, procreative, or other “programmed” instincts) which have their legitimate role but do not represent the higher intuitive knowledge. If the intellect is insufficiently developed, then the higher working of intuition will tend to get mixed with instincts and lapse into a lower and confused working. But an exclusive development of the intellect, shorn of the higher intuition, is not helpful either as it leads inevitably to agnosticism and scepticism—historically, the bane of highly rational societies—since the intellect has no reliable means for validating its own conclusions and finds itself repeatedly proved wrong over time as it explores the infinite variations of the universe. A healthy development of the intellect is one which strives constantly to serve a higher knowledge and ideal and is receptive to and guided by “flashes” of intuitive insights. In practice, this means that an exclusive reliance on the “gut instinct” is an inferior means, and the better way is to listen to the “gut” and then discriminate the quality and feel of the impulse and separate from it its essential knowledge component which can then act as a pointer or even a link to its higher intuitive origin. The intellect can then deliberately turn up to receive the full intuitive knowledge directly from above, from that which is the origin and the complete elaboration of what the gut instinct first indicated. The point here is that the true intuition is neither irrational

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nor anti-rational but supra-rational and super-conscious, and the training of a plastic and receptive reasoning mind and its full intellectual development is a necessary evolutionary stage to prepare us to receive the fullness of the higher intuition. It is the direct working of intuition, even if fitfully at first, that makes for the genius in any field. In principle, therefore, the genius potential exists within each one of us, and can be consciously awakened by the development of intuition.

2.3 Practices for Developing Intuition Sri Aurobindo articulates four broad practices by which to train the mind to open to its higher intuition (Sri Aurobindo, 1920b). These arise naturally as consequences of the Vedic model and are ideally practiced in their logical sequence but can also be developed simultaneously, since each method complements and assists the perfection of the others. For our purpose here, we will only summarise their rationale and focus on the essential form of their practice. The most significant insight arising from the Vedic model is that it is the intellectual mind’s habitual restless activity that prevents it from receiving the higher intuitive knowledge which is otherwise always present and available to us if only we could turn and receive from above. Hence, the first practice is to put the mind into a state of complete receptivity free of all personal bias or expectations which would distort what the intuition reveals. This is achieved by bringing the mind into a state of entire stillness which is alert and turned to the higher source awaiting what comes without impatience or expectation. The Yoga tradition images this as the still waters of the mind in which the sun of knowledge can reflect without distortion (Sri Aurobindo, 1920b) and prescribes several methods for attaining to this stillness. The precise means used is not important; what matters is that over time the mind is trained and accustomed to becoming still and even entirely silent on demand and for as long as necessary. An intellect that has been well trained to be receptive, open, flexible, plastic, and wide to new ideas will naturally be a superior instrument for receiving the full revelation from the intuition with all its subtleties, nuances, and associated threads of knowledge. But even an untrained mind that gives itself fully is over time moulded by the intuitional influences and made to become flexible, wide, and capable. This is the explanation for how “uneducated” people with “untrained” minds can yet reveal extraordinary and profound wisdom—the recent and best-documented case being that of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa in nineteenth-century India who answered even the most profound philosophical questions with effortless ease, clarity, and simplicity (Gupta, 1942). The second practice emerges from the recognition that the essence of our awareness and being is also the same divine One which is the origin of the universe, but experienced subjectively as the divine Presence within us, or as our secret and true Self but which is therefore also an intuitive Self. It is the source of an upwelling devotion, causeless joy, and selfless love that rises from within us, most easily felt in the cardiac centre and the basis of the Devotional Path of yoga and at the origin

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of many religious traditions. By placing all our actions and experiences in relation to this, growing progressively closer to its deepest centre within us, we find awakening in us an automatic intuitive discrimination and guidance—something “feels right” or not, or a sanction and conviction arises from deep within in response to an external situation. Gradually we begin to relate all things to this and to initiate all our decisions and actions from this deeper reference growing progressively closer to our true Self. While its guidance and discrimination are flawless in essence, it is not yet capable of complete knowledge nor error-free action as it must still operate through the inherent limitations of our mental and emotional faculties. The third practice therefore shifts the centre of our awareness to the highest organised centre of our mind which is at the top of the head known in the yoga tradition as the sahasr¯ara, the thousand-petalled lotus, which acts as the linking centre between our intellect (centred behind the forehead) and the higher supramental ranges of awareness which are presently still super-conscious above us. This practice leads to a complete liberation of our centre of awareness from the body and “we can feel ourselves thinking no longer with the brain but from above and outside the head in the subtle body” (Sri Aurobindo, 1920b). It is a liberating experience for the mind which now feels itself wide and free, no more bound to the dullness of the physical brain. Our thoughts then acquire great clarity, suppleness, and depth, and we can more easily distinguish the pure intuition from mental thoughts. There is then the distinct experience of perceiving intuitive insights descending into the mind from above and taking on mental forms as their clothing. The fourth practice takes the third to its culmination. Gradually all the existing mental processes and faculties are raised and subjected to the higher influence, until they are entirely replaced by the direct operation of the intuitive mind’s equivalent powers. For example, the faculty of memory is linked to its intuitive equivalent by turning inward and becoming aware of the part in us that already knows, as if in a forgotten memory, the new thing that is now being learnt (Sri Aurobindo, 1920b). But this effort can be made independently too, by developing the intellect to its peak with the intention of freeing it from its limitations and widening and intensifying its workings until it begins to exceed its current limitations and culminates by merging with the intuitive mind’s equivalent but direct faculties. Thus, the inferior working of our mind is entirely transformed to become an effective instrument for articulation of the higher knowledge by the governance of the intuitive mind, which is the natural agent for error-free cognition. Both can then open to still higher possibilities. The four practices lend themselves to multiple and specialised formulations and can easily be applied in various ways in all fields and circumstances of life.

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3 Application in Corporate Life and Decision-Making With exponentially growing information overload and increasing disruptive changes, the very nature of how we do business and what makes for its sustainability and profitability has fundamentally changed (Naim, 2013). It is not surprising that the corporate world is turning to recognise the importance of intuition in decision-making, sparking off a growing body of corporate studies, training programmes, self-help literature and inspirational narratives of successful leaders and their inspired decisions that turned their fortunes or redefined the industry (Bonnell, 2018; Gallo, 2017). These often tend to confuse rather than help by exaggerating and even misrepresenting the true character and role of intuition, by glorifying famous people and their successful decisions while ignoring their many equally dramatic failed decisions, simply because there is no way to assess whether those decisions were actually driven by a real intuition or an inferior “gut-feel”, or whether they were mere gambles or fortunate mistakes. At higher levels of management “gut-feel” can and is often used as a cover for ignorance or an ego-trip. Populist advice to imitate the famous can be deceptive; catch-phrases to “follow your gut”, “pay attention to your dreams”, or “tune in to synchronicity” without a deeper understanding of the truth they represent, can expose us to arbitrariness or mixed impulses that can be dangerous or even fatal when applied blindly. A dose of realism and caution in therefore necessary and some scepticism is justified in the ever-growing New-Age market. Without a deeper understanding of the nature of intuition, its populist application will degrade into the false subjectivism of deceptive hunches, superficial practices, and fashionable catch-phrases. But the reference of a comprehensive model such as the Vedic (and its lucid articulation as by Sri Aurobindo) can act as a light and guide us through this subjective passage and lead us to stable, reliable, and sustained use of our intuitive potential in corporate life both individually and collectively. In the 1970s, the US military instituted a classified programme to investigate the intuition-based power of Remote Viewing (RV) and later developed a structured programme to train people to become reliable military-grade remote-viewers with some attaining near-100% accuracy in their perceptions, and all generally exceeding the reliability of human-intelligence reports from on-site sources (Smith, 2005). What was shocking and incomprehensible to both the military and the remote-viewers, but is rationally explained by the Vedic model, is that RV perceptions were just as accurate irrespective of distance in space or displacement in time. In fact, a large part of the program’s success lay in its ability to remote-view impending events in order to be fully prepared ahead of time (Dames & Newman, 2010). The success of the programme is testament to the fact that intuitive perceptions can be trained and can be made entirely reliable for military or corporate use, although in the corporate space not all may have the time or the inclination to train themselves to that degree. It is not surprising therefore that, subsequent to their retirement, many military remoteviewers still continue to offer their skills in corporate consultancy to meet the growing demand for reliable knowledge.

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Significant elements of this programme validate the Vedic model and its implications. Two in particular stand out which we can formulate as general attitudes to develop. First, that those who trust their intuition tend to get more reliable insights. Or to put it differently, scepticism acts as a corrosive acid on the healthy development of our higher potential, while positive reinforcement nourishes and strengthens it. A faith and trust in your innate or deeper potential is therefore a must. This can also take an objectified form through a faith and trust in a higher spiritual guidance from Life, the Universe, the Divine or God—whatever the concept or form in which one may envisage the One that is the All. The second discovery was that the power of intuition grows with its use and is more effective when you direct yourself to its cultivation with an active enthusiasm and interest. In other words, it cannot be enforced on the unwilling, nor developed by mere mechanical practices. Necessarily therefore only those who feel inclined to pursue their potential will attain to it, but others can still be helped to build at the very least a receptive base through basic practices of relaxation, mindfulness, or meditation. These can be brought into corporate space through introductory training programmes following which participants can freely choose if they wish to continue their practices to greater heights. The full benefit of any training can be best leveraged in collective settings. For example, all meetings can begin with a concentration to bring the mind and emotions to stillness, and to turn them in quiet receptivity to the common purpose for which everyone is gathered, which can be articulated either implicitly or explicitly as required. This creates a receptive collective “container” in which the higher guidance can be more easily perceived, and its inspiration received. Even if there is one person—ideally one among those who initiate the meeting—who directly opens to invoke or receive the intuition, it can descend into all as a group. Such meetings are often charged with the energy of the intuition and powerfully inspire all including those who may not actively cultivate their higher potential. The Vedic model suggests several methods to aid decision-making and to integrate reason with intuition. Five broad phases are outlined which are common to all specialised methods: Phase 1: At first one chooses to fully consume the intellect in analysing all available data, drawing from it as many diverse implications as possible, and brain-storming all possible responses and outcomes, however impractical they may seem at first. The result is that (a) the intellect is given its full satisfaction of effort; (b) the mind is made plastic to as wide a perspective as possible, and hence receptive to a larger intuitive vision; and (c) the intellect is brought to a point of exhaustion and convinced of its insufficiency, so that it can now be easily brought into stillness and receptivity. Phase 2: With the mind now made as silent as possible and with all personal preferences and expectations annulled, the centre of awareness is shifted inward to the poise of a calm witness, gazing upon the entirety of the scene that the intellectual

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brainstorm has laid before it, so that now the perspective can be widened further to as complete a vision as possible. Phase 3: The entire awareness now turns upward in a quiet aspiration, offering the entire problem and vision to the divine Oneness above in which the secret harmony and solution already exist and are waiting to descend. Gradually, and to the extent possible, the entire awareness rises to meet this super-conscious awareness, knowledge and power of inspiration, invoking its descent in our silent mind, heart, and body. The awareness waits with vigilance but without expectation or preference for as long as it takes for the intuition to reveal itself and to descend. Phase 4: The intuitive guidance is received either as a flash of insight or a cluster or series of flashes of ideas and energies pouring down in a stream. During this period, one must continue to remain quietly receptive and not leap in excitement to catch what comes, as any kind of perturbation tends to limit, distort, or cease the descending flow. We allow the intuition to take on progressively its own distinct forms of ideas, thoughts, and words, culminating into forms of action. It is when the intuition can stream down all the way into the minutest detail of action that it is the most effective in its result, achieving even the impossible and the miraculous. Phase 5: As the stream spreads out and touches others around us through its compelling presence, revealed words, or inspired actions, it imprints into all those it touches the light and power of its content, awakening within them the same convictions and inspiring them into spontaneous and synchronised action. The result is a collective vision that translates into a collective harmony of action and effective result that is perfectly and effortlessly guided and coordinated by the streaming intuition. If the individual and the collective container can remain in aspiring receptivity, the stream can continue to flow as long as required, ceasing only when its work is done. During this time, everyone feels as if carried by it, energised and nourished by it, and guided perfectly and securely by it. It is this last state that is increasingly recognised as extraordinary, and popularly referred to as being “in the flow” or “in the zone”—in essence a streaming flow of intuition that perfectly leads our actions, sometimes down to the tiniest detail. Whether an Olympic gymnast or warrior on the battlefield or corporate leader inspired with a vision, it is the same power of intuition flowing in and through us that realises the idea and the perfection which is otherwise beyond the attainment of the human capacity or intellect. The same principles and the broadly the same five-step process are also the basis of the most advanced forms of training for Olympic gymnasts, for the mastery of martial arts, for inspired speech, or for any kind of effective, inspired, and inspiring leadership—the differences being only in emphasis, form, and detail of the various methods and techniques used. Once the underlying model is known and the principles for training and practice recognised, one can easily formulate specialised practices for the distinctive requirements of each person or situation. Those who thus dedicate themselves to the

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systematic evolutionary practice of conscious ascent to the intuitive mind will also find themselves assisted by the descending inspiration that nourishes them even while it acts on the circumstances around. The ascent therefore becomes increasingly more spontaneous and smoother as the intuition itself takes on the burden of our effort to manifest the hidden genius within us.

4 Conclusion Every human field of endeavour aims for a perfection that is impossible to realise due to the inherent limitations of the human mind and reason. But all can attain to true excellence and touch perfection, even if momentarily or partially, when inspired by intuition and the still higher ranges of our spiritual potential—whether in the arts or sciences, in leadership or in any realisation of a vision, ideal or dream. The present evolutionary crisis demands that humanity as a whole makes the necessary effort to open to and evolve towards these higher ranges of consciousness. Life itself and its growing complexity is compelling us to transition from reason-based decisionmaking to intuition-led leadership and management. The Vedic model of the cosmos, with its comprehensive articulation of the nature of the Intuitive Mind and the means to ascend to it, can be a guide for humanity in its hour of greatest crisis and need.

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Naim, M. (2013). The end of power: From boardrooms to battlefields and churches to states, why being in charge isn’t what it used to be. Basic Books. Nierenberg, C. (2016). The science of intuition: How to measure ‘hunches’ and ‘gut feelings’. https://www.livescience.com/54825-scientists-measure-intuition.html Ostrander, S., Schroeder, L., & Ostrander, N. (1979). Superlearning. Delacorte Press. Smith, P. H. (2005). Reading the enemy’s mind: Inside star gate: America’s psychic espionage program. Forge Books. Sri Aurobindo. (1920a). The life divine. Collected works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA) (Vol. 21, 2003 Ed.). Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Sri Aurobindo. (1920b). The synthesis of yoga. Collected works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA) (Vol. 24, 1999 Ed.). Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Sri Aurobindo. (1920c). The secret of the Veda, Sri Aurobindo. Collected works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA). Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Sri Aurobindo. (1920d). On the Upanishads. Collected works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA). Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Sri Aurobindo. (1950a). Letters on Yoga. Collected works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA) (Vol. 28, pp. 84–85). Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Sri Aurobindo. (1950b). Metaphysical thinkers, east and west. Collected works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA) (Vol. 22, pp. 351–355). Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The Mother. (1913). Collected works of the Mother (Vol. 2). Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Walker Punerr, H. (1992). Sigmund Freud: His life and mind. Transaction Publishers.

Understanding Human Values through Integrative Dialogue: The Śāstrārtha Method Sharda S. Nandram, S. Sukhada, Ankur Joshi, and Puneet K. Bindlish

1 Introduction The way we understand the issues in management today has evolved over time as a result of profound changes in the business environment; recent examples are VUCA [Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity] (Nandram & Bindlish, 2017), the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab, 2016; Schwab & Davis, 2018), globalisation, and diversity in the workplace. Moreover, topics like human values orientation (Chakraborty, 2018), spirituality at work (Karakas, 2010; Milliman et al., 2003; Pawar, 2009), spirit-centred leadership (Chakraborty, 2004), spirituality and business (Biberman & Tischler, 2008; Bouckaert, 2010; Bouckaert & Zsolnai, 2011; Brophy, 2015; Delbecq, 2009; Nandram, 2010; Tischler, 1999), and spiritual leadership (Benefiel et al., 2014; Chakraborty, 2004; Fairholm, 1996; Fry, 2003; Fry & Slocum, 2008; Fry et al., 2005) are becoming increasingly prominent in organisations. The motivation that underlies these topics is the search for a form of harmony or coherence that will engage people in their workplaces and citizens in their communities, to realise inclusiveness, or in a broader sense, integrativeness. However, the research approaches applied to understand and foster these areas in management are mostly still embedded in schismatic or dichotomous methodologies. This is apparent, for example, in the dichotomies created by qualitative versus quantitative research design; fundamental versus applied research; inductive versus deductive research; and existentialist versus essentialist paradigms. This chapter proposes an integrative research approach based on an integrative worldview (Bindlish & Nandram, 2019; Bindlish et al., 2017; Nandram et al., 2019) inspired by Bhāratīya culture (Ancient Indian culture) or Indian Ethos. It aims for the holistic attainment of worldly (abhyudaya) or non-worldly (niḥśreyasa) life goals, or both. This integrative research approach argues that the whole research S. S. Nandram (&)
S. Sukhada
A. Joshi
P. K. Bindlish Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_8

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process should be followed by a thorough review of numerous aspects, perspectives, and purposes, which are essential if a holistic view of the subject matter is to be achieved. After this, a deliberate effort is made to integrate these. The process can be approached in various ways. For example, there is the method of Śāstrārtha —a way of knowing a subject through a dialogue towards integrative understanding. Śāstrārtha is derived from the Indian philosophical school of Nyāya Darśana. Studying such dialogues with the aim of understanding human values in organisations can be a valuable research method. This chapter discusses the characteristics of dialogues based on Śāstrārtha and how they can contribute to integrativeness in the context of managing human values.

1.1

Human Values for Organisations

Now, more than ever, organisations are focusing on human values, aiming to create settings that are conducive to experiencing meaning at work, and encouraging engagement and psychological ownership. Often such areas are associated with the idea of higher purpose organisations (Quinn & Thakor, 2018). Chakraborty discusses the concept of values in the sense of means that serve the process of transformation towards a higher consciousness in organisations—a process he terms ‘becoming’ (Chakraborty, 2001). He states: ‘Human values are personal, in the sense that they first thrive in the personal consciousness and then get interwoven in the web of human relationships’ (Chakraborty, 1995: 33). While human values, such as humility and gratitude, could be seen as very soft, Chakraborty argues that even with such soft values, a company can still achieve organisational goals like growth and profit. In his 2001 book, Chakraborty reviews companies in China, India, Japan, and the US, in the light of almost 75 years of thinking on managing human values in corporate settings. He makes some very interesting observations, which are still relevant today, for example, the blended approach to bureaucracy and humanity; the role of restraining of impulsive anger and raw feelings; the role of silence as a true energiser; and how the cultivation of sensibility to beauty and serenity at work, as opposed to toughness and dynamism, could be beneficial for organisations. If we consider how organisations are developing today, it is clear that these types of areas need to be urgently addressed. They are frequently hidden within new concepts developed by business thinkers, often presented as alternatives to traditional management theories (Cloke & Goldsmith, 2002; Hamel & Breen, 2007). Some examples are Holacracy (Hsieh, 2016), Humanocracy (Golandaz, 2005; Hamel & Zanini, 2017, 2020), Teal Organisations (Laloux, 2014), the Faith at Work movement (Miller, 2007), Humane Leadership (Mutizwa, 2015), the Spirit at Work movement (Benefiel, 2003a, 2003b, 2007, 2010), Decentralisation, and Self-Management (Nandram, 2015, 2017). In self-management, in particular, the human value of autonomy acts as the foundation for building an alternative organisational architecture. Such new concepts, however, are often positioned as being opposed to traditional management school thinking. For example, people

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may ask whether ideas that work successfully in certain contexts, such as structures and procedures, can be embedded in new corporate models that are less based on hierarchy. A new treatment of these areas requires an integrative approach, not an either-or orientation. The work of Chakraborty and Chakraborty (2008) is helpful here too. The authors raise the question of whether human beings are the masters or the servants of industry and technology. They take the view that humans are the masters, making reference to the spiritual, the pure consciousness, and the divine model of man. They propose the principle of human beings removing the dichotomy between doing and becoming, instead harmonising these two towards union, a state which is the very core of being a human occurs at a gross, outward level, usually manifested in skills, while becoming is a more subtle level of existence where values come into play. They warn us that if values and behaviours are mismatched, they will not result in union, and instead may feed destructive tendencies. Chakraborty and Chakraborty (2008) focus on the important role that human values play in an organisational context. They say that: ‘if the cultivation of higher values strengthens human virtues, like gratitude, caring, a work ethic, honesty, forgiveness, helpfulness, humility and so on, we see no reason why they should not improve organisational effectiveness’ (Chakraborty & Chakraborty, 2008: 17). They stress the importance of organisations having both individuals who are willing to put aside their egoistic aims and organisations that create space for such individuals to draw on values as a means to fostering a spiritually oriented organisation—where a healthy financial bottom line can coexist with human values. Human values form an important foundation for a sustainable-economics framework in organisations (Chakraborty, 2018). Derived from ancient Indian Ethos, it is assumed that human beings pursue four puruṣārthas or life goals: righteousness (Dharma), the pursuit of wealth or money (Artha), the fulfilment of legitimate desires with moderation (Kāma), and permanent emancipation in the state of eternal consciousness and bliss (Mokṣa). As they strive for these, they will express a number of values. Some individuals will use these as ends and some as means. Chakraborty and Chakraborty (2008) integrate these four goals within a two-dimensional model of material development (Abhyudaya) and supreme good (Niḥśreyasa). Material development embraces the pursuit of wealth (Artha) and the fulfilment of desires (Kāma). The concept of supreme good embraces righteousness (Dharma) and eternal consciousness and bliss (Mokṣa). However, they should all be seen as elements to be pursued holistically (paying attention to the material without losing sight of the spiritual); otherwise, the basic human spiritual model will be degraded.

1.2

Dialogue as Part of Action Research

One of the research approaches that enables an integrative orientation towards human values is Action Research. Within Action Research, the Dialogue Method is

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often used to understand complex social realities, especially the subjective realities of people engaging in social contexts. Human values fit within such realities. Usually, such subjective realities are not easy to grasp through surveys or observations. ‘Articulation of subjectivity is enabled through critical questioning, a process not so easy for an actor to engage in on one's own. It is in such contexts that dialogue can be a meaningful method of inquiry in action research’ (Tandon, 2014: 259). Dialogue as a research method is used to understand subjective experiences, and the researcher, with the right preparation, can gain access to these experiences (Tandon, 2014). The first element in researcher preparation is building a relationship of mutual respect and trust with respondents. Second, researchers should prepare to be emotionally open and see the research as a two-way process, not as a type of psychoanalysis. Third, preparation means being open to competing elements and conflicts within oneself, to develop the capacity to listen, echo, resonate, and empathise. Fourth, preparation involves going to a deeper level to be able to discern the underlying dynamics of the topic being studied; this may involve a degree of confrontation with respondents, so that they can deeply articulate their subjective realities. The fifth aspect of preparation is to find ways to capture the subjective realities articulated, in order to make use of the data for critical reflection through data assembly, collation, synthesis, and analysis. These five forms of preparation are essential if a researcher is to have confidence in data collection and analysis when using the Dialogue Method. Tandon (2014) mentions that the method can lead to respondents committing to transforming their setting, simply as a result of engaging in the process of inquiry that the research involves. If researchers prefer not to engage in dialogue with respondents directly, they can gather data on the subjective realities of human values by analysing dialogues taking place within the organisation being studied. Śāstrārtha, the focus of this chapter, offers us a method to engage in dialogues aimed at integrative outcomes, which are expressed in the goal of understanding a subject—in our case, the subjective realities of human values.

2 Explaining Śāstrārtha The Nyāya philosophy describes three types of dialogues: Vāda (discussion), Jalpa (wrangling), and Vitaṇḍā (fault finding). These illustrate the traditional method of enquiry towards truth. Let us consider the characteristics of these dialogues. The main idea is that when our opinion does not match the opinion of others, this generates a need for further, collective, rather than individual, thinking. An ancient Indian quote states that ‘truth emerges out of Vāda’: वादे वादे जायते तत्वबोधः vāde vāde jāyate tatvabodhaḥ.

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The assumption behind this is that an individual may have a limited capacity to comprehend the thing they are trying to understand. The same idea is expressed beautifully in the Sanskrit verse by Bhartṛhari: प्रज्ञाविवेकं लभते भिन्नैरागमदर्शनैः । कियद्वा शक्यमुन्नेतुं स्वतर्कमनुधावता ।। (वाक्यपदीयम् 2.489). prajñāvivekaṃ labhate bhinnairāgamadarśanaiḥ। kiyadvā śakyamunnetuṃ svatarkamanudhāvatā।। (vākyapadīyam 2.489).

This attitude forms the basis of an integrative approach to understanding a subject (Bindlish et al., 2017; Nandram, 2019; Nandram et al., 2017). Clarity comes from the study of different systems of thought. How much can an individual know by merely following their own reasoning or by knowing only their own system of thinking? To arrive at the truth, they need to transcend their own limited capacity. One way to prepare for this is by listening to the opinions of others with an open attitude. This approach can inspire us to move away from a focus on our own intellect and towards wisdom. Of the three types of dialogues, Vāda (discussion, to defend or to arrive at the truth) is the ideal form of discourse. That is why Krishna in the Bhagavadgītā says ‘vādaḥ pravadatāmaham’, i.e. ‘of those who debate I am vāda’: सर्गाणामादिरन्तश्च मध्यं चैवाहमर्जुन। अध्यात्मविद्या विद्यानां वादः प्रवदतामहम्।। (भगवद्गीता 10.32). sargāṇāmādirantaśca madhyaṅ caivāhamarjuna৷ adhyātmavidyā vidyānāṃ vādaḥ pravadatāmaham৷৷ (Bhagavadgītā 10.32)).

The second type, Jalpa (wrangling or disputing with the goal of winning), is a form of discourse that does not aim to arrive at the truth. Instead, the aim is to win. The third type, Vitaṇḍā (attacking or fault finding for the sole purpose of winning), aims to criticise the views of others to prove that they are wrong. The second and third types are not effective as approaches to gain true knowledge. Still, given that people use them, it is important to understand them, for example, to recognise the kinds of dialogues that may take place when studying an organisation's human values. If an organisation has a trust-based worldview, it can be assumed that Vāda would be recognised as a dialogue type in that organisation. However, when an organisation is rooted in a more competitive worldview, we can assume that the other two types of dialogue will be more prominent in the organisation. In the following sections, we discuss in more detail the processes involved in these three types of dialogue. Vāda (Discussion)

प्रमाणतर्कसाधनोपालम्भः सिद्धान्ताविरुद्धः पक्षप्रतिपक्षपरिग्रहो वादः (न्याय दर्शन 1.2.1)

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pramāṇatarkasādhanopālambhaḥ siddhāntāviruddhaḥ pañcāvayavopapannaḥ pakṣapratipakṣaparigraho vādaḥ (Nyāya Darśana 1.2.1)

Vāda refers to the idea of a pakṣa (side) and a pratipakṣa (opposing side), in which what is to be adopted is analysed by both the pakṣa and the pratipakṣa using the Pramāṇas (means of gaining knowledge) and Tarka (logical reasoning) neither of which is opposed to the main proposition, and both of which are carried on in full accordance with the theory of proper argumentation (Paṃcāvayava Prakriyā). Let us explain the two sides with an example. When two contrary characteristics (pakṣa and pratipakṣa) are claimed to exist within the same object, they are considered as if they were opponents. An example of these two sides is: ‘There is a soul’ and ‘There is no soul’. However, when the contrary characteristics exist in different objects, they are not called pakṣa and pratipakṣa, for example, the positions: ‘The soul is eternal’ and ‘The pot is temporal’. Both pakṣa and pratipakṣa try to support their proposition and rebut or reject the proposition of the opposing side using the Pramāṇas and Tarka. The Pramāṇas: The Means of Attaining Right Knowledge.

प्रत्यक्षानुमानोपमानशब्दाः प्रमाणानि (न्याय दर्शन 1.1.3) pratyakṣānumānopamānaśabdāḥ pramāṇāni (Nyāya Darśana 1.1.3)

The Pramāṇas are four reliable means of obtaining right knowledge: 1. Pratyakṣa (perception): This refers to knowledge gained through direct perception by sensory organs. 2. Anumāna (inference): This refers to inference as a means to gain knowledge. 3. Upamāna (comparison): This refers to analogy as a means to gain knowledge. 4. Śabda (testimony/words): This refers to using sources acknowledged as authoritative, or the words and writings of trustworthy human beings, as a means to gain knowledge. Tarka

अविज्ञाततत्त्वेऽर्थे कारणोपपत्तितस्तत्त्वज्ञानार्थमूहस्तर्कः (न्याय दर्शन 1.1.40) avijñātatattve’rthe kāraṇopapattitastattvajñānārthamūhastarkaḥ (Nyāya Darśana 1.1.40) The process of ascertaining the unknown character of a thing through reasoning is known as Tarka

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When there is a desire to know the real character of something yet unknown, then the process of reasoning is pursued to ascertain the real character of the thing, by showing the absurdity of all contrary characteristics. This process of verifying the unknown, real nature of a thing through reasoning or ūhā is called Tarka. For example, if the real character of the soul, whether it is eternal or non-eternal, is not known, this process can be applied. To ascertain the real character, one can reason in the following manner: if the soul were non-eternal, it would be impossible for it to enjoy the fruits of its own actions, such as life and death (transmigration) or liberation. But such fruits are known to belong to the soul. Therefore, one must admit that the soul is eternal. Paṃcāvayava Prakriyā: The Theory of Proper Argumentation. Paṃcāvayava Prakriyā presents a method of proper argumentation.

प्रतिज्ञा-हेतु-उदाहरण-उपनय-निगमनानि अवयवाः (न्याय दर्शन 1.1.32) pratijñā-hetu-udāharaṇa-upanaya-nigamanāni avayavāḥ (Nyāya Darśana 1.1.32) According to Nyāya, proper argumentation must include five components (Paṃcāvayava): 1. Pratijñā (proposition or hypothesis): pratijñā refers to a proposition that needs to be established or proved. For instance, the declaration of the statement ‘the mountain is on fire’ (parvato vahnimān) is an example of Pratijñā, which needs to be proved. The remaining four components of Paṃcāvayava Prakriyā try to establish the Pratijñā.

साध्यनिर्देशः प्रतिज्ञा (न्याय दर्शन 1.1.33) sādhyanirdeśaḥ pratijñā (Nyāya Darśana 1.1.33) Pratijñā refers to the declaration of the proposition one intends to prove

2. Hetu (reason): The hetu is the means for the establishment of what is to be established. For the pratijñā ‘the mountain is on fire’, ‘smoke’ (dhūma) is the hetu.

उदाहरणसाधर्म्यात् साध्यसाधनं हेतुः। तथा वैधर्म्यात्। (न्याय दर्शन 1.1.34–35) udāharaṇasādharmyāt sādhyasādhanaṃ hetuḥ। tathā vaidharmyāt। (Nyāya Darśana 1.1.34–35) Hetu establishes Pratijñā through a similar or dissimilar example

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3. Udāharaṇa (a corroborative instance): An udāharaṇa is a familiar instance which possesses a characteristic of that which is to be proved. For example, an udāharaṇa similar to ‘the mountain is on fire’ is ‘a wood-fired kitchen’. As smoke is seen in wood-fired kitchens, smoke is also seen on a mountain that is on fire.

साध्यसाधर्म्यात्तद्धर्मभावी दृष्टान्त उदाहरणम्। तद्विपर्ययाद्वा विपरीतम्। (न्याय दर्शन 1.1.36–37) sādhyasādharmyāttaddharmabhāvī dṛṣṭānta udāharaṇam। tadviparyayādvā viparītam। (Nyāya Darśana 1.1.36–37) Udāharaṇa is a familiar instance that possesses a characteristic of Pratijñā

4. Upanaya (application of the rule; reaffirmation): Upanaya means ‘winding up’. Winding up, depending on the example, which says, either in affirmation as in ‘It is so’, or in negation as in ‘It is not so’ is upanaya. In our case, the example of upanaya is ‘It is so with the mountain, because there is smoke’.

उदाहरणापेक्षस्तथेत्युपसंहारो न तथेति वा साध्यस्योपनयः (न्याय दर्शन 1.1.38) udāharaṇāpekṣastathetyupasaṃhāro na tatheti vā sādhyasyopanayaḥ (Nyāya Darśana 1.1.38) Winding up the example, in affirmation or negation

5. Nigamana (conclusion): A reaffirmation of the Pratijñā on the basis of the similarity or dissimilarity of Hetu or Udāharaṇa or Upanaya is Nigamana. To demonstrate it, let us put all the five avayavas together: a. b. c. d. e.

Pratijñā: The mountain is on fire. Hetu: Because there is smoke. Udāharaṇa: Wherever there is smoke, there is fire, as in wood-fired kitchens. Upanaya: So it is with the mountain (because there is smoke). Nigamana: Therefore, the mountain is on fire.

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हेत्वपदेशात् प्रतिज्ञायाः पुनर्वचनं निगमनम् (न्याय दर्शन 1.1.39) hetvapadeśāt pratijñāyāḥ punarvacanaṃ nigamanam (Nyāya Darśana 1.1.39) Reaffirmation of the Pratijñā based on similar or dissimilar Hetu, Udāharaṇa, or Upanaya

Another example: Similarity-based Nigamana (conclusion): 1. Pratijñā (hypothesis): Sound is non-eternal 2. Hetu (reason): Because it is produced and whatever is produced is non-eternal 3. Udāharaṇa (example): as in a pot; the pot is produced, and it is non-eternal 4. Upanaya (reaffirmation): So it is with sound (as it is produced) 5. Nigamana (conclusion): Therefore, sound is non-eternal

Dissimilarity-based Nigamana (conclusion): 1. Pratijñā: Sound is non-eternal 2. Hetu: Because it is produced; whatever is not non-eternal (is eternal) is not produced 3. Udāharaṇa: as in the ātmā (soul); the soul is not produced, and it is eternal 4. Upanaya: It is not so with sound (as it is produced) 5. Nigamana: Therefore, sound is non-eternal

In Vāda (discussion), both sides (pakṣa and pratipakṣa) attempt to know the true nature of the object. Therefore, they support or reject a proposition in order to ascertain the true nature of the object, without a desire for victory. Dialogues between ‘teacher and taught’, ‘Krishna and Arjuna’, and ‘Yama and Nachiketa’ in the Indian scriptures are famous examples of Vāda.

3 Examples in Organisational Context The following is an example from an organisational context. Here the objective is the same, and the Pratijñā is reaffirmed based on the similarity or dissimilarity of Udāharaṇa and Upanaya: ‘Trust is a meaningful human value in an organisation with an integrative worldview’, because, if trust were not experienced as a meaningful value by employees, then integrativeness would not be achieved in that organisation. Although in the academic world, management thinkers distinguish different types of trust, we do not discuss them in this chapter. Mayer et al. (1995) suggest that trust leads to outcomes achieved through risk-taking behaviour and that it should be seen as an interdependent concept. This implies that if a trusting party recognises the benevolence, ability, and integrity of another party, then, in the future, they will be more willing to engage in cooperative behaviours with that party. Trust, especially the concept of team trust, has been studied in the context of performance. In a recent meta-study by Morrissette and Kisamore (2020), team trust was positively correlated

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with team performance. They also found that team type significantly moderated the relationship between team trust and team performance in business teams, and that the relationship was stronger for teams that had the authority to make decisions themselves, compared with teams operating according to tightly defined production lines. Let us consider a few examples. The table below displays all five components of Paṃcāvayava Prakriyā for this hypothesis (Pratijñā): Similarity-based example: Pratijñā (hypothesis): Trust in an organisation is meaningful (a value that is a means to achieving higher purposes) Hetu (reason): Because it gives the experience of integrativeness expressed through harmony Udāharaṇa (example): Whatever gives the experience of integrativeness expressed in harmony gives meaning, as in the trust among the members of a household Upanaya (reaffirmation): so it is in an organisation, as it requires the experience of integrativeness expressed in harmony Nigamana (conclusion): therefore, trust is meaningful in an organisation

Dissimilarity-based example: Pratijñā: Trust in an organisation is meaningful (a value that is a means to achieving higher purposes) Hetu: Because it gives the experience of integrativeness expressed in harmony Udāharaṇa: Whatever is not meaningful is not integrative; not harmonious, as in the distrust between soldiers on a battlefield Upanaya: an organisation is not a battlefield; it requires the experience of integrativeness expressed through harmony Nigamana: therefore, trust is meaningful in an organisation

Consider an example where the objects are different: ‘Trust in an organisation is a meaningful human value’ versus ‘Trust in a jungle is not a meaningful human value’. Here the organisation and the jungle are two different objects, and therefore they cannot be called pakṣa and pratipakṣa. Consider now another topic. Following Morrissette and Kisamore (2020), and with regard to the moderation effect mentioned above, we can assume that decision-making is an important aspect of enhancing trust, and one that positively influences organisational performance. Space for decision-making can be created by giving employees autonomy. In the following two examples, we describe how the five steps of reasoning might look in dialogues on this topic. Pakṣa: Pratijñā: Trust is a meaningful human value in an organisation Hetu: Because it helps to achieve the organisation’s goals Udāharaṇa: Wherever there is trust among people, they thrive to achieve goals collectively, as do the members of a household Upanaya: So it is with an organisation because it involves people Nigamana: Therefore, trust is meaningful in an organisation

Pratipakṣa: Pratijñā: Trust is not a meaningful human value in an organisation Hetu: Because employees often deceive for their own personal advantage Udāharaṇa: As on a battlefield, where people often deceive for their personal advantage Upanaya: So it is with an organisation because it involves people Nigamana: Therefore, trust is a not a meaningful human value in an organisation

The Vāda (discussion) between pakṣa and pratipakṣa will continue and both parties will present their viewpoints based on Pramāṇas and Tarka. They might

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come up with a refined conclusion which includes the views that both parties have presented. For example, in the above case, the refined conclusion might be: Trust built on competence and contractual agreements between the members of an organisation is a meaningful human value that helps achieve the organisation’s goals.

Here is another example which, as a result of dialogue between two people, leads to integrativeness in arguments. 1. In a fully decentralised organisation there is no need for managers. 2. In a fully decentralised organisation there is a need for managers. The viewpoint of the first person: • Pratijñā: In a fully decentralised organisation there is no need for managers. • Hetu: Because employees manage themselves and wherever employees manage themselves, there is no need for managers. • Udāharaṇa: Teal Organisations and Holacracy are types of organisations where there is no need for managers. For example, in the Dutch home care organisation Buurtzorg, where there is zero bureaucracy and no managerial control, the organisational architecture ensures that every employee remains accountable. • Upanaya: So it is with the decentralised organisation (as it has self-management). • Nigamana: Therefore, in a fully decentralised organisation, there is no need for managers. The viewpoint of the second person: • Pratijñā: In a fully decentralised organisation, there is still a need for managers. I would like to add that even in a fully decentralised organisation, where there is much less authority and control, employees still need managers. • Hetu: Because all employees have egos, they will inevitably experience hurt as they interact, so it is important that someone can manage conflicts. • Udāharaṇa: If, however, these egos do not dominate the relationships, there is no need for someone to manage the employees. They will take responsibility and feel accountable even in the absence of managerial control. Despite the trust among the members of the household, there is always a head in the family to manage conflicts at times. Therefore, a total absence of managers is not possible. • Upanaya: So, in fully decentralised organisations without managers, employees will find ways to manage themselves, even if informally one of them takes the role of the manager. • Nigamana: Therefore, I agree with your viewpoint and would like to add this dimension too that there is a need for managers in decentralised organisations to manage occasional conflicts. As discussed above, this dialogue will usually continue over several rounds, following the same five ‘rules of argumentation’ until there is saturation—which means there are no new arguments and both parties come to a conclusion about the truth regarding the phenomenon under discussion. This conclusion produces a coherent outcome and does not involve a winner and a loser.

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3.1

Fallacious and Fault-Finding Dialogues

In practice, however, people may deploy different forms of argumentation in their dialogues in order to win. We discuss two such forms, Jalpa and Vitaṇḍā, below. Jalpa (Wrangling)

यथोक्तोपपन्नश्छलजातिनिग्रहस्थानसाधनोपालंभो जल्पः (न्याय दर्शन 1.2.2) yathoktopapannaśchalajātinigrahasthānasādhanopālaṃbho jalpaḥ (Nyāya Darśana 1.2.2)

Jalpa, or wrangling, adopts all the means (Pramāṇa, Tarka, Paṃcāvayava Prakriyā) that are used for Vāda apart from that, unlike in Vāda, in Jalpa, one or the other party also uses Chala, Jāti, or Nigrahasthāna as a means to establishing their own proposition and refuting the opposite side. Let us now consider how Chala, Jāti, and Nigrahasthāna are used deliberately in dialogue by a party whose aim is to win: • Chala (छल) consists of opposing an assertion by assuming an alternative meaning. Consider the sentence, ‘The child loves to play in boots’. Here, the word ‘boots’ could have two meanings: 1. Boots worn on the feet to play outdoors and 2. The plural form of the boot (trunk) of a car. If, instead of accepting the speaker’s intended meaning, the opposing party assumes an alternative meaning in order to refute the other side, this is called Chala. Consider another example, relating to education. In a discussion on students’ perceptions of universities, a person might say—‘Students in Amsterdam prefer Free University’. The word ‘free’ can be interpreted in two ways: as a name (representing free academic thinking, not dependent on state or church or any institution) or as free of charge (without cost). Instead of interpreting it as the name of the university, the other party, when taking part in a dialogue, may adopt the alternative meaning to the word ‘free’ and say something like: ‘All students would like to go to a university where they don’t have to pay; no wonder they prefer the Free University’. This would change the line of argument, and the discussion might turn to the cost of education, or free benefits and subsidies in it. This would cause the initiator to lose ground. • Jāti (जाति) consists of opposing an assertion through similarity or dissimilarity. For example, – Similarity: if a person says—‘Sound is non-eternal because sound is produced. Whatever is produced is non-eternal, as in a pot’. To rebut this view, another person might argue that if sound were non-eternal, like a pot, because both of them are produced, then, just as a pot is, sound should also be physical and weighable.

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– Dissimilarity: if a person says—‘Sound is non-eternal because sound is produced. Whatever is produced is non-eternal, as in a pot’. To rebut this view, another person might argue that sound might be non-eternal, like a pot, because both of them are produced, but unlike a pot, the sound is not perceived by touch; therefore, sound cannot be non-eternal. • Nigrahasthāna (निग्रहस्थान) consists of indicating the opposing party's misunderstanding or their failure to understand their own proposition. Chala, Jāti, and Nigrahasthāna are considered as secondary means used to refute an opposing view, but they do not serve as a direct means for establishing a person's own view. Vitaṇḍā (Fault finding)

स प्रतिपक्षस्थापनाहीनो वितण्डा (न्याय दर्शन 1.2.3) sa pratipakṣasthāpanāhīno vitaṇḍā (Nyāya Darśana 1.2.3)

A person using Vitaṇḍā adopts the same means as Jalpa to refute the opposite side but never discloses their own proposition to the other party. If, in a discussion, a party merely tries to defeat the opposing party without putting forward their own proposition as a counterproposition which they need to prove, this is called Vitaṇḍā. A person or party that neither puts forward its own proposition nor tries to defend a proposition is called Vaitaṇḍika.

3.2

Applying Śāstrārtha to Management by Values

The above discussion on the forms and processes of Śāstrārtha helps us understand the dimensions it can be used to address. But, given today’s VUCA environment, it is pertinent that we focus on the integrative aspect of Śāstrārtha and the positive contribution it can make in such a context. This section presents several ways that Śāstrārtha can be applied to Management by Values in the education sector and as a strategic tool in governance and business. Education: Educators have an opportunity of enriching classroom discussion by adopting this methodology, whose aim is to bring multiple dimensions into a discussion. This method has been practised by the Faculty of Management Studies of WISDOM (The Women’s Institute for Studies in Development Oriented Management) at Banasthali Vidyapith University in a number of sessions in the Faculty Development Programme on Personal Finance. For example, the programme featured a module on ‘Can money bring happiness?’ Another example was for teaching values and ethics, where, to generate interest, the theme ‘Towards Dharma and Ethos: Beyond Ethics’ was chosen. In addition, and with the aim of

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addressing confusing and intriguing matters like spirituality and materialism, one of the topics chosen was ‘Can Spirituality and Materialism go together?’ Impact: These Śāstrārthas created a very positive impact among their audience, and the organisers report that participants regularly requested more sessions of this type. Strategy: Policymakers today need better frameworks to harmonise ideas and approaches. This is true in government, the corporate world, and many other systems. The pluralistic and integrative approach offered by Śāstrārtha can help resolve numerous issues and conflicts. The Vice-President of India, Shri Venkaiah Naidu, notes that the 10th Prime Minister of India, the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee, practised Śāstrārtha as a core approach when running a successful coalition government of 12 political parties. The method followed was that any decision or initiative would be taken only after a wider consultation. The minister, or person, promoting a new bill, policy, or initiative, was expected to make a presentation to all stakeholders, and discussions took place in a constructive and integrative manner to serve the national interest.

4 Conclusion The Ancient Indian method of Dialogue, Śāstrārthas, although presented here in the context of management, can also be applied to other fields, given its insights on argumentation. Researchers can benefit by applying its methodology when analysing dialogues between people in order to determine the true nature of the topic they are investigating. They can also apply it to help facilitate change; for example, by producing an integrative outcome in groups where several different points of view are present. The aim in this could be to achieve a transformation towards adopting a particular human value that will act as a means to benefit everyone in an organisation. In the Dialogue Approach, we have seen three main characteristics: the five types of psychological preparation, a focus on understanding subjective experiences, and having transformation as the main aim. Insights from Śāstrārthas can be added to such an approach because they focus on determining truth and moving things away from subjective realities towards objective realities, by making the subjective realities explicit and preparing the participants for a dialogue using a logical step-by-step approach. Both approaches stress the importance of the participants having an open attitude. At the same time, Śāstrārthas stress the importance of collective thinking and create space for subjective reality because they focus on intellect and wisdom. The Śāstrārtha approach can be viewed as an inclusive method that offers both a materialistic focus (doing) and a spiritual focus (becoming). It helps consider values not as ends but as means that help achieve higher purposes in organisations. In this chapter, we have focused on the two main teachings of Chakraborty: values as means, and the acknowledgement of both material and spiritual life goals in organisations. Further research on the

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applications of Śāstrārthas in a management context may enrich the academic understanding of the role of human values in management and may even result in transformations towards more inclusion and integrative worldviews.

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Ethical Decision-Making—Synthesizing S. K. Chakraborty’s Classification of Ethics with Levels of Moral Judgement and the Four-Component Model Sunil G. Savur

In recent years, ethical decision-making (EDM) in organizations has received considerable attention. Several approaches and models have been postulated. Some are descriptive theoretical models and others are normative or prescriptive models. Descriptive models have been categorized into (a) rationalist-based and (b) nonrationalist-based models. Prescriptive approaches have resulted in applying practical philosophical approaches (such as utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue), codes of ethics, ethics training, whistleblowing, supported by numerous acts of legislation (such as the Sarbanes–Oxley Act and others)—see Dedeke (2015); Savur et al., (2018, p 119); Schwartz (2016) for summaries of ethical decision-making models. A third approach called the ‘Integrated’ EDM model has been put forth by several researchers that aim to bridge the divide between the above two approaches (Dedeke, 2015; Schwartz, 2016). However, unethical and illegal activities abound all over the world, some shockingly large, resulting in enormous costs to stakeholders including employees, consumers, shareholders, communities, and the environment. We only must look at the industrial, social, and environmental disasters that the world has witnessed over the past century and its continuation in the twenty-first century (for example Enron, the Global Financial Crisis, the oil spills, Rana Plaza collapse, child labour, institutional abuses). Moreover, these are happening despite attempts by business schools the world over to teach Business Ethics as an essential course in most degree programmes. Therefore, it seems reasonable to postulate that the descriptive, prescriptive, and integrated models are insufficient to comprehend, analyse, and act on the ethical issues and dilemmas that we are facing now and in the future. This paper will suggest that it is possible to slow down and reverse the unethical trend

S. G. Savur (B) University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_9

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by integrating (1) James Rest’s descriptive ‘Four-Component’ model (FCM), (2) Bebeau, Thoma and Walker’s ‘Three levels of moral judgment’ (TMJ) and (3) S K Chakraborty’s three classifications of ethics (TCE)—compliance ethics, cognitive ethics and consciousness ethics. This paper has four sections. The first section will examine various ethical decision-making models. The second section will proceed to introduce the concepts of FCM, TMJ, and TCE. The third section will develop a theoretical EDM model that incorporates these three concepts within the existing models, followed by a conclusion and future directions.

1 Ethics and Ethical Decision-Making Models Research suggest that business managers consider areas where ethical issues are most experienced are competition, pricing, and bidding; outsourcing; accounts and finance; intellectual property; and hiring and firing (Savur, 2011). While efforts to improve the ethical quality of business decisions have intensified (Ciulla, 2011; Ferrell et al., 1989; Goodpaster, 2010; Voegtlin et al., 2012), loss of public trust in businesses resulting from scandals such as bribes, unsafe products, financial misconduct, environmental degradation, and child labour has focused managers’ inclination to improve ethical decision-making in business. Researchers have noted that a lack of understanding, guidance, and application of ethical principles and moral philosophies (Ferrell et al., 1989; Trevino, 1986a) could lead to ineffective ethical decision-making by business managers. With so many factors that might influence EDM, there has been a significant amount of effort “to give a unified general account of good decision-making, but that does not necessarily result in ways to improve ethical decisions in everyday practice” (Savur et al., 2018, p. 118). EDM models could be categorized into ones that are rationalist-based and ones that are non-rationalist based. The rationalist-based view assumes that moral reasoning leads to moral judgment and subsequent actions led initially by Kohlberg (1973) and later by Rest (1984). Since 1984, the rationalist model was further developed by Ferrell and Gresham (1985) (social and cultural factors), (Trevino, 1986) (personsituation interaction), (Jones, 1991) (issue-contingent and moral intensity). The nonrationalist view assumes intuition and emotion influences moral judgment followed by explanations (reason) or justifications (rationalizations) (proponents led by Haidt (2001), Sonenshein (2007); Tsang (2002), and others). Recently, attempts have been made to show that rationalist and non-rationalist approaches, or more specifically, reason (and rationalization) and intuition (and emotion) may not be mutually exclusive and may interact to achieve moral judgments. This integration, also known as ‘dual-process’ or ‘two-systems’, has been proposed by Greene et al. (2001), Reynolds (2006) among others. Two recent models that illustrate such integrations are of particular interest to us—(1) the cognitiveintuitionist model (CIM) proposed by (Dedeke, 2015) which consists of five stages: issue framing, pre-processing (automatic cognitions and emotions), moral judgment,

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moral reflection, and moral intent, and (2) the integrated ethical decision-making model (I-EDM) proposed by (Schwartz, 2016) which consists of issue-norms, recognize, mental processes of intuition-emotion-reason-rationalization, judgment, intention, and action, influenced by situation, moral capacity, learning and lack of awareness. Both models have their origins in and are based on James Rest’s four-component model of ethical decision making (Rest, 1984), widely acknowledged as the most significant rationalist-based model of EDM—see Schwartz (2016) for more details. While both integration models reflect the importance of reason and intuition in the moral judgment component of the EDMs, it fails to consider two queries about moral judgment. Firstly, are there any moral principles or schemas that can be used to resolve ethical issues and dilemmas and are there any means of showing that the rules of our morality are the right ones? What concepts do people in business and society use to make moral judgements? We propose to introduce the three levels of moral judgment processing postulated by Bebeau (2002), Bebeau and Thoma (1999), Thoma (2002), Walker (2002). Secondly, to do the right thing in the right way in each case of an ethical issue or dilemma cannot be done solely by following a rule, a reason, or even by intuition. It needs one to be in the right consciousness. We propose to introduce the concept of ‘Consciousness Ethics’ postulated by Chakraborty and Chakraborty (2009), Sarkar (2019).

2 The Consciousness-Based Ethical Decision-Making Model Figure 1 shows the concept of the proposed Consciousness-based Ethical DecisionMaking Model (CEDM). This model has the foundations of Rest’s Four-Component model, the moderating and influencing factors of Trevino, Jones, and others, concepts from the integrated models of Dedeke and Schwartz, and our proposed introduction of the Three Levels of Moral Judgment (TMJ) and SK Chakraborty’s three classifications of ethics (TCE). The CEDM consists of six sections: moral issue framing, moral awareness, processing (emotion, intuition, reason, rationalization), moral judgment, moral intent, and moral behaviour. Moderators from existing EDM models are situational and individual. The proposed influencing factors (in dotted boxes) are TMJ’s professional codes of ethics, organizational codes of ethics, and abstract principles; and TEC’s compliance ethics, cognitive ethics, and consciousness ethics.

2.1 Moral Issue Framing and Norms The process of the CEDM model begins at the point where individuals tend to perceive and process situations in different ways. There are two influencing factors at

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Fig. 1 The consciousness-based ethical decision-making model (CEDM)

this stage—framing and norms. Framing occurs when individuals generate meaning from the external stimuli and could therefore perceive the situation either from a moral frame or a non-moral frame (Sonenshein, 2007; Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe 2008b). A non-moral frame would be legal frame or business frame, e.g., deciding not to supply expensive life-saving drugs at no-cost or subsidized cost to poorer countries, whereas a moral frame would find ways to do it. The type of framing at this stage would dictate subsequent processes of the model. Norms are standards or expectations of behaviour that are influenced by either normative conditions where values, beliefs, and actions of external entities at national, cultural, and societal levels (Philippe & Durand, 2011), or by cognitive conditions where internal takenfor-granted values and beliefs at work, group, and organizational levels (Hannah et al., 2011). An example of normative conditions would be bribery acceptable at cultural or national level, and cognitive conditions would be padding expense account acceptable at organizational level (Schwartz, 2016).

2.2 Rest’s Four Components (FC) of Ethical Decision-Making Rest’s (1986, pp. 3–5) FC is based on individual ethical decision-making and behaviour, where a person faced with an ethical issue would recognize the moral issue (awareness), make a moral judgement, establish moral intent, and engage in moral behaviour (act).

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FC 1—Moral awareness (recognizing the moral issue)—involves interpreting the situation with sensitivity and involves imagining what courses of action are possible in a situation and tracing out the consequences of action in terms of how each action would affect each party involved (Rest, 1984, 1986). Subsequent components of the model do not come into play if the individual does not perceive some ethical content in a situation (Hunt & Vitell, 1986), a person at a lower stage of moral development (Blasi, 1990; Kohlberg, 1981; Rest, 1974) may not see a situation as an ethical issue (Ferrell et al., 1989), and recognition of an ethical issue can vary between persons because of the differences in a person’s knowledge of the moral good (O’Boyle, 2002). Recognition of a moral issue can also depend on gender, nationality and culture, ethical experience, personal values and orientation, moral disengagement from the ethical aspects of a decision, situations such as job satisfaction, issue intensity (for example harming 10,000 people is morally more intense than harming 10 people), and organizational ethical climates generated by factors such as formal and informal systems (Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008a). In the business context, Bebeau (2002) contends that recognizing ethical issues can be influenced by knowledge of the regulations, codes, norms of one’s profession and recognizing when they apply. FC 2—Make a moral judgement—involves determining what course of action would best fulfil a moral ideal, that is, what ought to be done in the situation (Rest, 1984, 1986, p. 8). From FC 1, a person is aware of the various possible courses of action and what the consequences would be to all parties involved. In FC 2, a person needs to decide which of these courses of action is morally right, fair, or comes closest to a person’s ideals (Rest, 1984). Making moral judgements has been suggested to depend on several aspects—individual’s cognitive structure such as knowledge, values, beliefs, and attitudes (Ferrell & Gresham, 1985), evaluation methods such as deontological and teleological (Hunt & Vitell, 1986), moral developmental stage (Rest, 1986, pp. 8–11; Trevino, 1986a), issue-dependent (Jones, 1991), and ability to think analytically (O’Boyle, 2002). FC 3—Establish moral intent—involves resolving to place moral concerns ahead of other concerns by selecting among competing value outcomes, the one to act upon, and deciding whether or not to fulfil one’s moral ideal (Rest, 1984, 1986, p. 13). Having decided on a course of action which a person perceives to be morally right and fair by applying one or several of the decision-making processes (FC 2), a person would now evaluate the moral decision with other competing values. Typically, moral values are not the only motives that people have and there is awareness of a number of possible outcomes based on different motives such as certain preferred consequences related to self-interest, for example, advancement in careers (Hunt & Vitell, 1986; Jones, 1991; Rest, 1986), organizational pressures, greater good, desire to avoid aversive consequences and internal stimuli such as emotions, feelings, and mood (Jones, 1991). Establishing moral intent is also dependent on social influence to guide behaviour, ego strength of conviction, locus of control (an individual’s perception of how much control they exert over events in their lives), and the person’s freedom to act (O’Boyle, 2002; Trevino, 1986a).

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FC 4—Engage in moral behaviour (act)—involves executing and implementing a plan of action. It comprises figuring out a sequence of actions, working around difficulties, overcoming fatigue, resisting distractions, and not losing sight of the eventual goal (Rest, 1984, 1986, p. 15). Factors and aspects for engaging in moral behaviour include a combination of individual and organizational factors that can push an individual’s moral intention to take moral action and exhibit moral behaviour (Ferrell & Gresham, 1985), opportunity to evaluate actual consequences and to provide feedback into personal experiences (Hunt & Vitell, 1986), higher levels of moral development (Trevino, 1986a), organizational culture (Ferrell et al., 1989), tendency of people to hold themselves less accountable for their behaviour than they would hold others in the same situation (Jones, 1991), and ‘courage to make behaviour conform to the good even when it is personally dangerous’ (O’Boyle, 2002, p. 273).

2.3 Situational Factors Considerable research exists to indicate that situational and organizational factors can influence ethical decision-making (Ferrell & Gresham, 1985; Hunt & Scott, 1986; Trevino, 1986b) and have been included in various EDM models. The central aspect of the situational factor is moral intensity which captures the extent of issue-related moral imperative in terms of the magnitude of consequences probability of effect, immediacy, proximity, and proportionality (Jones, 1991). Moral intensity of an issue could increase when a situation requires breaking rules, codes, or laws. Higher levels of moral intensity would increase sensitivity to moral awareness (Schwartz, 2016). Other aspects related to situational factors are the importance of the issue—moral awareness can heighten based on how important the issue is to the individual, and issue complexity—for example, an individual may not take ethical action if they feel that the whistleblowing process is highly complex (Schwartz, 2016).

2.4 Individual Factors Researchers have integrated the influence of individual factors into most ethical decision-making models. These include factors such as cognitive stages of moral development (Kohlberg, 1973, 1981; Trevino, 1986b), individual values (Ferrell & Gresham, 1985), personal experiences (Hunt & Scott, 1986), and locus of control (Trevino, 1986b). All of these can be attributed to an individual’s maturity and capacity to engage in recognizing, judging, and acting on ethical issues. Recent research has identified factors such as ‘moral character’, ‘moral conation’ (willpower or desire to act according to one’s ethical principle), ‘moral ownership’ (feeling responsible for their and others’ actions), and ‘moral courage’ (strength to resist pressure to act unethically)—see Hannah et al. (2011) for more details. There are other potential factors that can also affect EDM stages—such as demographical

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variables, personality variations, and ethical experience—see Craft (2013), Lehnert et al. (2015), O’Fallon and Butterfield (2005) for a complete list of individual and situational factors that influence ethical decision-making.

2.5 Emotions and Intuitions Although David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, proposed that reason was “the slave of the passions” see Lehrer (2009: 17), most early philosophers including Leibniz, Descartes, and Kant tried to construct a moral system entirely free of feelings using the argument that doing the right thing was a consequence of acting rationally (Lehrer, 2009: 172). The idea that emotions could have a role in moral decision-making was researched mainly in the twentieth century. Researchers now suggest that emotions are linked to judgments and that our judgments or beliefs can determine our emotions (Nussbaum, 2001). Provis (2013: 55) has argued that ‘moral judgement involves the exercise of intuition that is developed by social interaction and feedback’. The social-intuitionist model of ethical decision-making has been based on the view that emotions dominate the fast intuitive process (Greene et al., 2004; Haidt, 2001). In some cases, emotion might be the initial response to an ethical situation or dilemma, followed by moral reasoning process to justify the initial response (Haidt, 2001, 2012). Initial emotional responses such as anger or disgust can lead to intuitive moral judgments that a behaviour is unacceptable and needs to be addressed. Emotions can also lead to moral rationalizations, for example, rejection for promotion could lead to rationalizing padding expense account (Dedeke, 2015). Intuition too plays a significant role in the ethical decision-making process. This initial ‘gut’ feeling of rightness or wrongness is typically followed by moral reasoning or rationalization process (Dedeke, 2015; Haidt, 2001; Reynolds, 2006).

2.6 Moral Reasoning and Rationalization Moral reasoning involves a deliberative process leading to a particular moral judgment. It enables the decision-maker to reflect upon the situation by considering stakeholder claims, or by applying certain ethical theories such as utilitarianism greatest good for greatest number/cost-benefit analysis), deontology (duty, obligations, intentions), and code of ethics/conduct at the organizational or institutional level (Saltzstein & Kasachkoff, 2004). Complex ethical dilemmas may require a more rigorous process. Moral rationalization occurs when ‘individuals convince themselves that their behaviour does not violate their moral standards’ (Tsang, 2002, p. 26). One of the key aspects of moral rationalization is moral motivations. Here, again, as in moral reasoning, dimensions of utilitarianism or deontological ethics can affect moral motivations. Robin Hood, for example, would be considered moral

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by utilitarians and in contrast deontologists would argue that he acted immorally because stealing cannot be willed to be a universal law.

2.7 Three Levels of Moral Judgment (TMJ) Researchers of moral judgement have suggested that people in society and business alike utilize one or more of the following three levels of moral judgement: (1) abstract or general principles, (2) intermediate-level moral concepts, and (3) concrete rules or codes of ethics (Bebeau, 2002; Bebeau & Thoma, 1999; Thoma, 2002; Walker, 2002). Abstract or general principles include ethical theories described by philosophers and include principles such as greater good, utility, justice, beneficence, duty, moral rules, religious rules, the golden rule, and their related principles (Bebeau, 2002; Walker, 2002). Some of these ethical theories are the well-known and much discussed Teleological (utilitarian), Deontological, and Virtue approaches to ethical decisionmaking. Because these theories are general in nature, it is not obvious which theory should be applied to any particular circumstance, and do not provide easy resolution (Fisher & Lovell, 2009, p. 101). They are useful because they (a) can explain why actions are right or wrong, (b) provide a decision procedure for resolving difficult situations, (c) make it possible for individuals who make moral decisions to explain and justify them to others, and (d) can be used to evaluate conventional morality. Intermediate-level moral concepts include professional codes or policies developed for specific professionals in law, medicine, engineering, accountancy and finance, and insurance, among others. Examples are ‘professional autonomy’, ‘competence’, ‘informed consent’, ‘confidentiality’, ‘due process’, ‘rule of law’, ‘whistleblowing’, and ‘intellectual property’ (Bebeau & Thoma, 1999: 348). Intermediate concepts thus apply to a range or class of situations and individuals are required to interpret and apply them in context (Thoma, 2002). The concrete level includes codes of ethics and conduct at the organizational level and serves to direct individual behaviour in very clearly defined situations. These are essentially lists of specific prescriptions and prohibitions designed to serve as action guides in particular circumstances and seldom provide a rationale or explanation from moral theory (Bebeau & Thoma, 1999; Walker, 2002). Walker (2002) further notes that codes at the concrete level derive their coherence from the intermediatelevel concepts and in turn, the intermediate concepts may derive coherence from the more abstract and general principles such as justice or utility. Bebeau and Thoma’s (1999: 348) research indicates that the intermediate concept that reflects the content of professional ethics is a better guide to action than more abstract notions of morality.

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3 Classifications of Ethics In modern times, according to Chakraborty and Chakraborty (2009: 40), moral judgment, within the ethical decision-making process, is heavily influenced by a ‘huge corpus of “compliance ethics” (codes, legislation, etc.) and “cognitive ethics” (intellectual theories)’. Compliance ethics can be understood as arriving at moral judgments based on organizational and professional codes of ethics and conduct, bearing semblance to ‘concrete level’ of the three levels of moral judgment (see Bebeau and colleagues for example) discussed earlier. Extensive literature exists with regard to codes of ethics (Mckinney et al., 2010). These codes are perceived as essential for sustaining an ethical culture in organizations (Garcia-Sanchez et al., 2015) through ethical business practices, and may also lead to reputational benefits (Mckinney et al., 2010), risk management, improving customer relationships, and reduce negative consumer actions such as boycotts. However, ethical collapses such as Enron, which was at one point in its history heralded as a paragon of corporate responsibility and ethics (Sims & Brinkman, 2003), leads us to question the effectiveness of these codes on ethical performances of organizations. Different approaches to improve the effectiveness of such codes have been suggested. These include improving code quality (Erwin, 2011), a ‘bottom-up’ approach that advances shared values through reflection and empowerment of the entire organization (Hill & Rapp, 2014), independence and diversity of the board of directors (Garcia-Sanchez et al., 2015), making code of ethics a living document, conduct compliance audit (Collins, 2006), identify specific behaviours, potential punishments for violations, and creation of codes using participative processes (Mckinney et al., 2010). Cognitive ethics in contrast can be understood as arriving at moral judgments using intellectual concepts and theories such as utilitarianism, deontological ethics, stakeholder theory, rights, social justice, and ethics of care, bearing semblance to Bebeau’s intermediate level of moral judgment discussed earlier. Yet, as Chakraborty and Chakraborty (2009: 40) note, ‘unethicality is on the rise’ and observe that we know what is right, yet we do not act upon it; we also know what is wrong, yet we do not desist from doing it. ‘Right knowing’ relates to being aware of the existence of ethical issues and possibly having the knowledge of what is the right thing to do. Moral judgment would result from ‘cognitive-scientificsecular-rational’ approach (Chakraborty & Chakraborty, 2009: 40) that could be attributed to the three levels of moral judgment (abstract, intermediate, and concrete levels) and the compliance and cognitive ethical approaches discussed earlier. ‘Right behaving’ would begin with establishing the intention to act and culminate into the final action or behaviour itself. As observed by Chakraborty and Chakraborty (2009), ‘right knowing’ does not necessarily or automatically lead to ‘right behaving’. The answer, according to them is the ‘Consciousness Ethics’ approach to ethical decisionmaking. One of the early proponents of this approach was the Indian philosopher, Sri Aurobindo (see Gupta 2014 for Sri Aurobindo’s life), who argued that ‘to do the right thing in the right way in each case and at each moment, one must be in the right consciousness….it can never be done by following a fixed mental rule…’ (Aurobindo,

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1995: 58). At this point, we need to define and describe the terms ‘consciousness’ and ‘right consciousness’ before discussing the concept and application of ‘consciousness ethics’. Consciousness, for long a realm in philosophy, religion, and spirituality is gaining recognition among psychologists, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and ethics. It can be referred to the waking state, any mental state, experience, self-recognition, self-awareness, self-knowledge (Zeman, 2001). It can be defined as consisting of ‘inner, qualitative, subjective state and processes of sentience or awareness…It includes everything from feeling a pain to perceiving objects visually, to state of anxiety and depression, to working out crossword puzzles, playing chess, trying to remember your aunt’s phone number, arguing about politics, or just wishing you were somewhere else’ (Searle, 2000: 559). In arguing the differences between human and artificial ethical agency, Torrance (2008) asserts that there’s a strong link in humans between consciousness, autonomous self-maintenance, and moral norms. Cognitive neuroscience has delivered links between consciousness and implicit-explicit memory, and consciousness and deliberate-automatic actions. What is clear is that consciousness is ‘intimately related to the activity of the brain and that it has an important influence of behaviour’ (Zeman, 2001: 1264). Hill (2009: 1–27) has distinguished five forms of consciousness: agent consciousness (to be able to think, feel, perceive, and experience bodily sensations), propositional consciousness (when one is conscious or have knowledge about something), introspective and relational consciousness (a mental state that is independent of information about the external world, but is immediate and does not need reasoning— conscious that and conscious of ), experiential consciousness (mental events that participate in higher level cognitive ability such as reasoning), and phenomenal consciousness (when one becomes aware of qualitative characteristics such as pain or taste of oranges). From their definitions, we can infer that each form of consciousness contributes to awareness, judgments, and behaviours. In the eastern traditions, consciousness has been shown as that which is composed of the embedded ‘seeds’ of the past actions of the self and that of our family and society (Marques, 2012), and that consciousness can be classified into moral and immoral consciousness. Immoral consciousness produces undesirable consequences and originates from attachment, greed, ill will, and ignorance, whereas moral consciousness produces desirable consequences and emanate from non-attachment, generosity, goodwill, and wisdom (Marques, 2012: 29), and within that exists the concept of karma—which holds that external causal conditions result from the accumulation of one’s actions, that engaging in negative acts will foster negative results, that harming others will harm ourselves, and that bringing others happiness will result in our own future happiness (Rinpoche, 2002: 98). Deep explorations of consciousness can be found in the Upanishads, Advaita Vedanta, and in the commentaries of Sri Shankaracharya, Sri Aurobindo, Sri Radhakrishnan, and Mahatma Gandhi among others—see Gupta (2014); Pradhan (2020). So, what then is ‘right consciousness’? Sri Aurobindo considers human evolution as an ongoing evolution of consciousness. While consciousness emancipates in plant and animal life through signs of giving and taking, feelings, drives, and emotions, the

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human mind shows further emancipation of consciousness characterized by ideas, thoughts, and intelligence. At this stage, the mind begins making distinctions between subject and object, me and you, right and wrong. The Vedic tradition considers this as primitive forms of consciousness, ego-bound, dependent of physical senses. Above it lie several levels of higher consciousness of self-revealed wisdom, where truths are seen, are inevitable, perfect, comprehensive, and all-encompassing, ultimately leading to ‘supramental consciousness’ (Cornelissen, 2004). In sum, it would be prudent to define ‘right consciousness’ as consciousness other than the ego and non-dependent on physical senses. ‘Consciousness ethics’ is thus derived from the idea that ‘right consciousness’ is a pre-requisite to do the right thing in the right way in each and every situation (Aurobindo, 1995; Chakraborty & Chakraborty, 2009: 40). It would be specifically applicable when we know what is right but cannot act upon it or know what is wrong but cannot desist from doing it. Knowing what is right or wrong can result from the other two components of TCE: compliance ethics (codes, legislation, etc.) and cognitive ethics (intellectual theories such as utilitarianism, deontology, virtue, etc.). However, acting upon the right things in the right way and desisting from doing wrong would require ‘Consciousness ethics’. Chakraborty and Chakraborty (2009, p. 41) confirms this evaluation by noting that “this ‘right consciousness’ is the antidote to the present consciousness of competitive divisiveness, which is the root of unethicality.” Considering the all-encompassing nature of ‘Consciousness ethics’, we suggest that it could be applied to each stage of the CEDM model as shown in Fig. 1. Five practical elements have been identified for applying consciousness ethics (Chakraborty & Chakraborty, 2009: 51–57): 1.

2.

3.

4.

Conscious intentionality: it is unethical when an entity acts intentionally to gain some advantage or inflict some loss over another entity who is either unaware of or is defenceless against such intention. Decision-making involves choice from a set of options or variables with a purpose. When a decision can adversely affect an entity, it needs to be judged in terms of ‘should’ or ‘should not’ and therefore needs to satisfy certain universal and local normative standards. Nishkam Karma (NK): A desirable element, also known as detached involvement or desireless action, NK is enunciated in Ch. II verse 47 of the Bhagavad Gita: action is required but never for its fruits, nor should there be any attachment. NK should not be confused with indifference to work. Action should be selfless, performed with indifference to the outcomes, success or failure, praise, or blame. Sakam Karma (SK): An undesirable element, also known as attached involvement, SK relates to performing work with an obsession for additional personal recognition, gain, or reward. This could erode the decision-makers sense of proportion and prudence, be the major cause for violation of ethical norms, and may lead to short-term gain with long-term negative consequences.

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Raising efficiency to effectiveness: While efficiency is simply an output-input ratio where input can be unethical means, excellence or effectiveness is attained by achieving efficiency through consciousness ethics, which can be enhanced by NK.

4 Conclusion and Future Directions After addressing several insufficiencies in the existing EDM models, this paper has attempted to merge current processes of framing, emotion, intuition, reason, rationalization, individual, and situational factors, and Rest’s Four-Component model with Bebeau and colleagues’ Three Levels of Moral Judgment (TMJ) and Chakraborty and Chakraborty’s Three Classifications of Ethics (TCE), specifically the concept of ‘Consciousness Ethics’. The new model, which we called Consciousness-based Ethical Decision-making (CEDM) could provide future opportunities for research such as conducting empirical studies to understand the application and impact of utilizing ‘Consciousness ethics’ in ethical decision-making. Further, as suggested by Rest and Narvaez (1994: 202–205) new models should drive further research leading to new instruments to assess morality, devising new tests, and establishing links to predicting behaviour. Such research could include empirical studies to establish comprehensive measurements to develop reliable and valid assessments of each component of the CEDM and then flesh out their structure and importance in moral functioning. Conducting empirical research could enhance the understanding of the use of professional codes and norms within the context of ‘Consciousness ethics to recognize ethical issues and make moral judgements.

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Time to Globalize Sarvodaya? Sanjeeb Kakoty

1983 would be forever etched in the collective memory of Assam. It was a year that convulsed the state with large-scale sectarian violence that left countless dead, maimed, widowed, orphaned, and homeless. The genesis of the tumult was student led civil protests against the government on issues of illegal immigration into the state. Though the student organizations orchestrating the protests proclaimed their commitment to the Gandhian model of Satyagraha and nonviolence, yet they remained abjectly powerless to contain the waves of violence and counter violence that was subsequently unleashed. This was no Chauri Chaura of 1922, wherein Gandhi had suspended the noncooperation movement due to an incident of police firing and the subsequent public retaliation of burning the police station that claimed many lives. (Chandra et al., 1989). Modern India seemed to be exhibiting alarming tendencies that openly displayed the mainstreaming of intolerance, violence and counter violence. Was this a portent of the rise of a new social order that was critical of Gandhi and skeptical of Truth and Non Violence? For an impressionable teenager like me, the dichotomy between Gandhian principles and the ever present violence was extremely difficult to navigate. Those were heady days filled with impotent anger, fear, frustration, and the ever present threat of violence. The exposure to the daily news of violence and the frequent sights of death and killings ensured that an entire generation never had a normal childhood. It was commonplace for friends to debate the efficacy of the Gandhian model of protests using truth and nonviolence as the only weapons versus the Maoist dictum of power flows out of the barrel of a gun. Probably, flush out of such a debate, my brother made a pronouncement at the dinner table “Gandhi and his philosophy is obsolete and hence should be consigned to history”. Probably in some other home the elders would have let the statement pass. But not in our family whose lineage S. Kakoty (B) Sustainability and Liberal Studies Area, Indian Institute of Management, Shillong, Meghalaya, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_10

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included Maniram Dewan, the first martyr from Assam who was sent to the gallows by the British and Sundari Barkakoty, the indomitable lady who had been chosen to lead Gandhi’s call for Satyagraha in the state. My teenage brother’s statement was sacrilege and the words profane! What followed was no reprimand but a series of conversations on philosophy that I hungrily soaked in. These discussions were replete with anecdotes and recounting of personal experiences by my father and his sister my aunt, both of whom were freedom fighters and spent time with Gandhiji and Vinoba Bhave, among others. All of this provided me with a rare and unique understanding of Gandhian thought and the Sarvodaya philosophy. This experience was something that was much more immediate and refreshingly free of theoretical trappings.

1 Gandhi Lights the Lamp A first person account from my aunt, Hema Kakoty, who was in the first batch of seven girls from Assam initiated by Gandhiji and subsequently spent her entire life in the Kasturba Gandhi Ashram. (A documentary entitled Gandhi Vinobar Khoje Khoje or In the footsteps of Gandhi and Vinoba, was made by the author for Doordarshan Guwahati 2003–04). On the 9th of January 1945, the Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust formally began its journey in Assam. It was a Trust that had been set up in memory of Gandhiji’s wife Kasturba, who had died while being incarcerated by the British, on 22nd February 1944, in the Aga Khan Palace Prison. There is an interesting story about the funding of the Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust. Gandhi’s followers had decided that since he was reaching the milestone of his 75th birthday that year, they would commemorate it by giving him a purse of seventy five lakh rupees. Collecting one coin at a time the purse for the occasion steadily grew. Soon the collection touched eighty lakh rupees and it was this purse that was handed over to him by Sarojini Naidu. But by then, Gandhi’s personal life had irretrievably changed with Kasturba’s passing away. A lifelong companion, who not only gave him strength but also often acted as a sounding board for his ideas and a moral compass. Her departure deeply affected him. So, he decided to use the money in memory of Kasturba and for the service of the nation. After a lot of deliberation it was decided that a Trust would be created. It would focus on rural India through affirmative voluntary service that would transform the education, health, and livelihood scenario of the rural masses. It would be achieved by focusing primarily on women and children. Each state of the country would be covered and a select few individuals from each state would be trained by Gandhiji to take forward the mission of the Trust. A network of exemplary women leaders was enlisted for each province of the country. Assam was put under the charge of Amal Prabha Das, whose father Dr. Harekrishna Das was associated with Gandhiji. In 1945, the Mahatma himself arrived in Guwahati and was put up in a hut made of bamboo and thatch constructed for him atop the Sarania hills, on land donated by Dr Harekrishan Das. In attendance were the 7 young girls who had been chosen from different parts

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of the state to receive the initiation. Among them was the teenage Hema Kakoty, my aunt. On the 9th of January, Gandhi lit an earthen lamp and initiated them by saying that this lamp should be used to light countless lamps in the villages and dispel darkness. The qualities that each volunteer must possess were listed as fearlessness, healthy in body and mind, capacity to live and initiate a life of self sufficiency and independence. They were further instructed to choose the most backward areas and transform them by making the people imbibe values of cleanliness, healthy lifestyles, moral and ethical values, proper education, and economic activities aimed at ensuring self sufficiency. They were made to receive adequate instruction in all these aspects before they were allowed to train other volunteers. In time this group of inspired volunteers fanned out to remote villages of the state and set up Kasturba Gandhi Ashrams. Today, twenty-one of these ashrams under the jurisdiction of the Assam branch can be found in Assam, Meghalaya, and Arunachal Pradesh. Sadly, the ones in Mizoram and Nagaland shut down due to prolonged insurgency. Probably, Gandhi’s blueprint of rural development can be found in a 1941 publication entitled “Constructive Programme: Its Meaning and Places” This was subsequently revised in 1945. It contains a list of eighteen items which included communal unity, removal of untouchability, prohibition, development of khadi, promotion of village industries, improvement of village sanitation, craft centric basic education, universal adult education, ensuring equality, status and opportunity for women, education in health and hygiene, developing local languages while also promoting Hindi as the national language, economic equality, organizing farmers and industrial workers and protecting their rights, welfare of the tribal people and ensuring the growth of students in aspects of their mental, moral and physical development. (Kantowsky, 1980) All of these would be based on the overarching principle of Truth and Nonviolence. Notably, “Gandhi’s vision went far beyond the task of winning India’s political freedom. He ambitiously sought to address the social, economic, cultural and spiritual freedom of the individual. Gandhi recognized that true emancipation of the individual is only possible when every person is afforded the conditions to live a healthy, well rounded and uncoerced life” (Govinda & Malghan, 2016). The work of the Kasturba Ashrams sought to achieve these objectives.

2 Ek Muthi Chawal or a Handful of Rice My father Chikon Kakoty, a Gandhian, was closely associated with Vinoba Bhave. (The Sentinel, 1996) the person who spear headed the Sarvodaya movement after Gandhiji. Vinoba had embarked on a audacious project of a radical but voluntary intervention that would ensure social and economic justice for India’s millions. Through a Padayatra (pada = feet yatra = travel/march) walking the length and breadth of the country, he strived to create public awareness and sought to alter the socio-economic map of the country, through voluntary redistribution of resources. This was called the famous Bhoodan (bhoo = land and dan = gift) and Gramdan (gram = village and dan = gift). movement. Unlike the Chinese model, where the state used its might

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to achieve it, the Indian model was based on invoking a higher consciousness and voluntary gifting of land to the landless by the landlords! My father spoke at length about his experience during the Padayatra and perhaps one of the most poignant of these anecdotes was the one concerning their visit to an extremely poor village. The details of the place I cannot recall, nor do I have the luxury to cross check as the story teller is no more! But the gist of the incident narrated to me is still vivid in my mind. Dusk was gathering in this remote village as the padayatris strode in. They were met by a few men who led them to the village center that was adorned by a huge tree. Underneath it they sat down to rest their weary limbs. As was his wont, Vinoba started a conversation with the villagers. They told him of their poverty and explained how they often struggled for two square meals a day and how during times of crop failure or floods, they even faced starvation. Vinoba listened to their tale of woes and suddenly interjected “why don’t you people open a bank?” This statement was met with incredulous silence before the village head ventured a response “we are poor people often on the verge of starvation, and you are asking us to start a bank?”. The answer from Vinoba was a mono syllable “Yes”. This prompted some others to join in and beseech “please do not make fun of our poverty”. At this Vinoba asked about the whereabouts of womenfolk of the village, as he could see none. He was informed that they were busy with their household chores like cooking the evening meal. Vinoba told the audience to inform all the women that he would like to meet them exclusively after they were free for the day. Soon the news spread, and it was an excited gaggle of women, young and old who gathered underneath the tree to meet Vinobaji. He enquired of them about their well-being and then asked what was it they had cooked. They replied that they had cooked rice at which Vinoba asked how did they measure how much of rice was to be cooked. An elderly mother replied that it was done on the basis of the household size and one or two fist full of rice (ek muthi = one fistful chawal = rice) was cooked for each. Vinoba then enquired, whether the family meal would be substantially reduced if one fistful from each meal was kept aside. The women replied in the negative. So, Vinoba said that from the next day onwards specially appointed volunteers would go from house to house to collect ek muthi chawal and store the same in a central place. Within a few months the village had a substantial store of rice. This store came in handy to feed the people during unforeseen calamities. When required the rice could also be sold to buy other essentials or provide a loan for the needy entrepreneur. The concept of the ek muthi rice bank proved to be a game changer in many a poor village in India. This was one of the finest example of the power of the collective, something that Sarvodaya succeeded in unleashing. The Bhoodan or land gift example was an unprecedented movement in the history of mankind. Designed to ensure social justice through voluntary redistribution of land, it was certainly audacious and revolutionary. It was actually started in Talengana, an area where communist guerrillas were fighting government troops. Vinoba visited the village of Ponchampalli, a village of three thousand inhabitants with three thousand acres of cultivable land that was owned by ninety families. The remaining five hundred families were landless and could barely sustain themselves. This prompted Vinoba to seek land donation and to his delight, a landlord moved

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by Vinoba’s exhortation spontaneously offered to gift a hundred acres of his land. It was the 18th of April 1951, and with this singular act the Bhoodan Movement was born! (Kantowsky, 1980). This example was replicated in numerous states, and there were hopes that if the momentum could be maintained the movement would transform the entire socio-economic fabric of the country. However, after a strong initial response and an unprecedented support from the landlords, enthusiasm for Bhoodan gradually faded away. After 1956 there were no more large-scale donations. Land donations till July 1970 stood at 4,166,810 acres which was donated by 568,885 individuals. Of this 1,215,795 acres were distributed to 461,689 households. It was found that 1,854,882 acres were not easily cultivable and hence not distributed while the balance of 1,146,095 acres were to be checked for eventual distribution. When compared to Vinoba’s target of achieving a donation of 50 million acres by 1957, the actual donation of 4.16 million hectares looks small. To make matters worse was the fact that 44.5% of all donations were of land not easily amenable to cultivation (Kantowsky, 1980). However, credit cannot be denied to the achievements of this unique and transformative social action. It seemed to prove Ruskin and Gandhi right that man was not simply an economic creature but someone who was meant for a higher order of living. But at the same time, there was no denying that the movement seemed to be losing steam and many a volunteer seemed to be getting disillusioned and frustrated. One day, my father being the irrepressible Bhoodan volunteer that he was, voiced his frustrations to Vinoba, and asked him the use of trying so hard to bring about change in people who did not seem receptive enough to their ideas. At this Vinoba responded “Beta tumhara kam hai Ghanti Bajana. Tum Ghanti Bajao. Koi Sune ya na sune woh tumhara bas me nahin hai. Tum Ghanti bajate jao!” (Son your job is to ring the bell. You keep ringing it. Whether somebody responds to its call is not for you to decide. You simply keep ringing the bell!).

3 The Spiritual Aspect of Sarvoyada Perhaps a major shortcoming in modern day understanding of Gandhian philosophy and the ideals of Sarvodaya is neglect of the spiritual connotation it carried. As a matter of fact, Gandhi openly declared that at the root of his work was his quest for self realization. In an article in the Young India in April 1924 he declared “I am a humble seeker after Truth. I am impatient to realize myself, to attain Moksha in this very existence. My national service is part of my training for freeing my soul from the bondage of flesh…the road to salvation lies through incessant toil in the service of my country and therethrough of humanity” (Kantowsky, 1980). It was this sense of service of fellow beings that acted as the motivation and solace for innumerable workers and volunteers who left their hearths and homes to relocate to distant parts of the country to work among the poor and the backward through the aegis of the Kasturba Ashrams. It is interesting that Gandhi forever challenged the comfort zones of people and one such example is the famous quote “I will give you a talisman. Whenever you

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are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]” (Talisman, 2021). One of the last quotes left behind by the Mahatma and one of the most quoted. These lines certainly encapsulate the very essence of Sarvodaya in practice. How does your life and what you intend to do, impact the lives of the less advantaged? Such a question would appear strange for a generation that celebrates personal wealth as the very embodiment of success and the wealth of one nation may be at the cost of penury and starvation of another! Muhammad Yunus call it a systemic problem that begins with the primary assumption that human nature is based on indifference to other human beings. In fact, the neo classical theory of economics postulates humans as personal gain seekers and efforts at maximizing profit constitute the core of economic rationality wherein terms like greed, exploitation, and selfishness find justification and acceptance. The ridiculous nature of wealth distribution is revealed in the many reports that come out each year. For instance, the report from OXFAM, which highlighted that in 2010 the world’s richest 388 individuals held more wealth in excess of what more than 50% of the world population of some 3.3 billion humans held. By 2017, the numbers had come down to 8 individuals who held more than what the 50% people of the world owned in terms of wealth and resources. Interestingly, the total on the other side of the 8 richest individuals numbered some 3.6 billion souls (Yunus, 2017). It is pertinent to note that at a time when income disparities have exacerbated, the global economy has witnessed growth at an exponential speed. Korten (1995) shows that the total global economic output rose from $3.8 trillion in 1950 to 18.9 trillion in 1992 and world trade in terms of exports soared from $309 billion to $3554 billion, a 11.5 fold increase. But this growth has been extremely skewed. A 1992 UNDP report showed that 20% of the world’s people enjoyed 82.7% of this income and bottom 20% received 1.4% of the income. More than 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day and that figure is only growing. In terms of lifestyles and life aspirations the nations of the Occident and particularly America seem to have set the bench mark for the entire world. Largely based on the philosophy of instant gratification, the consequences have been both startling and largely adverse. Roberts (2014). Conservative estimates reveal that the ecological footprint which may be translated as the average amount of productive land and shallow sea, used by an individual for food, housing, transportation, commerce and waste absorption is about 1 ha or 2.5 acres in developing countries and about 9.6 ha or 24 acres in the USA. The average human footprint is 2.1 ha or 5.2 acres. If with existing technology, every individual were to reach the standard set by the USA, we would require 4 more planet earths! (Wilson, 2003) Otherwise what? It is not surprising that in order to meet the ever growing consumption levels, there is an intense competition among nations to secure more raw material and resources. This mad scramble for resources has led to an amazing increase in conflict and war. An era termed as neo colonialism has started especially in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia. Arguably, the end of the second world war was supposed to herald an era of peace and the comity of nations also created International organizations like

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the UN to promote peace and fraternity. Ironically in the post-war period between 1945 and 1992, it is estimated that more than 20 million people have died in conflicts and only three of the 82 armed conflicts were between nations during this time. Not surprisingly, at the beginning of the century, 90% of casualties were that of combatants, but by the end of the century 90% casualties are that of civilians! (Korten, 1995) Such figures cannot be brushed aside as collateral damage and in the last two decades the incidents and intensity of conflicts have grown many fold. Most of these conflicts have control over resources as the primary driver. Attention may be drawn to the violence in Darfur, Sudan, which started in 2003. Supposed to be a tribal conflict between two hostile tribes, a conservative UN estimates reveal that some 300,000 people have been killed and some 3,000,000 people have been displaced. Interestingly, it is now accepted that the basic reason was the result of a man made ecological disaster. The region had experienced prolonged drought and desertification of what was once pristine farmlands. Ban Ki Moon, the then UN Secretary General in an op-ed in the Washington Post in 2007 wrote “The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change… It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought” (Farris, 2009) As rightly pointed out by Stephan Farris, the most significant lesson from Darfur might be moral in that the region’s collapse was in part caused by the emissions from factories, power plants, and cars that the rest of the world are using! So, the question is when would the world community wake up to its responsibility and prevent other Darfurs from happening? Heinberg (2011) summarizes the problem mankind faces and terms it simply as the End of Growth! He notes that the depletion of important resources including fossil fuels and minerals coupled with the proliferation of negative environmental impacts due to extraction and use of resources followed by the financial disruptions caused by the systems inability to adjust to depleting resources, rising environmental costs and shrinking economies, should leave no one in doubt that a complete change in perspective is required. (Heinberg, 2011). Thinkers, foremost of whom would be Mahatma Gandhi, did deliberate at length on these issues. He is credited with popularizing the term Sarvodaya, a concept that seems to provide a ray of hope to a world that seems to have lost its way. The term Sarvodaya is the amalgam of two Sanskrit terms, Sarvo meaning all and Udaya meaning rising or uplift. Hence, Sarvodaya may be understood as a term denoting “Universal Uplift” or “Progress of All”. The term was first used by Gandhiji as the title of his 1908 translation of John Ruskin’s book, “Unto This Last”. Interestingly, the four essays that made up Ruskin’s book was seen as a fundamental attack on prevalent economic thinking and the editor of the “Cornhill” subsequently refused to accept any writing by Ruskin on political economy! (Kantowsky, 1980) The basic tenet of his writing was his opposition to creating of an artificial construct called the economic man. Man, he argues cannot be isolated from society and social affection. He highlights the fact that even individual goal setting has a social context. Ruskin also examined mercantile economy and came to the conclusion that it promoted the establishment of maximum inequality in favor of a group of privileged individuals. He found fault with the system that placed the measurement of utility only in terms

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of its capacity to satisfy a desire or serve a purpose without taking into consideration the true nature of that desire. He found this gross and unacceptable. The purpose of the economy was to strive and make the greatest number of human beings noble and happy. (Kantowsky, 1980). Gandhi firmly advocated that the earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not for every man’s greed. Hence, while explaining Sarvodaya he advocated a social order that would be free from any greed for limitless acquisition of material wealth and stressed on the motto of simple living and high thinking. The economic order should be designed to provide gainful employment to all. In other words, the inherent logic of the system is to ensure ample opportunity to produce and earn sufficiently through honest work for decent and dignified living. In such a society, all natural resources be it water, air, land or minerals will be assumed as common property to be utilized for the welfare of all. Gandhi’s Seven Principles in the Young India of 22–10–1925 seems to lay the basic tenets of the philosophy of Sarvodaya and what society should abhor. • • • • • • •

Politics without Principle Wealth Without Work Pleasure Without Conscience Knowledge without Character Commerce without Morality Science without Humanity Worship without Sacrifice

4 Conclusion Every individual is encouraged to see oneself as a trustee of the common resources and use it diligently for his fellow creatures and the future generations. This stands in sharp contrast to what our present thought process is, in which the maximizing of profits at the shortest possible time without given much thought to either society or to future long-term implications seems to be the norm. Unfortunately, the environmental disaster that modern man seems to be heading toward cannot be reversed unless the concept of Sarvodaya becomes truly globalized. This would require a reorientation of the minds. As Gandhi asserted “the economic constitution of India and for that matter of the world, should be such that no one under it should suffer from want of food and clothing. In other words everybody should be able to get sufficient work to enable him to make the two ends meet. And this ideal can be universally realized only if the means of production of the elementary necessaries of life remain in the control of the masses…” (UNESCO, 1959) This, when seen with the assertion that the character of production should be determined by social necessity and not by personal whim or greed. He had advocated the concept of Trusteeship through which the present capitalist order of society would be transformed into an egalitarian one through reformation. (Gandhi, 1954) Something based out of and deeply reflective of his belief that human nature was never beyond redemption. There are sure to be

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sceptics who would call his idea of the Trusteeship as an unattainable utopia. But to use Gandhi’s words “I remain an optimist, not that there is any evidence that I can give that right is going to prosper, but because of my unflinching faith that right must prosper in the end…our inspiration can come only from our faith that right must ultimately prevail” (UNESCO, 1959).

References Chandra, B., Mukherjee, M., et al. (1989). India’s struggle for independence. Penguin. Faris, S. (2009). Forecast. Henry Holt and Company. Gandhi, M. K. (1954). Sarvodaya. Navajivan Press. Govindu, V. M., & Malghan, M. (2016). The web of freedom. Oxford University Press. Heinberg, R. (2011). The end of growth. New Society Publishers. Kantowsky, D. (1980). Sarvodaya. Vikas Publishing. Korten, D. C. (1995). When corporations rule the world. Kumarian Press Inc. Roberts, P. (2014). The impulse society. Bloomsbury. Talisman, G. (2021). https://www.mkgandhi.org/gquots1.htm (Accessed on January 15, 2021). The Sentinel. (1996). English Daily, Guwahati (1996) “Pages from the padayatra diary” Chikon Kakoty 20/01/1996. UNESCO. (1959). All men are brothers. UNESCO. Wilson, E. O. (2003). The future of life. Vintage Book. Yunus, M. (2017). A world of three zeros. Hatchette India.

From Indian and Utopian Ethos to Management for Spiritual Growth Gerrit De Vylder

1 The Nature of ‘Homo Economicus’? What is the standard of behavior that guides individual managers in their works, both in the public and private spheres? In general they assume social responsibility and it is only hoped that they do this in an ethically responsible way. According to management ethics specialists, like prof. S. K. Chakraborty, personal and spiritual development interacts with management ethics. Are managers, or more general, economic actors and human beings, by nature good or bad? On the one hand, Genevan social philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) argued that the individual might retain an innate human goodness while remaining part of a corrupting collectivity: ‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man’ (opening line in Rousseau’s ‘Émile ou de l’éducation’, 1762). On the other hand, in unmasking the megalomanias and perversions of barons and bankers, of monarchs and magistrates, French controversial author and philosopher Marquis de Sade (1740–1814; cfr. Phillips, 2005) warned against naïve trust in all forms of authority. He exposed the self-interest and hypocrisy underlying man’s so-called virtues and forces us to recognize the truth of human nature and our potential for cruelty. Being good by nature, or at least having the potential to be good, should be reflected by solidarity and integration in economics and management. Solidarity and integration have been a corner stone of many religious and humanistic traditions (e.g., Hustinx et al., 2015; Redekop, 1967). Only German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche Some parts of the paper draws on the author previous publication: G. De Vylder: “Kautilya versus Thiruvalluvar. Inspiration from Indian Ancient Classics for Ethics in Business and Governance” Globalization for the Common Good Initiative Journal. 2014: pp. 1–16. Used with the permission of the publisher. G. De Vylder (B) Catholic University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_11

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(1844–1900) considered it a slave ethic, reflecting a profound self-deception (Tanner, 2000, 81–88). Research (e.g., Berg et al., 1995), however, suggests that the average economic actor cares about others. He/she likes to be treated fairly, and wishes others to be treated in the same way. It is felt that inequitable outcomes of economic activities are to be avoided. Behavioral economists call this preference inequity aversion. This interplay between trust and reciprocity also plays a key element in successful collaborative teamwork. Genuine teamwork relies on mutual benefits. Inequitable outcomes in different types of economic interactions, like business, labor, and consumer relationships, are the result of unjust structures, either on a corporate or a government level. Inequity aversion would result in joining forces as a team against such unjust socio-economic and political systems encouraging unfair relationships. Experimental studies (cfr. Baddeley, 2017) suggest that this type of behavior is a strong tendency across most countries and cultures. In combination with the current high labor productivity in all sectors, allowing to supply all basic needs to all people by relatively small inputs, we should have reached a phase where business, labor, and its management, take on a completely different meaning. Prof. S. K. Chakraborty, building on the 19th and early 20th C. reformist Bengal Hindu renaissance and the legacy of 1913 Literature Nobel Prize laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), argued that labor and its management should have their own rewards in terms of personal and spiritual development. This should also guarantee fair-play, righteousness, and moderation. Tagore also included leisure, made possible by a high labor productivity, as one of the main conditions to achieve a higher level of consciousness. The current economic and political system reflects a very different scenario. Why is the labor market more than ever based on a ‘survival of the fittest’-system, whereby players have to be as efficient as possible to sell structural overproduction through excessive and unethical marketing techniques? Why are the current political-economic structures characterized by a technocratic obsession with largescale, centralization, control and growth? ‘Big Government’ is, as it were, dictated on the basis of ‘Big Data’ by ‘Big Capital’. Now, more than ever, ‘Big is Beautiful’. Therefore, the challenges facing the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century contain dangerous apologies for introducing a technocratic and totalitarian system: to what extent does the fight against terrorism, climate change, and pandemics fit into monopolistic agendas and is a Huxleyan Brave New World gradually being introduced? This brings us to a crucial question: why is there such a huge gap between what could theoretically be possible (an economy based on leisure allowing personal and spiritual development) and what is actually taking place? There is the general observation by many critics that the lack of ethical awareness among both public and private economic players has to do with the economics curriculum and economic textbooks which are used in India and worldwide. Surveys reflect that on average, economists and economics students behave in a more selfinterested way than others. In different experiments they tend to deviate from the moral good and are more corrupt. In India too some scholars look for spirituality as a solution to this behavioral problem. Shrikant (2014) argues to teach more spirituality, ethics, philosophy, and history in business schools. Too often a long historical

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experience regarding economic ethics and behavior is completely ignored. What we suggest here is that historical sources may be useful as a source of inspiration for solving today’s ethical issues in business, economics, and society. Our case-study concerns both the classical Indian ethical tradition and the utopian tradition, which was partly its spill off.

2 The Indian Ethos The Indian ethos is based on Hinduism which distinguishes itself from other religions by its age. From about 3000 BC, a ‘monotheistic pantheism’ gradually emerged on the Indian subcontinent, the ‘gods’ being merely symbols of the characteristics of the one God. Broadly speaking, this can be reduced to a trinity: Shiva destroys and renews, Vishnu sustains and Brahma creates. Much influence was and continues to be derived from the ‘Bhagavad Gita’, the philosophical scripture that forms the basis for the nondualistic Vedanta philosophy, the most important of the six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy. According to Vedanta, everything is essentially one. The Gita states that as long as the individual ‘atman’ (‘self’) remains separate from the universal ‘Brahman’ (a world soul that coincides with ‘Atman’, with a capital ‘A’), the cycle of suffering continues in the form of reincarnations and ‘Moksha’ (‘liberation’) is delayed. Economic activities are positive as long as they are carried out selflessly, without passion and regardless the result. Its value lies in the performance of each person’s ‘economic Dharma’ (or ‘ethics’, or ‘task’), not in its outcome. ‘Dharma’ refers to doing the right thing for the right reasons according to the universal laws of nature. In this sense it can be compared to the Greek ‘logos’. As Hinduism gradually lost its core messages, values, and ethics, it gave rise to a rigid caste system. The Buddha, the ‘first enlightened’ (or the one who first ‘remembered’ everything), reacted in the sixth century BC by emphasizing spiritual and economic freedom and the need for a sense of responsibility. Following the ‘Middle Way’ leads to ‘enlightenment’ or ‘deliverance from something into nothing’. The Middle Way lies between physical and emotional self-indulgence on the one hand, and extreme asceticism on the other, which is just as destructive. An important aspect is paying attention to what is manifesting in the present, through meditation or simply by living more consciously. Also Hinduism itself rediscovered and reinterpreted its original concepts and ideas. Advaita Vedanta, one of the Vedanta schools, as advocated by Malayali philosopher Adi Shankara, again emphasized in the eighth century AD that ‘Atman’ is identical with ‘Brahman’ and that there is no difference. It also argued that ‘Moksha’ is achievable in this life in contrast to being an ‘after death-experience’. Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950), the famous twentieth century Tamil sage from Tiruvannamalai, practiced and recommended self-enquiry to remove ignorance and obtain this absolute truth in this life. Menon (2007, 82–99) describes this ‘experiential Advaita’ as being intuitively aware of our portion of the divine ‘Self’, and being at the same time aware of the ‘Self’ in others. When we recognize the divine ‘Brahman’

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in ourselves and in others in spite of external differences it becomes possible to perceive one absolute standard. As a result, if our intuition works, one’s own experience of goodness must be identical to that of another person. This is what Aldous Huxley (2013; cfr. infra) identified as ‘perennial philosophy’. German Indologist Paul Deussen (1845–1919) summed it up: ‘The gospels quite correctly establish as the highest law of morality, “Love your neighbor as yourself”. But why should I do so since by the order of nature I feel pain and pleasure only in myself, not in my neighbor? The answer is not in the Bible… but it is in the Veda, in the great formula “Thou art That” [‘Tat tvam asi’] which gives in three words the combined sum of metaphysics and morals. You shall love your neighbor as yourselves because you are your neighbor’ (quoted by Radhakrishnan, 1981, 96). This type of ‘deep experience’ suggests the experience of ‘brotherly love’ or ‘deep friendship’ both as a means and an end. In Shankara’s view, the illusion is basically that one’s environment is separate from oneself. The individual owes part of his significance to the social group in which he lives, and conversely what he thinks and does is of significance to the group. But the social group, and the individual connections that bind it, are basically only ways to a spiritual end, to salvation. Famous Indian philosopher S. Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) argued that this is the case in every religion and does not distinguish Hinduism from Christianity, but in modern industrialized society the group has come to be regarded as an end in itself, to which one should dedicate oneself. A personal alliance to a political party, a government, or a business is arguably more dangerous than an alliance with God, because one is only accountable to oneself. Even in democratic countries this results in a need to comply with a perceived majority: ‘where the majority feels threatened, than the minority must beware’ (Menon, 2007, 82–99). In these cases human relationships remain limited to the utilitarian and pleasurable dimensions. That is why Shankara never held any political or socio-economic view in the modern sense. According to Shankara the relative world that is known to us is supported by pairs of ‘opposites’, like ‘good-evil’, ‘pleasure-pain’, ‘happiness-sadness’, etc. The total sum of happiness does not change. It only moves from one place to another. This element of imperfection, known in the monotheistic tradition as ‘original sin’, is inherent in the phenomenal world as a whole. But it allows the individual to strive for that which is perfect, perform his ‘dharma’ and develop ‘deep’ love or friendships. He will stop taking political or other sides, and stop being attached to the results of his actions, including those on the political and socio-economic level. Radhakrishnan summed it up beautifully: ‘…Shankara asks us to be in the world but not of it… wisdom is to dream with our eyes open, to be detached from the world without any hostility to it’ (quoted by Menon, 2007, 82–99). Doing charitable work should never be a compensation for all kinds of neuroses. All actions bind their doers by creating attachment to the result. It is not action but the desire for a result that brings suffering. As a result, Hinduism advocates renunciation in action, not renunciation of action. The liberated person does not become ‘wholly good’, he merely transcends good and evil, and will regard the ‘other’ from a perspective of ‘deep’ love or friendship, without judgment or expectation. The ‘other’ then becomes a way to salvation, so

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that we are each other’s way to salvation. And it is within the framework of ‘deep’ love or friendship that the ‘other’ expresses itself most profoundly. This kind of ethical theory distinguishes itself from utilitarianism where action should result in ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’. In such an approach results are either good or bad and the action itself has no meaning of its own. As English political economist J. S. Mill (1806–1873) explained: ‘Pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends’, and actions should only be means to those ends. As a result only actions focusing pleasure or usefulness are relevant, and characteristics like ambition become a virtue because they may contribute to achieving those ends. In contrast to this view, Hindu ethics hold that ‘the value of an action resides ultimately in its effect on the doer; and that the pursuit of pleasure in any form, however subtle, as an end in itself is delusion’ (Menon, 2007, 82–99). Two non-religious Indian classics, the ‘Arthashastra’ and the ‘Thirukkural’, reflect two very different interpretations of these early spiritual sources, resulting in two very different socio-economic and political systems (cfr. De Vylder, 2014; Mulla & De Vylder, 2014). First, the ‘Arthashastra’ is a treatise on economics and politics written by Kautilya, the advisor to the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta during the fourth century BC (cfr. Trautman, 2012). Kautilya emphasized the need for ‘Good Governance’ and pragmatism to curb the more destructive characteristics of human nature. For example, he recommended high and fair compensations to civil servants as the only way to fight inefficiency and corruption.1 Second, the ‘Thirukkural’ is a classic of rhyming Tamil couplets, possibly written around 31 BC, by Thiruvalluvar, a common weaver born in Mylapore, near presentday Chennai. It is one of the most revered ancient works in the Tamil language, providing a guide for human morals and betterment in life. Like British economist Adam Smith (1723–1790) and Genevan social philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (cfr. supra), Thiruvalluvar stated that ethical values coincide with a good economy and that therefore a free market is necessary. Basically humans are naturally good and contribute positively to the economy. By neutralizing the unnatural forces of the state and society, like destructive desires and greed, and allowing one’s natural true self to emerge, life can be reformed and refined. This would enable a firm attitude of mind, allowing to neutralize greed and be aware that ‘we do not need what we can do without’ (Narayanaswamy, 2010, 18). Thiruvalluvar agreed with Kautilya in emphasizing that government officials should not abuse their position. However, he believed that only individual transformation could solve the problem and not a higher compensation. Thiruvalluvar described this as ‘stable nature’, ‘true knowledge’, ‘nature of the world’, or ‘proper procedures by the law of nature’. The Alsatian doctor and philosopher Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) concluded that ‘like the Buddha and the Bhagavad Gita, the Thirukkural desires inner freedom from the world and a mind free from hatred…’ (quoted by Varadarajan, 1988, 68–89). But for Schweitzer there is more because the ‘Thirukkural’ advocates the idea of active love: ‘While the Bhagavad Gita in a forced and chilly manner gives as a motive for remaining in active life that it is in accordance with the order of the Universe, 1

Drawn from De Vylder (2014).

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the Thirukkural justifies it—what an advance!—by the idea of ethical activity. Work and profit place man in a position to do good’. Summarizing, while Kautilya gave pragmatic advice to tackle human’s destructive economic instincts, Thiruvalluvar assumed the natural goodness of men and warned against institutional interference.2 Also among the non-religious ancient sources, the ‘Panchatantra’ (‘Five Treatises’), an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose, stands out because of its ethical and spiritual dimensions (‘Visnu Sarma’, 1993). The oldest written sources of these stories date from 200 BC and are based on even older oral traditions. They are also the origin of several stories in ‘Arabian Nights’, and ‘Sindbad’, among others. They reached Europe in the eleventh century and are probably the base for the European tradition of animal fables (e.g., Jean de la Fontaine, 1621–1695). Today, the fables are arguably the most translated non-religious work in the world. The ‘Panchatantra’ is relevant here because it focused ‘solidarity’, ‘friendship’, and ‘integration’ as facilitating empowerment of the ‘small’ economic and political actors (similar to E. F. Schumacher’s ‘Small Is Beautiful’, cfr. infra). In the first treatise a jackal named Damanaka, the unemployed minister in a kingdom ruled by a lion, conspires to break up alliances and friendships of the lion king. The second treatise is a collection of adventures of four characters: a crow, a mouse, a turtle, and a deer. Its theme is to emphasize the importance of friendships, teamwork, and alliances. The general message is that ‘weak animals with very different skills, working together can accomplish what they cannot when they work alone’. The third treatise discusses war and peace, indicating that a battle of wits (e.g., crows who are weaker, smaller, but represent the ‘good’ and ‘light’) is a more potent force than a battle of swords (e.g., owls who are stronger, more numerous but represent ‘evil’ and ‘darkness’). It also includes some fables which demonstrate how different characters have different needs and motives, which is subjectively rational from each character’s viewpoint, and that addressing these needs can empower peaceful relationships even if they start off in a different way.

3 From Indian Ethos to Utopian Thinking The messages contained in ancient Indian thinking did not stand alone. The idea that ‘Atman’ is really ‘Brahman’ follows the core message of most genuine spiritual experiences in any religious tradition. The Iranian Sufi mystic Rumi (1207–1273) said: ‘You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the whole ocean in a drop’. This idea of an original unity between Man and God, of a paradise unaffected by continuous choices between good and bad, between right and sin, of a timeless balance in which individuality merges with ultimate unity, is the foundation, according to many religious scholars, of all original religious sources. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) also looked in the direction of the same unity. From the 2

Drawn from De Vylder (2014).

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old Sanskrit formula ‘Tat tvam asi’ (cfr. supra) he concluded: ‘One goes outwards, in all directions, instead of looking in oneself where the solution lies to every riddle’. From the middle of the nineteenth century many alternative thinkers, including economists and sociologists, in both Europe and America, again rediscovered this ancient wisdom, but this time it was a by-product from their romantic quest in ancient Indian sources (cfr. De Vylder, 2013; De Vylder & Opdebeeck, 2016). For example, the American essayist and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) took a pandeist approach in which God is in nature and reality, as in Indian philosophy, and not outside of it, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition. He looked to the American rivers as Hindus look to the sacred (Mother) Ganges and its sister rivers, like ever-flowing water containing the memory of the universe. When the ‘original relationship with the universe’ is restored, the inherent goodness of both man and nature is revealed. In contrast to this, society and its institutions, especially organized religion and political parties, corrupt the innocence of the individual. Thoreau wondered where division of labor and specialization ultimately lead to. Trade destroys everything it touches, he said, and the only real wealth is life. Calling for disobedience against an unjust government, he came to symbolize the American version of anarchism: ‘The best government is the one that does not rule at all’. He also saw slavery as a result of institutional abuse of power by an overly powerful government. Thoreau’s mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), known as a ‘champion’ of individualism, was also influenced by Vedantic non-dualism. According to Emerson, ‘from outside’ man lives separated from his surroundings, but ‘from within’, he is united with the ‘soul of the whole’, the ‘wise silence’, the ‘universal beauty’, or the ‘eternal unity’. In this soul the activity of seeing and what is seen is identical; the subject and the object are one. The world is experienced in parts, but in their entirety these parts are only illusions. In India itself, the ‘Father of the Indian Nation’, Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869– 1948), experienced the world in a similar way. From his Vedantic non-dualism he built up a concrete socio-economic agenda. Instead of the widespread pragmatism of the young Indian nation and the newly popular science of development economics, Gandhi defended a small-scale utopian world. Gandhi, soon referred to as Mahatma (‘Great Spirit’), spoke of a ‘voluntary limitation of needs’, the need for self-sustaining village communities and a better balance between man and nature. It is important to strive for a nonviolent and needs-based society rather than a demand-oriented economy. ‘The true economy is the economy of justice’, he wrote. Western theories talked about achieving profit and revenue maximization, regardless of whether what is being produced makes sense or not. As industries gradually move away from their local and traditional dimensions, the economy loses connection with people’s real needs. People become subordinated to technological progress, economic policy, and the game of interests. They are at the mercy of the non-transparent and nonpredictable economic laws that, at fatal moments, can put thousands of people out of work at once. The citizen who lives in a highly industrialized environment is no longer able to support himself or herself and can no longer be satisfied with what he or she produces himself. ‘Swadeshi’, or ‘local self-sufficiency’, was an answer to this problem and became part of the Indian struggle for independence. In India

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itself, Gandhi was soon overshadowed by the obsession with large-scale of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s planned socialism. On an international level, however, Gandhism experienced a renaissance, especially when the Gandhi-inspired GermanBritish economist E.F. Schumacher (1911–1977), published ‘Small is Beautiful’ (1973) and ‘A Guide for the Perplexed’ (1977). Constructive criticism of Gandhi’s philosophy came from Rabindranath Tagore (2004; cfr. supra). Tagore preferred the ideas of the philosopher and spiritual leader, Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), who wanted to stimulate the ‘total man’ in the Indians, while Gandhi stressed only ‘the mechanical use of fingers on the spinning wheel’, the ideal activity in Gandhian philosophy. The role of the nation in the economy and society was also interpreted differently. Gandhi’s nationalism is tied to preserving the integrity of Indian civilization and breaking its economic exploitation. Tagore was rather anti-nationalist and saw no difference between a British or an Indian economic oppressor. It is ‘the nation’, as a concept or a system, which represents all social relations that are mechanical and impersonal. The ‘cult of the nation’ forces individuals to give up their personal will in favor of an abstractly organized national will. Tagore clarified, ‘I am not against any particular nation, but the general idea of nations. What is a nation?’ The nation is basically reducing an entire people into an organized force. But the exercise of this power means that energy is drawn away from the higher nature of man where he is creative and in solidarity. Nationalism is immoral, mechanical, self-destructive, and counterproductive. In Europe, during the First World War, the French writer Romain Rolland (1866–1944) and the German-Swiss writer Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) represented Tagore’s ideas on both sides of the front and were instrumental in introducing post-war peace. Last but not least, the author of the dystopian novel ‘Brave New World’ (1932), Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), was also inspired by Indian sources such as the lectures of Swami Vivekananda (cfr. supra) and the South-Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986), and the philosophy of Vedanta in general. Without a spiritual intervention, human fate is contained in a technocratic world where all identity, individuality, and freedom are lost and replaced by a false and artificial sense of happiness. The economy is based on mass production combined with mass distribution and a high income concentration rate, destroying the middle classes. In both communist and capitalist states, a power elite controls a reservoir of slaves conditioned by marketing (in the case of large capitalist corporations) or propaganda (in the case of a communist state). In short, Huxley identified an invisible modern slavery that is only normal in relation to an absolutely abnormal society. The difference with George Orwell’s likewise dystopian novels ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1949) and ‘Animal Farm’ (1945) lies in the fact that Huxley argued that because of technological progress man is becoming unaware of his own oppression and that only a ‘spiritual emancipation’ can raise awareness (cfr. De Vylder, 2020).

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4 Toward an Economy and Management of Hope? The importance of Hindu-Buddhist and utopian traditions in seeking solutions to the current socio-economic and management malaise cannot be underestimated. Indian thinkers and the utopian thinkers with whom they interacted had the merit of connecting their belief in the essential unity of existence and of consciousness with a belief in the need for small scale, decentralized socio-economic and political structures, and a holistic, integrated ‘Middle Way’ approach. These principles are in many ways an antithesis to the current socio-economic and management structures characterized by a technocratic obsession with large-scale, centralization, control, and growth. ‘Big Government’ is, as it were, dictated by ‘Big Capital’, on the basis of ‘Big Data’. Their legacy is also a plea for a more responsible balance between free trade and protectionism. The current obsession with free trade does not take into account the social and cultural needs of a society. After all, roughly the same human talents are always found in every region or country. In the case of excessive economic specialization, where each region will develop only a limited number of activities and productions, most of the talents will no longer be used in their own region or country. On a small-scale level, supply and demand are also much more transparent and the market is closer to the real needs (which are also of a psychological, social, cultural, and even spiritual nature) of man. When free trade and globalization are today being abused by big capital to create socio-economically destructive and unjust monopolies and oligopolies in collaboration with big government, then a ‘small is beautiful’ renaissance is more than necessary. Therefore, the challenges facing the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century must also be treated very carefully: to what extent does the fight against terrorism, climate change, and pandemics fit into monopolistic ‘Big is Beautiful’ agendas and is a Huxleyan Brave New World gradually being introduced? The social awareness about the risk of a growing digital technocracy and of violating human rights on the way is gradually disappearing. The Buddha’s ‘Middle Way’, which would also take into account psychosocial and legal aspects, is too often ignored. An underlying evil fueling all these dangers is that scientific research is becoming more dependent on big donors, such as multinationals and their non-profit ancillary organizations, as well as supranational entities, which are by definition influenced by big lobbyists. The problem with academic research that shows negative results (for example, on a particular government policy or a product innovation of a publicly listed company) is that it is very difficult to publish. This jeopardizes objectivity and neutrality, and blurs the boundary between fake and real news. Philosopher of science, Jerome Ravetz (2006), argues that we must accept uncertainty and ignorance in the field as well as the need for citizens’ participation in the policies involving science. As Huxley said, only a spiritual push of our boundaries can offer hope. Only then does man, as the Buddha suggests, find the ‘Middle Way’. But as long as we continue to plow through a swamp of political, social, economic, and institutional-religious ‘-isms’, which are abused over and over again, engaging us only intellectually and

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emotionally, hope remains bleak. Democracy is always becoming particracy or technocracy, and fair free trade is becoming unfair monopolism again and again. Krishnamurti expressed this by indicating that every new social ideology, every new social model only brings more chaos. Only a new consciousness from within, from which ‘dharma’ springs forth, will bring real freedom and room for hope.

References Baddeley, M. (2017). Behavioural economics. A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Berg, J. Dickhaut, J., & McCabe, K. (July 1995). Trust, reciprocity, and social history. Games and Economic Behavior, 10(1), 122–142. De Vylder, G. (2013). From oriental Utopia to business ethics. Europe’s search for new socioeconomic paradigms in eastern religions and philosophies. In Sharma, A. & Khanna, M. (Eds.), Asian perspectives on the world’s religions after September 11 (pp. 69–88). ABC Clio. De Vylder, G. (December 2014). Kautilya versus Thiruvalluvar. Inspiration from Indian ancient classics for ethics in business and governance. Globalization for the Common Good Initiative Journal. GCGI, 1–16. De Vylder, G. & Opdebeeck, H. (2016). indian spiritual traditions as inspiration for ethical leadership and management in Europe. In Chatterji, M. & Laszlo, Z. (Eds.), Ethical leadership. Indian and European spiritual approaches (pp 85–106). Palgrave Macmillan De Vylder, G. (2020). Aldous Huxley’s anarchist entrepreneurship based on spiritual capital. In Bouckaert, L. & Van den Heuvel, S.C. (Eds.), Servant leadership, social entrepreneurship and the will to serve. spiritual foundations and business applications (pp. 351–372). Palgrave Macmillan Hustinx, L., Von Essen, J., Haers, J., & Mels, S. (Eds.). (2015). Religion and volunteering. Complex, contested and ambiguous relationships. Springer. Huxley, A. (2013; first published 1945). The Perennial Philosophy. Stellar Books. Huxley, A. (1980; first published 1932). Brave new world. Granada. Menon, Y. K. (2007; first published 1976). The Mind of Adi Shankaracharya. Jaico Books. Mulla, Z. R. & De Vylder, G. (September 2014). Wages in the Indian Bureaucracy. Can Kautilya’s Arthasashtra provide an answer? Great Lakes Herald, 8(2), 16–39. Narayanasamy, J. (2010). Thirukkural. Transliteration and translation. Sura Pathippagam. Phillips, J. (2005). The Marquis de sade. A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Radhakrishnan, S. (1981; first published 1939). Eastern religions & western thought. Oxford University Press. Ravetz, J. (2006). The no-nonsense guide to science. New Internationalist. Redekop, C. (Autumn 1967). Toward an understanding of religion and social solidarity. Sociological Analysis. Oxford University Press, 28(3), 149–161. Shrikant, M. L. (2014). Time for B-schools to teach spirituality. S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research. Tagore, R. (2004). Selected essays. Rupa. Tanner, M. (2000). Nietzsche. A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Trautman, T. R. (2012). Arthasastra. The science of wealth. Allen Lane/Penguin Books. Varadarajan, M. (1988). A History of tamil literature. Sahitya Academi. “Visnu Sarma’. (1993). The pancatantra. Penguin Books.

Developing New Organizational Models and Processes

A Note on Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility for Multinational Enterprises Manas Chatterji

For the last four decades, there have been drastic changes in the area of international business particularly in the production and trade. For most companies, they have an international market. Notwithstanding trade barriers between different countries, low transportation cost and technological development and information system international business is greatly influenced by globalization. The world has become a single market and the development of Internet has decreased transportation costs. The innovation in air and surface transportation greatly influenced the production system. Globalization also has influenced the socio-economic characteristics of all countries in the world. Changes and liberalization in the political systems of different countries have helped the process of this globalization. There has been a drastic change in the center of gravity of the production from the Western world to Asia Pacific countries. Besides production and trade, arts and popular culture are also globalized. Because of the competition and economy of scale, cost of production has greatly decreased leading to continuous product and process innovation. This drastic change of globalization has been vividly pictured by Friedman (1999) However there have been some negative impacts of globalization as observed by Stiglitz (2002). Multinational corporations (MNC), Trade and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and Technological Development are the major drivers of this process of globalization. However, this transformation has not been smooth because the host countries of these multinational corporations are very diverse in social, political, and cultural characteristics. The birth rate, death rate, migration, the other demographic characteristics of the population are quite different in the host countries from those of the MNC countries. The major problems the multinational corporations facing are The paper is heavily based on the publications listed in the suggested readings and reference. M. Chatterji (B) Binghamton University School of Management, Binghamton, USA e-mail: [email protected] Guest Professor, Peking University, Beijing, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_12

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cultural differences of the host countries. It is difficult to define culture. It is a combination of values and standards. Some of the factors determining the culture are social organization, individualism, group dynamics, hierarchical structure of the society, social mobility, spoken and written language, religion and educational systems, etc. greatly affecting ethical characteristics Hill, C. W. L., & Hult, T. (2020). This in turn influenced the international business in their decision process of hiring, avoiding discrimination, discouraging corruption, stopping environmental pollutions, etc. It is an ethical dilemma. It also depends on the personal ethics of the leader of MNC and its organizational culture, unrealistic expectation of the performance of the companies, and the culture of the originating countries of MNC, etc. Hill, C. W. L., & Hult, T. (2020). The decision-making of the MNC depends also on the leadership. The leader can use Friedman (1970) doctrine which states the only objective of the business is to make profit so long the company stays within the rules of law. Sometimes home country ethical standard is applied to a foreign subsidiary. If a manager finds that other companies are not following some ethical norms in a host nation, they should not follow it either. Utilitarian approaches to ethics hold that the best decisions are those which produce greatest good for the majority of the people. Kantian and other ethics theory in philosophy state that people should be treated as ends and never as a means to the end of others. They have dignity and should be respected. Right theory states that human beings have fundamental rights and privileges that transcend national boundaries and culture. It establishes minimum level of morality. MNC should follow an ethical standard which is based on high sense of ethics, morality, and standard of leadership. This in turn is reflected by corporate social responsibility (CSR). Corporate social responsibility is demonstrated by helping people and institutions through charities, financial assistance, etc. It is a strategy which the business corporations use in addressing the ethical morality. To determine the magnitude of CSR, we need to use the principles of economics, humanities, social sciences, and sustainable environment. Shared visions, stockholders management, and strategic behavior are to be used for this end goal. We need to examine the difference between the actual and perceived benefit of the CSR. The question we need to answer whether the international business organizations are gaining positive abnormal return when there is a mandatory or voluntary stipulation of corporate social responsibility. Statistical methods like regression analysis can be used to determine whether the return in stock prices depends on the level of social responsibilities provided through financial and other contributions. We can show by using cross section or panel data to estimate the regression coefficient of the equation and test whether it is significant or not. It has been shown that voluntary CSR can also achieve a positive abnormal return as against regulated CSR. We need to show how CSR is creating the social value in the host country and how it is getting a win–win situation through its strategic commitment. The impact of CSR on the changes in the stock prices will vary for different industries in specific countries. We need to can estimate it by using statistical methods of correlation and regression analysis. It has been determined that for some countries that there is no significant correlation in the publication of CSR report and the stock price. We find that the firms with high CSR have less cost of capital. Family firms with high CSR

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have significantly lower cost of capital. Higher profitability firms with high CSR have significantly lower cost than low earning firms with high CSR. CSR with independent advisory board have lower cost compared to those with no board. There is no correlation of CSR to company’s stock returns. CSR is negatively related to tax rate. It will be helpful to develop an index of effectiveness of CSR. Top management has lots of influence through its integrative capacity of influencing CSR. CEO narcissism has positive effects on the level of organizational CSR. But it will reduce the effect of CSR on performance. Since CSR is often uncertain and ambiguous to the general investors, the business analysts may serve as informational medium. This was found in qualitative as well as quantitative studies. Quantitative indicators of CSR significantly affect the performance of a particular industry such as semiconductor. The question arises how consumers perceive CSR and how they measure it. If we can develop a measurement index, it can assist a company to judge its success and shortcoming. CEO power as measured by parity between CEO and top management has positive employee relation. It also affects individual categories of employee involvement. However, no strong positive relationship was found when CEO holds dual role as a chairperson of the board. Orphan drug is a treatment of rare and neglected diseases. US- and EU-based companies engaged in orphan drug are regarded as respectable. Relationship of CSR and the sustainable development like climate change and the reduction of poverty has been observed. As such there has been a change in the integration of CSR and Environmental Social Responsibility (ESR). Sometime the potential of CSR is undermined by its systematic misuse, misunderstanding, and flawed application of the concept in many business settings. Under the guise of sustainability, business is being asked to do less than or more than what is required by commitment to sustainable development. In CSR two conceptual framework may be used namely utility maximization or economic approach and institutional theory. The utility maximization or economic approach centers on motivation to decrease cost, increase revenue, and manager’s utility. The institutional theory emphasizes how external factors like pressure from market and non-market influence it. Potential revenue increase or cost reduction due to better environmental practices lead to better access to certain market, differentiation of product, setting pollution control technology, risk management, cost of material, cost of capital, and cost of labor. Some other variables are CEO duality, presences of women in the board, greenhouse gas emission reduction, companies risk premium, financial leverage, and industry profile are factors for increasing corporate social responsibility. Environmental corporate social responsibility (ECSR) generates new and competitive revenue for the firms. Positive stock market reaction of eco-friendly companies is smaller with high level of environmental CSR. Better ranked firms anticipate larger future cash flow due to more positive reaction from key-stockholders, employees, NGO, and regulators. Academic work is lacking in the empirical evidence about the CSR on local enterprises, workers, and the environment. We need to incorporate CSR in business strategy analysis.

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We now present the impact of CSR to different factors in some countries. In China, environmentally sensitive industry (ESI) and state owned enterprise (SOE) are significantly more committed to environmental information disclosure particularly paying attention to energy saving/carbon reduction/development of the economy. Statistical results are available to prove that environmental misconduct in China is significantly associated with corporate philanthropy. This suggests that some Chinese familyowned firm’s philanthropy is to divert public attention for their misconduct in environmental behavior. In China, the construction industry CSR fulfillment is embedded in the construction process in community, employees, client, and CSR management. The environmentally sensitive industry, and state enterprises are significantly more committed to environmental information disclosure particularly paying attention carbon reduction. In Japan, an environmental accounting is a part of financial disclosure in accounting information. Environmental Accounting (EA) is conducted by internal and external functions. Internal function deals with the management of environmental cost and activities. Same is true in central and eastern Europe like Slovenia. In central and Eastern Europe, we find some of the most important forces behind environmental enforcement. In many large and medium sized organizations in Slovenia, it was observed that there is direct relationship of fulfilling the vision, strategy, and co-independence between social responsibility factors and successful corporate operation. For Nigeria, with two major oil companies, there is a conflict between the companies and the community. Things are improving but it is short term. In Malaysia CSR reports, philanthropic activities are most widely repeated followed by human resources initiative. Only the top companies report their environmental practices certified by rating agency. Religiosity increases the influence on ethical CSR positively but affects negatively financial CSR. In a study in Malaysia it was found that the higher the value of the CSR the stronger is the bond of consumer loyalty. It has been shown that there is a positive relationship between CSR and sustainable development like climate change and poverty. CSR has been misused in the application of the concept in many settings. Better CSR ranked firm anticipate larger future cash values due to more positive reaction from stockholders, employees, NGO, and regulators. We do not have much research in the empirical evidence about CSR on local enterprises workers and environment. In Malaysia, only the top companies report that environmental practices. Suggested Readings 1. 2.

3.

Andrews, K. R. (Ed.). (1989). Ethics in practice: Managing the moral corporation. Harvard Business School Press. Clarkson, M. (1995). A stakeholder framework for analyzing and evaluating corporate social performance. Academy of Management Review, 20(1995), 92–117. De George, R. T. (1993). Competing with integrity in international business. Oxford University Press.

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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Dicken, P. (2015). Global shift: Mapping the changing contours of the world economy. The Guilford Press. Donaldson, K. T. & Werhane, P. (1979). Case study-Italian style mores, In Ethical issues in business. Prentice Hall Ehrlich, I., & Lui, F. (1999). Bureaucratic Corruption and Endogenous Economic Growth. Journal of Political Economy, 107(Dec 1999), 270–292. Everett, J., Neu, D., & Rahaman, A. S. (2006). The global fight against corruption. Journal of Business Ethics, 65(2006), 1–18. Ferrell, O.C., Fraedrich, J., & Ferrell, L. (2013). Business ethics. Cengage Freeman, E. (1984). Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. Pitman Press. Freeman, R. E., & Gilbert, D. (1988). Corporation strategy and the search for ethics. Prentice Hall. Grant, C. (2020). Whistle blowers: Saints of secular culture. Journal of Business Ethics, September 2002, 391–400. Hill, C. W. L., & Jones, T. M. (1992). Stakeholder-agency theory. Journal of Management Studies, 29(1992), 131–154. Hult, T. (2011). Market-focused sustainability: Market orientation plus! Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 39, 1–6. Hult, T., Mena, J., Ferrell, O. C., & Ferrell, L. (2011). Stakeholder marketing: A definition and conceptual framework. AMS Review, 1(2011), 44–65. Jones, T. M. (1991). Ethical decision making by individuals in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 16(1991), 366–395. Kaufman, D., & Wei, S. J. (2000). Does grease money speed up the wheels of commerce? World Bank policy research working paper, January 11, 2000. Maignan, I., Ferrell, O. C., & Hult, T. (1999). Corporate citizenship: Cultural antecedents and business benefits. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 27(1999), 455–469. March, J. G., & Simon, H. A. (1958). Organizations. Wiley. Mauro, P. (1995). Corruption and growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 110(1995), 681–712. Messick, D., & Bazerman, M. H. (1996). Ethical leadership and the psychology of decision making. Sloan Management Review 37(Winter 1996), 9–20 Scholtens, B. & Dam, L. (2007). Cultural values and international differences in business ethics. Journal of Business Ethics. Shleifer, A., & Vishny, R. W. (1993). Corruption. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 108(1993), 599–617. Singer, P. (2002). One world: The ethics of globalization. Yale University Press. Smith, J. (2002). The world’s most sustainable companies. Forbes, January 24, 2014. Waddock, S. A., & Graves, S. B. (1997). The corporate social performancefinancial performance link. Strategic Management Journal, 8(1997), 303–319.

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References Friedman, M. (1970). The Social responsibility of business is to increase profits. The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. Friedman, T. (1999). The Lexus and the olive tree, understanding globalization. Picador Hill, C. W. L., & Hult, T. (2020). International business: Competing in the global marketplace. McGraw Hill. Stiglitz, J. E. (2002). Globalization and its discontent. W.W. Norton.

Creating Sustainable Wealth through Human-Centered Complex Adaptive Systems Pravir Malik

By definition, a complex adaptive system (CAS) is creatively adaptive and sustainable at multiple levels of granularity. It is a generator of multidimensional wealth—technology, culture, community, sustainable profit and love, among other dimensions. Yet business leaders often continue to view the lubricator and output of contemporary CAS, be they corporations, markets or economies, in one dimension only: money. This narrowness of vision can cause us to act in inherently unsustainable ways. For example, in a sleight of accounting. We can cut down rich forest ecosystems and denominate the massive loss in wealth in terms of the weight in wood and as a profit. It is clear that our perception and use of money often destroys rather than creates value. This is further evident in the endless series of market crashes which, at their root, were caused by continued and inappropriate generation and use of money (Malik, 2011). Either we must change our approach to fiscal management, or our current rendering of systems simply cannot persist. Corporations must reorient to focus on the sustainable generation of wealth, and I’ve been writing about how the focus on the human can help drive that change (Malik, 2019a). These are some steps I propose to leaders: 1.

The habit of acting in terms of monetary return on investment (ROI) has to be assuaged by reinforcing that a CAS has two aspects: raison d’etre and adaptation (Malik, 2018a). Leaders will have to engineer the reality of core values being viscerally experienced and becoming an ongoing anchor for action and adaptation.

Permission to use the Forbes articles (https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/ 2019/06/25/becoming-a-cas-organization-mastering-wealth/?sh=2dc0f72f2da2) was provided by Ms. Alyssa Ammirato, Associate Editor, Forbes, who had worked with me on the whole series, in June 2020. P. Malik (B) Deep Order Technologies, San Francisco, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_13

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What it takes to generate multidimensional wealth is a CAS driven by individual authenticity (Malik, 2018b). To make this a reality, leaders are going to have to push for a flattening of the organization, which allows for self-management within a framework of accountabilities. Coaches instead of managers and progression driven by enhancing skills rather than by fancier titles are the stepping stones. There are four fundamental ideals that build everything and have to exist in balance to create a wealth-generating CAS (Malik, 2018c). These ideals of knowledge, power, presence and harmony can be viewed as a cultural undertaking that creates the sustainable foundation in physical, chemical and biological systems. These are arguably deeply embedded in our DNA and form an inherent organizational preference rooted at the level of genetics itself. The systematic generation of wealth implies that leaders must leverage these innate sources of innovation and cause their meaning to continue to grow in all organizational endeavors. Leaders must spearhead programs that allow teams to drive to greater levels of organizational maturity by themselves. I’ve suggested such a program (Malik, 2018d) and discussed the importance of a real-time mirror to foster the twin aspects of stability and dynamism crucial to a CAS. Such a program must culminate in the recognition of real-time patterns that foster continuous improvement (the dynamic aspect of a CAS) and the real-time assessment of core values and other important edifices of culture (the stable aspect of a CAS). Leaders must drive the use of uncommon language (Malik, 2019b) to facilitate seeing the same market differently. The use of such language will open stakeholders’ eyes to potential and desirable complexification of the four ideals by altering individual neural nets, thereby attuning us to additional sources of wealth. Increased revenues will be the side effect of new sight.

Each of these suggestions is taken up in more detail in each of the sections that follow.

1 Reinforcing Two Aspects of CAS Through Core Values Recent research reveals the average age of an S&P 500 Company today is less than 20 years, down from 60 years when measured in the 1950s. Yet there are organizations that have endured the test of time: complex adaptive systems (CAS). The question is what needs to happen to morph the culture and running of an organization to operate more like a CAS? Here, we will look at getting the process going at the very beginning of an employee’s life cycle. What must first be understood is an overarching characteristic of any CAS. CAS are those organizations that successfully maintain the core of what they represent— their raison d’etre—while simultaneously adapting to or even successfully making

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incremental changes in real time. So any new-hire training ideally gives an intimate, visceral experience of both these sides. In the US Marine Corps, for example, a colleague related to me that when he joined he felt his identity progressively stripped from him. His head was shaved, he was given a uniform to wear and he was provided specific reading materials to internalize. Further, he had to undergo an intense daily routine for months on end. He had to learn to be and act a certain way, and eventually, he began to experience himself and those around him differently. Something of Marine’s hymn, “First to fight for right and freedom and to keep our honor clean,” dawned on him in a visceral way. Often for something new to dawn, space has to be created. There is a famous Zen story (O’Brien, 2018) of the scholar Tokusan who came to the Zen Master Ryutan to learn about Zen. Ryutan poured Tokusan a cup of tea but did not stop when it began to brim over. Finally unable to watch the tea continuing to spill, Tokusan exclaimed, “Stop! The cup is full.” Master Ryutan replied to the effect, “You are like the cup: full of ideas and ego. First empty your cup, and then maybe something of Zen will be able to enter into you.” In essence, this is what the training at the Marine Corps, I believe, was trying to achieve. A similar experience is the outcome of the new-hire training and onboarding program we employed at Zappos for much of its history. There is a set of rules by which each participant must abide, including myself when I joined. It does not matter where anyone comes from. It does not matter who they are, or what role they will play going forward. What seems essential is the experience of complete equality, which is the lifeblood of the system of self-organization that animates our corporate life. To understand self-organization, one’s cup has to be emptied first and then refilled in such a way that will make them successful. An equally important part of the new-hire training is the experience of what it means to “deliver WOW through service,” one of our Core Values. This is achieved through spending 30–40 hours on the phone, with a dedicated crew of coaches always present, teaching in real time and then later through dissection of calls as per a detailed architecture of creating the desired experience. Internalizing this sense also gives an intimate feel for what built our company—the sweat, the tears and the love—and it is not uncommon for participants to experience a far greater sense of humility and appreciation for always striving to serve customers, thereby further emptying the cup. But these examples give only a way in which that essential core that defines both organizations can be experienced. Equally important is the dynamic aspect that rounds out the nature of the day-to-day operations required to function as a complex adaptive system. For the Marine Corps, this has traditionally been achieved through the internalization of a set of operating principles. When in battle, for example, goals and strategy constantly shift depending on the dynamic, real-time change. However, the principles required to face any situation always remain the same and become the means by which each Marine operates. Regardless of the type of organization, values should

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similarly function as anchors for action. No matter what the action is, all core values are ideally upheld. While there may be one value that may lead the action, this should not compromise any of the others. Such a balance between these two attributes is essential for an organization to become a CAS, and there has to be an emphasis and balance between these in every action taken by an organization. In fact, the secret of the empty-cup experience that creates the stable core is that it allows dynamism by virtue of its emptiness. The secret of the principles or core values that allow dynamism is that the dynamism is an unpredictable emergence of this stability. So it is the interaction of the stable dynamism and the dynamic stability that creates CAS.

2 Individual Authenticity An old story goes (GreekMythology, 2020) that as the species of the earth were being created, the Titan Epimetheus was given the task of distributing faculties of survival to each species. He distributed strength, speed, durability, cunning and flexibility, among many others, and just as he was getting to the human species, he had exhausted all the gifts given to him by Zeus. In despair, he turned to his wiser brother Prometheus. Prometheus ended up stealing the fire and light of Zeus as a gift for humans. It is such fire and light that arguably have been responsible for culture, progress, technology and the civilizations that the human species has been able to realize. This fire and light are none other than authenticity, and the story provides insight into two fundamental aspects that must exist in every complex adaptive system: the stable core or repeatable skills represented by Epimetheus, and the authentic dynamism represented by Prometheus. At the same time, this story also sheds light on fundamentally different kinds of CAS. An ant colony, for example, represents an organization that has withstood the test of time and has been able to adapt to changing environmental situations through creatively leveraging the same simple rules. It is, therefore, more of an Epimetheus, or simple rules, type of CAS. By contrast, humanity itself is a long-living example of a balanced Epimetheus-Prometheus CAS existing by continually leveraging simple rules, but importantly also experimenting to change these at the fringes in displays of authenticity. At the extreme, a Prometheus type of CAS, acting always on the fringe without converting inventiveness into repeatability, will never be able to put in place the steps required to reach the next level of stability. The ant colony, though, has not evolved to the level of palaces, and the ant has remained more or less the same through eons. The question is, then, what must an environment be like to allow more Prometheus-ness to come into being? The ants follow a few simple rules, exercising the capacities gifted to them by Epimetheus that allow them to adapt to changing circumstances. However, they do not themselves adapt. Prometheus, on the other hand, broke the rules and sought to give the fire of authenticity to humans that until then was the privilege of the gods alone.

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The dynamic of authenticity must become alive in the practice of self-organization, and it is easy to envision self-organization as being a license to operate without rules and accountabilities. But the truth is that self-organization will only work within a clear system of accountabilities. The fulfillment of accountabilities can proceed with freedom along any unprescribed path. Prometheus, accountable for the good of humankind, risked the wrath of Zeus by choosing an unexpected path—that of stealing Zeus’ fire. It is such a system of authenticity bounded by accountability that must be the aim of organizational leaders. A story from a well-known company, Zappos, goes that in service of a single customer, an employee has remained on the phone for up to 10 hours. On another call, for example, fulfilling a requirement that every single employee regardless of the role will pitch in to manage volume during peak times, the Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, had a 20-min discussion on quantum physics with someone who called in with questions about this and the expectation that we will answer anything. Word has it that a specific initiative grew out of a call where the grandmother of an autistic child shared some of her concerns about the difficulty her grandchild had when putting on shoes himself. That call made a lasting impression on an employee, and he helped create a team dedicated to sourcing products that are functional, fashionable and meet all types of needs. None of this would be possible if authenticity was not fully brought to the table. But authenticity comes at a price. It means that people have to manage their own progression. A useful operative question is "What do you want to become?" Progression is not about having the right degrees, but about increasing one’s skills and continually learning to do what one is passionate about and is good at to help drive the company forward. Titles are unimportant—it is the role a person plays and the knowledge they have that is valued. Further, a playground has to exist where the added skills can be exercised fully, and this will only happen when self-organization works. For self-organization to work, the notion of a “manager” has to, in general, give way to a coach, with the caveat that an employee will decide how much management they need. This can erode the often debilitating practice of micromanagement. It dissolves the shelter of victimization. It reduces the need to have others tell us what to do. And it minimizes the idea of seeking approval from others. However, sometimes it is easy to get lost in the trees and not see the forest. Deeply ingrained habits need to be changed, and different approaches adopted as necessary to assist with this. What is critical is establishing a balanced Epimetheus-Prometheus CAS where the lessons of adopted approaches are internalized and become part of the stable structure, and where the fire and light of authenticity can freely build on such stability to always continue to push the boundaries.

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3 The Secret to Creating a Living Culture Often in an initial spate of enthusiasm, an organization will create a set of core values or principles to encapsulate its culture—which unfortunately ends up hanging on some wall and forgotten. The law of entropy (Jha, 2013) suggests that unless something keeps growing—that is, has a constant and positive interchange of energies with the environment—it will start dying. The question is, then, how can an organization meaningfully keep its culture alive? The answer lies in ensuring that the twin aspects of stability and dynamism true of any complex adaptive system are adhered to. The famous "School of Athens" fresco by Italian Renaissance painter Raphael (Artble, 2020) succinctly captures this notion as it applies to culture. In the center stand Plato and Aristotle. Plato has his hand pointing up toward the heavens and is carrying his book Timaeus, which describes the fundamental properties and processes that create the universe. Aristotle’s hand is facing down toward the earth, and he is carrying his book Ethics, which focuses on the best way for an individual to live in relationship to the world. If these figures, epitomizing idealism and realism, respectively, are understood as complementary and necessary to each other, we can understand not only a key aspect of a sustainable complex adaptive system (CAS), but also the secret of a living culture. Deep principles or properties have to become the stable basis by which meaningful interaction takes place. Away from the art world, the diversity of species and the vast variation within species illustrate nature’s living culture. If we imagine that a species represents an ideal or archetype, then realism suggests that with variation, shades of meaning are added to that archetype. But penetrating even deeper, it is the foundational dynamism of physical, chemical and biological systems that creates the astounding diversity of species. A brief observation of how these systems maintain stability provides insight into enriching the meaning of values and creating a sustainable cultural foundation. Hence, in physical systems, the Standard Model (Cern, 2020) describing quantum particles can be interpreted as a cultural undertaking organized around four deep values: knowledge embodied by quarks, power embodied by leptons, presence embodied by the Higgs boson and harmony embodied by bosons. All these particles, or embodiments of deeper principles, have to act in unison to create a foundation for the subsequent emergence of atoms. These same four values of knowledge, power, presence and harmony underlying the Standard Model emerge with more nuanced meaning as atoms in the periodic table (RSC, 2020). Hence, there are more elements, arguably capturing more shades of meaning in each of the naturally occurring s-group (representing power), p-group (knowledge), d-group (presence) and f-group (harmony) segments. Atoms from all these groupings similarly create the foundation for the emergence of an infinite range of molecules. In biological systems, such a selection of molecules gets organized around these same four principles so that there are many more variations to the four basic molecular plans (Goodsell, 2004) existing in every living cell. Hence, the number of nucleic acids (representing knowledge), polysaccharides

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(power), lipids (harmony) and proteins (presence) increases dramatically so that, for example, there are as many as 30,000 different proteins in a single living cell. Summarizing, there are two useful cultural implications literally embedded in all DNA: 1. 2.

First, for core values to stay alive, shades of meaning have to be added, as is seen in the increasing number of "shades" in systems of greater complexity. Second, all four core values or principles have to act together for a sustainable "culture" to be created.

This same dynamic can be applied to the creation of employee teams and even in the design or reconstruction of departments and business units. Designs where there is balance between the following types of values or personalities will tend to be more successful than designs without such balance: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Driven by knowledge (knowledge). Always present and providing deep service (presence). Continuing to move forward at a steady clip and maintaining a rhythm of power (power). Ensuring harmony between all the pieces and people (harmony).

But further, not only must these core values all work in unison when a company acts, but these four archetypes must continually enhance their meanings by adding shades and nuances that did not exist previously. When considering a company’s core value that may have to do with "continuous learning" under the knowledge dimension, for example, this could imply growth of meaning by adding shades such as the following: 1. 2. 3. 4.

More occasions become opportunities for learning. Learning is understood as varying by type of personality. A myriad of technological processes becomes the means for learning. Learning is considered best when it occurs in real time.

Even the trend in recent research, as a piece on parsing organizational culture (Chatman et al., 2014) points out, is that as a cultural lever, the norm of adaptability may be more meaningful when compared to other cultural levers in creating financial success. By leveraging Plato’s deeper idealism with a full set of relevant core values, as well as Aristotle’s adaptable realism that causes meaning to grow, an organization can create a living culture that will go a long way in helping it on its journey to becoming a CAS.

4 Building EQ and Adaptability in Teams Markets are becoming increasingly complex. This is in no small measure driven by the rapid change and adoption of technology that makes disaggregation and recombination of traditional market components easy. With evolving technologies, traditional

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components (including products, suppliers, channels, competitors, customers and differentiated values) are easily further segmented and recombined in a vast number of combinations. This means that an organization needs to become equally flexible in aggregating the right talent to address specific market opportunities. To stay ahead of the curve, an organization must continue to take the steps to proactively act much more like a complex adaptive system. Teams must assemble and disassemble quickly and work together to scale the team maturity curve rapidly, while also continuing to act in ways that do not compromise deeper cultural values that define the organization. It is often not the question asked that should become the basis of analyses, but the unexpected things suggested by the data. This point is portrayed well by one of the final scenes of the film The Last Samurai (McLaughlin, 2016), which was inspired by Japan’s westernization and the resulting Satsuma Rebellion led by Saig¯o Takamori in 1877. In this scene, Captain Algren, befriended by the Samurai leader after his capture in battle, gains audience with Emperor Meiji of Japan. The Emperor asks Algren how the Samurai leader died. Algren instead replies, “I will tell you how he lived.” It is this kind of unexpected reflection converting a question about death into a far more meaningful depiction on the way of life that is arguably more useful. This is what any organizational data collection process and analyses should aim to do through the collection of data. The best practice aims at daily, real-time, anonymous inputs made by the team members themselves. The nature of the recordings is primarily emotional—each team member reflecting on the last few days records the most significant emotions they experienced from their point of view. Such states of being may have to do with the body, heart or gut and mind. So the range of emotions could vary from lethargy to joy to anxiety to fear, among many others. Here is what we have found useful in the collection of these reflections: • Keep it anonymous to encourage full disclosure. • Make the recording of the emotion easy by using an app, website or texting information to a phone number that redirects it to a database on the back-end. • To establish significance, ask for the intensity of the emotion. • To figure if the emotion was fleeting or persistent, ask for an approximate duration of the emotion. • Ask for the reason or root cause of why the person felt the way they did. While these tasks are simple, and in general it may not take more than a few minutes a week for a person to provide this information, it is what is done with these inputs that can prove impactful. The simplest reflection may give insight into the following collective patterns: • A real-time aggregate picture of sentiment for an entire team. • A real-time aggregate picture of the most significant aspects of the sentiment pattern. • A real-time aggregate picture of possible root causes based on the entries made.

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In a value-added Algren-Meiji reflection, we wanted a system that would further reinforce self-organization. Hence, teams themselves would collectively reflect on and process the aggregate patterns and then decide on the next steps to address the identified root causes and minimize negative patterns. If the root causes are successfully addressed, then this will impact the real-time sentiment pattern. The rate at which a change in patterns takes place can become the means by which teams self-assess their performance. If a negative pattern is converted to a positive pattern quickly, then collectively the team would be performing at a higher level—as opposed to if a negative pattern persists, for example. But this will require the following: • A discipline by which team members diligently record their significant emotions and what causes them. • A process or system that computes the rate at which patterns are changing. • A process or system that correlates this rate of change to a level of maturity of the team. We chose to use Tuckman’s model of team development (Stein, 2020) and built a system that can automatically assess whether a team is at the forming, storming, norming or performing stage. • A process or system that will suggest to teams what they need to do to move from one stage of maturity to the next, what the pitfalls of each stage might be and what the signs of moving to a subsequent stage might be. Such a system may also yield some useful side effects. When these patterns are aggregated across an organization, they can provide important, actionable reflections by the level of granularity, whether at the team, business unit or division level. Since patterns are updated in real time, the effect of changes made by a team or area can generally be assessed quite quickly. Sensitivity analyses tied to specific actions and events can be gauged by assessing patterns before and after the action or event. Such analytical specificity may allow teams and areas to learn quickly and generally fosters continuous innovation. By scanning the root causes and correlating entries with cultural levers and core values, the system may provide an ongoing reflection of the state of the culture. Hence, by using viscerally experienced emotional inputs collected in real time, a more elaborate reflection that provides deeper intelligence about the organizational practices of different parts and levels of the organization can be provided. Abandoning all lip service and unnecessary adulation, like the mirror on the wall in Snow White, such a reflection may provide an image of a deeper truth. Such reflection will provide the means for action that is more precise and the bases for real-time maneuverability in markets that continue to increase in complexity.

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5 Neuroplasticity and Creating New Markets “It is sight itself that has blinded us to nearly the entire universe.” This assessment made in an article about dark energy (Panek, 2010) being the biggest mystery in the universe could equally apply to the dynamics in markets. So what are markets? Are they just sources and streams of revenue? Or, as I’ve previously suggested, is there a fundamental values-based functionality underlying all complex adaptive systems (CAS), whose task is to increase the shades of meaning? Discourse about long-tail markets supports a view where markets are a means for the amplification of function, arguably bringing out more and more diversity and beauty and, as a result, becoming sources of revenue. Assuming that this is the case, I propose that organizational leadership should recognize that it needs to see differently and that HR should facilitate learning to see differently. It is easy to get used to seeing things in the same way, and as a result, we often cannot clearly see why change is happening. The historian Toynbee suggested that societies decay because of their over-reliance on structures that helped them solve old problems. In fact, adopting a one-dimensional as opposed to a multidimensional view has been linked to the collapse of civilizations (Easterbrook, 2005) and renewal and growth tied to the adoption of a range of sources of innovation. But the reality we are in—whether in an organization, a market or a country—is that each of these is a complex adaptive system and will by definition never be the same from one moment to the next. A way for organizational leaders to determine whether we are seeing correctly is to identify whether the level and sources of challenges are, in general, increasing or decreasing. Challenges may manifest in a variation of common business operational metrics, such as a decrease in revenues and profit margins, a decrease in customer acquisition rates and the typical spend of a customer or an increase in employee dissatisfaction and turnover. When faced with such variation, it is easy for leaders to do more of what we always have been doing: throw more money at a problem, make cuts in the business and ramp up a marketing budget. What I suggest is that instead of doing that, begin to see the market differently, as a more and more elaborate play of the four fundamental organizational principles—knowledge, power, service and harmony—that I’ve presented in my research. The question to ask is whether we are doing what is necessary to be part of that elaboration, or are we just stunned bystanders, watching as everything gets more and more complex? If the latter, then we have to learn to see differently. But changing our view is not trivial, and for decades, it was thought even impossible after a person had crossed a certain age. However, research on neuroplasticity (Giang, 2015) suggests that learning and brain adaptation can be unending. Leaders need to play a key role in making this happen by proactively putting in place programs that allow a company to lead such elaboration, rather than be mere bystanders. Seeing markets as expressions of the fourfold richness will require a different view. The good news is that as neuroplasticity suggests, such sight can be learned. It

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will serve organizations well to experiment with neuroplasticity to alter the lens by which organizational dynamics, including dynamics in markets, are seen. The structural basis of such a lens is to expedite the creation of new nodes and connections in brain-based neural networks that create a different perception or context for people, by which the same phenomena can be seen and interpreted differently. What is important in the creation of such a lens is that these new neural networks be comprised of nodes from each of the four organizational principles. This implies that organizational leaders deliberately change operating language in appropriate circumstances so that attunement to these organizational principles is increased. Typically, different use of language in organizational development initiatives is particularly helpful in bringing about change that catches. For example, a tool created and administered by the author aims to not only understand the structural makeup of some parts of the organization in terms of the four underlying organizational principles, but more importantly to initiate the creation of an internal neural networkbased lens that will allow the four principles to progressively become more living as organizational principles. Rather than have rapid responses to a large number of questions as is the common practice in assessment-type tools, we focused on a smaller set of questions designed to make a person pause and concentrate, to really figure out what is being said. Such a pause facilitates the creation of an enhanced neural network. Example snippets of the uncommon language, inspired and adapted from Sri Aurobindo’s seminal book “The Mother” (Sri Aurobindo, 1984), related to the key areas include the following: • In the area of knowledge, we ask employees to consider “the study of life in areas outside the domain of your work.” • In the area of service, we ask them to consider “the readiness to follow any needful self-discipline in the aim of service.” • In the area of harmony, we ask them to consider “the sense to consider and weigh accurately all that has been done and all that remains to be done hereafter.” • In the area of power, we ask them to consider “the urge to change the environment in accordance with some personal or respected ideals.” A resulting and reinforced neural network then becomes the lens by which dynamics are progressively perceived differently and will awaken a person to a new way of seeing. As a result, it will become easier for leadership to proactively put in place a solution to an organizational, market or customer problem so that the allimportant CAS requirement of continuing to add shades of meaning to the fourfold play is upheld. This in turn provides the juice or the opening that often initiates new markets. "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." The observation by Marcel Proust could very well have been referring to neuroplasticity and the creation of new markets.

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6 Conclusion The four ideals behind all physical, chemical, biological and human systems have their origins in light. It should not be surprising, then, that in following a program aimed at their progressive growth and balance of these four ideals, that wealth, like light that shines everywhere without discrimination, may also one day be as easily and democratically generated and available. This will signal the mastery of wealth and is a goal worth striving for.

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Panek, R. (2010). Dark energy—The biggest mystery in the universe. The Smithsonian. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dark-energy-the-biggest-mystery-in-theuniverse-9482130/ RSC. (2020). The periodic table. The Royal Society of Chemistry. https://www.rsc.org/periodictable Sri Aurobindo. (1984). The Mother. All India Books. Stein, J. (2020). Using the stages of team development (retrieved). https://hr.mit.edu/learning-top ics/teams/articles/stages-development

Values of Management in Ecologically Conscious Businesses András Ócsai

1 Central Propositions Earlier and recent studies have underscored that, in the era of the Anthropocene, humankind is seriously damaging the functioning of ecosystems at an accelerating rate. Respecting the carrying capacity and environmental boundaries of the Earth system is a prerequisite for preserving the chances for a livable future for all living beings (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971; Steffen, Broadgate, et al., 2015, Steffen, Richardson, et al., 2015; Steffen et al., 2018; Global Footprint Network, 2020). As the signs of ecological, social, and existential crises have become obvious, research confirms that modern economic activities, business, management, and the related unsustainable patterns of production and consumption and maximizing shortterm profitability lie at the heart of the problem (Mintzberg, 2007; Tencati et al., 2009; Brown & Timmerman, 2015; Shrivastava et al., 2019; EASAC, 2020). S. K. Chakraborty had clearly seen these problems for decades. He called attention to that exploitation of one individual by another and exploitation of Nature by human beings are unacceptable. He suggested practical solutions developed from the core concepts of Indian traditional wisdom such as the development of duties-consciousness, sacred rationality, ‘spiritual law of ethical work’, ‘detached involvement’, and trusteeship-based leadership. He coined the term ‘spirinomics’— economics subordinated to Spirit—which is the truly sustainable economics because spiritual attitude is essential for successful environmental conservation. Chakraborty argued that the root cause of ethical failures at the individual and organizational level is that the actions are not implemented by actors and leaders operating from the right consciousness and do not meet the imperatives of ‘consciousness ethics’ (Bidyut, 2019; Chakraborty, 1995).

A. Ócsai (B) Business Ethics Center, Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_14

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After outlining the theoretical foundations, this chapter presents empirical studies about ethics and values of management in ecologically conscious businesses, how managers realize ethics and spiritual practices in the real world to preserve natural ecosystems. It draws attention to why and how businesses built on ecological commitment can contribute to protect natural ecosystems, social communities, and future generations, and how they can become exemplary for other economic actors. The paper shows that the ethical and ecological commitment of the studied businesses is based on the ethical character, the ecological consciousness, and the spiritual attitude of their owners and managers. These managers and leaders are able to live up to the level of ‘consciousness ethics’ and live and work with deep respect for nature, God, or the source of life, and provide selfless service for the common good. Trusteeship and leadership in a higher sense, and the pursuit of flourishing for all stakeholders of the studied businesses can, thus, become reality in their business functioning.

2 Literature Review The Anthropocene is the current geological era when humankind has been causing deteriorating ecological, social, and economic processes since the 1950s (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Steffen, Broadgate, et al., 2015; Waters et al., 2016). Communities of scientists have confirmed that global climate change (IPCC, 2018; WMO, 2020); declining ecosystem services such as food, water, disease control, climate regulation, spiritual fulfillment, and aesthetic experience (MEA, 2005; UNEP, 2019); and loss of biodiversity (WWF, 2018; IPBES, 2019) have dire consequences on societies, economies, health, migration, food security, and the global terrestrial and aquatic life. Many scholars have argued that mainstream economics and the prevailing business model of companies are causing and worsening the ecological and social crises. Growth-based mainstream economics is unsustainable, does not recognize the intrinsic value of nature, uses living beings as natural resources then depletes them, and destroys natural ecosystems, local communities, and ultimately its own basis of existence (Daly, 2008; Ims et al., 2014; Jakobsen, 2017; Shrivastava et al., 2019; Zsolnai, 2015). Ecological degradation is fast and accelerating. Business-as-usual has to be abandoned and all political, economic, scientific, and civil actors should cooperate in order to achieve transformative changes in society, economy, and science and technology. A shift to a new paradigm that promotes respect for nature, wellbeing for all living beings, and human dignity for all generations is indispensable (Costanza et al., 2018; WWF, 2018; Club of Rome, 2020; EASAC, 2020; Wallis, 2020; Wellbeing Economy Alliance, 2020). Practicing ecological consciousness; achieving ecological transformation; reorienting human value-orientation, behavior, and institutions; and development and application of new and progressive business models are important steps toward the new paradigm.

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Ecological consciousness was characteristic of Paleolithic societies and even in early agricultural civilizations. The philosophy of the ancient Greeks, Hinduism, and Taoism considered humans as part of the cosmos, living creatures tied with all the living beings. Extensive leaps of biosphere-transforming activity of humankind, however, made humans physically, psychologically, and spiritually separated from nature (Hughes, 1991). The concept of ecological consciousness has been differentiated from environmental consciousness since the late 1960s. Ecological consciousness can be defined as concern for environmental problems due to experiencing the degradation of nature, supplemented with the understanding that to solve ecological problems one has to understand the genuine relationship between nature, society, and the individual. Unless instrumental rationality behind modern capitalism, industrial technology, individualism, mechanistic science, and the atomistic concept of the self is replaced with an ecological rationality, holistic approach, extended self-understanding, and an ethical system based on ecological values, global ecological and social crises will be unavoidable (Christopher, 1999). S. K. Chakraborty distinguished between sacred rationality and scientific secular rationality and claims that successful environmental conservation depends on spreading the sacred attitude. ‘Sensible localization’, spiritual intuition, nonaggressive and non-acquisitive civilization, and ‘mind enrichment’ could serve as strategic principles to support that. Chakraborty’s classification of ethics into ‘compliance ethics’ (legislations and codes of conduct), ‘cognitive ethics’ (abstractrational theories), and ‘consciousness ethics’ (spiritual communion) also highlights that ethical failures usually stem from compliance ethics when leaders do not behave practicing right consciousness. Chakraborty argues that based on concepts of Vedanta, Mahatma Gandhi’s Sarvodaya and trusteeship, and the works of Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda, and Rabindranath Tagore, the dominant Western world-view and mindset, materialistic and reductionist values of consumeristmilitarist culture, industrial technology, and the capitalist economy must be transcended. Mainstream economics has to be transformed into ‘spirinomics’, an economics subordinated to Spirit. Problems of self-serving globalization, ecological crisis, existential poverty, and exploitation of nature and human beings may be solved with the help of applying concepts of Indian perennial wisdom such as duties-consciousness, ‘Rajarshi leadership’, and giving importance to humanistic values within the economy and business organizations (Bidyut, 2019; Chakraborty, 1995; Chakraborty & Chakraborty, 2008, 2013). Values are pivotal in studying and promoting ecological consciousness. Several different definitions of values exist in various disciplines, and there is a lack of synthesis. Synthesizing Clyde Kluckhohn’s (1951), Milton Rokeach’s (1973), and Shalom Schwartz’s (2006) definitions, we can say that values determine, influence, and guide human actions, motivate the individuals, and serve as evaluation criteria when they judge actions, situations, or people. Scholars have suggested that companies have a moral personality (French, 1979), even environmental conscience (Goodpaster, 1990, quoted by Brenkert, 1995). Business enterprises can be viewed as moral actors as their actions originate from the

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intentions of their members, who are subjects of moral responsibility (Werhane, 1985). Chakraborty emphasizes that business organizations consist of individuals, and individuals make decisions, and ultimately individuals are accountable for the company’s actions. Individual accountability is the root of ‘ethico-morality’ at all levels of the society and organizations (Chakraborty, 1995). The personal values of the managers of companies greatly influence the values of their business organizations (Meglino & Ravlin, 1998; Loe et al., 2000; Hemingway, 2005; Zsolnai & Gy˝ori, 2011; Gy˝ori & Ócsai, 2014). As personal values determine company character, a more responsible, value-oriented, and ecologically conscious conduct of business requires higher consciousness of leaders (Bidyut, 2019).

3 Empirical Study This chapter, in the following, investigates the values of management of some selected ecologically conscious business enterprises from different parts of the world. Those businesses are considered ecologically conscious, which base their operations on ecological considerations, and are capable to function in alternative ways in the mainstream economic system. Applying an empirical approach, this part of the chapter studies the values of some selected ecologically conscious business organizations to understand what values of management influence ecologically conscious business conduct. A qualitative research design was used for case analyses of eight well-known ecologically conscious business enterprises throughout the world from America (Interface, Natura, Patagonia), Europe (Houdini Sportswear, Organica Water, Scott Bader), and Asia (Green Monday, Organic India). A less structured qualitative approach, document analysis of publicly available websites, official documents, and publications were studied to see the value background of these business models. A brief introduction of ecologically conscious businesses is followed by a summary of their main characteristics and values. Interface Ray C. Anderson founded Interface in 1973 in Atlanta. The company is among the global leaders of office and household modular carpet manufacturers. It has operations on four continents, sales activity in 100 countries, employs more than 4000 people, and made 80 million USD profit in 2019 with sales of 1.3 billion USD. The interface is committed to industrial ecology, sustainability, continuous innovations based on mimicking nature, and customer-centeredness. For two decades, the company has been among the best-recognized sustainability leaders, and through its Mission Zero, Climate Take Back programs, and realizing its own concept of climbing up ‘Mount Sustainability’, Interface sought to totally eliminate its negative ecological impact (GlobeScan, 2019; Interface, 2019, 2020).

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Natura Natura was established in 1969 and became Brazil’s market leader in cosmetics and direct marketing. Since January 2020, Natura has belonged to the world’s fourthlargest beauty group together with the Australian brand Aesop, the English brand The Body Shop, and the iconic American beauty brand Avon. Well-being, harmony and relations with people, with nature and with the Wholeness, sustainable development, customer care, innovation, and social and environmental responsibility are key aspects of its value background. Natura Brazil alone reached 2.2 billion USD net revenue in 2019, but Natura & Co., the group of four emblematic brands, had 10 billion USD gross revenue, serves 200 million consumers in 100 countries on five continents, and employs 40,000 people and 6.3 million consultants and representative (Natura, 2020; Natura & Co., 2020). Patagonia Outdoor clothing and apparel company Patagonia was founded in 1973 in California by mountain climber and environmental activist Yvon Chouinard. Inspired also by its manager’s Buddhist approach, the company is genuinely committed to environmental and social sustainability and now has 2000 employees in 50 countries on five continents, with approximately 1 billion USD turnover in 2020. Patagonia’s main goal is to produce the best outdoor products without causing the least possible harm and to use business to mitigate the ecological crisis as a leading ‘activist company’. Within its whole value chain, the company strives to neutralize its negative effects, enhance consciousness, and support environmental movements and transformation of businesses (Chouinard, 2005; Patagonia, 2020). Houdini Sportswear The Swedish functional outdoor clothing company was established in 1993 in Stockholm. In 2019, the company reached 17 million EUR turnover, employed 45 people, and its products are available in 18 countries on three continents. Inspired by the love of nature, Houdini’s mission is to serve customers actively engaged in exploring the world and environmental protection, eliminate all of its negative ecological impacts, and become industry leader in open-source innovation of materials and processes. The company fights against overconsumption and wants to eliminate waste by developing and applying circular systems in harmony with natural principles. Long-term commitment, creativity, community, free-thinking, and sharing knowledge are also of utmost importance among Houdini’s values (Houdini, 2020; Largest Companies, 2020). Organica Water Organica Water was founded in 1998 in Hungary as a traditional wastewater designbuild company. After focusing on the Hungarian market and building and operating nearly 100 municipal, commercial, and industrial wastewater treatment plants in the first nine years, the company decided to divest its traditional business line. Organica’s

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exclusive focus became the commercialization of its own biological wastewater treatment solution. The company has now a global reach on five continents with more than 110 facilities in 16 countries and is the world leader in sustainable wastewater solutions. Based on its main values of transparency, diversity, responsibility, commitment, teamwork, passion, and transcending of limits, Organica’s main goal is to drive positive change in the world (Organica Water, 2020). Scott Bader Ernest Bader and his wife, Dora Scott, started the chemical company in 1921 in London. After three decades of governing the organization according to the dominant capitalist principles, the couple decided to transform the company into a commonwealth. They were inspired by Quaker religious thought and values and wanted to act more ethically for the common good. As a global chemical company, Scott Bader employs 700 people in 16 countries on five continents. With a turnover of about 200 million GBP, the company is a market leader in manufacturing composite, adhesive, and specialty polymers. Its self-governing structure and a common trusteeship allow Scott Bader’s employees to own and manage the company. Scott Bader is also a registered charity, and its focus is on creating value for society, social and environmental sustainability (Scott Bader, 2019, 2020; Simkin, 2020). Green Monday In 2012, David Yeung and Francis Ngai established Green Monday in Hong Kong, a group of social and business enterprises with a mission to mitigate climate change and food security by providing plant-based food and reducing meat consumption. The company has been growing rapidly and has become one of the most innovative companies in China, present in ten countries in Southeast Asia, in the United Kingdom, and in the United States. Green Monday had a turnover of 12 million USD in 2017 and a favorable industry potential, sales, and profit outlook. Inspired by the founder’s Buddhist practice, the company operates as a platform to support and combine the efforts of companies, institutions, communities, and individuals to promote low-carbon, simple, harmonious and easy-to-implement sustainable lifestyles that reduce suffering (Green Monday, 2020; Yusof, 2020). Organic India Organic India was founded by Bhavani Lev and Bharat Mitra in 1997 in Lucknow, India, to produce and distribute Ayurvedic Tulsi tea blends and organic herbal products. Based on inspiration from Hindu teachings and combining millennia of traditional Indian wisdom with cutting-edge technology, the company became a world leader with a mission of conducting a holistic, ethical, socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable business, supporting true well-being, and raising consciousness. An essential part of its functioning is to promote organic, regenerative agriculture and provide livelihoods and training to disadvantaged rural, tribal, and farming communities. Service to all beings and respect and devotion to Mother Nature are also among its core values. Organic India has been growing significantly

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since its inception and expects to have a turnover of 70 million USD in 2020 (The Economic Times, 2017; Organic India, 2020). Table 1 presents the main characteristics, missions, and main values of the selected ecologically conscious businesses. The most important values of the selected ecologically conscious business organizations are sustainability, respect for nature and future generations, cooperation and knowledge-sharing, regeneration, simplicity, circularity, responsibility, well-being and health, love, passion, transparency, genuineness, honesty, credibility, setting an example, inspiring others, consciousness, and action. Values such as innovation inspired by nature, feasibility, ecology and ecosophy, a holistic approach, doing well by doing good, interconnectedness, diversity, empowerment, and free-thinking are also important for them. These companies also consider harmony, peace, quality, compassion, generosity, humility, respect for limits, solidarity, integrity, equal opportunities, fearlessness, and self-motivation be relevant, but less emphasized. Among the values of the studied organizations, various aspects of spirituality can be identified. Some of them use religious world-views explicitly such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Quakerism, but more general spiritual values are also relevant for the selected ecologically conscious businesses. Consciousness, interconnectedness, compassion, harmony with nature, other people and the Wholeness, holistic approach, and transcendence are important spiritual values for some enterprises even if they do not live them as part of any formal religious tradition.

4 Conclusions and Future Directions From the empirical study of the selected cases of ecologically conscious business organizations, the following can be derived as concluding remarks. The functioning of ecologically conscious business organizations is a promising way to promote ecological transformation and reorientation of values in business and indicates the much needed paradigm shift from a materialistic and instrumental rationality to an ecological or sacred rationality. Ethical and ecological commitment of the studied businesses is based on the ethical character, value background, and spiritual attitude of their managers and owners. Strong personally held ethical, ecological, and spiritual values foster managers to realize their genuine visions of doing business in the real world and contribute to preserve the chances of survival of the natural ecosystems and the humankind. While contributing to improving the living conditions of natural ecosystems, social communities, and future generations, these ecologically conscious organizations and their management can become exemplary for other economic actors. Managers of ecologically conscious businesses are able to live up to the level of ‘consciousness ethics’ because they live and work in harmony with their genuine

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Table 1 Main characteristics of the selected ecologically conscious businesses Company name

Year of foundation

Sector

Mission

Main values

Interface, USA

1973

Modular carpet

Through globally producing modular flooring doing right for a positive future, showing that sustainability is better for business, being an agent of restoration and the redesign of global industry

Consciousness, compassion, action, purpose-driven, passionate teams, well-being, genuineness, generosity, interconnectedness, and pioneering innovations inspired by nature

Natura, Brazil 1969

Natural cosmetics

Nurturing beauty and relationships for a better way of living and business, local and global collaboration of four socially and environmentally conscious beauty brands

‘Well-being well’, harmony, empathy, successful and joyful relationship with nature, people, and the ‘Whole’, solidarity, truth, diversity, human rights, gender equality, circularity, and regeneration

Patagonia, USA

1973

Outdoor Producing the best clothing, apparel outdoor clothing products and apparel without generating unnecessary harm and using business to protect the stability, integrity, and beauty of the web of life

Love and respect for nature, free entrepreneurial spirit, passion, fearlessness, respect for limits, simplicity, innovation, interconnectedness, empowerment, and Buddhism

Houdini Sportswear, Sweden

1993

Functional Leading outdoor outdoor clothing clothing industry, reconnecting humankind to nature through promoting a healthier and happier lifestyle, helping people to evolve to improve the situation of the present and future generations

Regeneration and respect for the intrinsic value of nature, passion, functionality, love, holistic approach, circular systems, knowledge-sharing, leading the change, ecosophy, and deep ecology (continued)

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Table 1 (continued) Company name

Year of foundation

Sector

Mission

Main values

Organica Water, Hungary

1998

Biological wastewater treatment

Providing products and services worldwide that enable partners to build and operate space and energy-efficient biological wastewater treatment plants harmoniously integrated in urban and residential areas

Transparency with all stakeholders, respect for diversity, innovation, learning, accountability, responsibility, impact, change people’s way of thinking, unity, collaboration, teamwork, passion, and transcendence

Scott Bader, Great Britain

1921

Composites, adhesives, and polymers

Being a globally present chemical company providing essential technologies that address social challenges and serve as a force for good, helping humanity to thrive without compromising the natural systems

Mutual responsibility, joint ownership, democratic participation, material and spiritual development of all stakeholders, circular economy, equal opportunities, leading by example, dialogue, and Quakerism

Green Monday, Hong Kong

2012

Plant-based foods

Through an ecosystem of social and business enterprises of plant-based food promoting global lifestyle change, preventing food insecurity, food-related illness, planetary devastation, and animal suffering

Community, health and well-being of all stakeholders, consciousness, simplicity, feasibility, easy-to-implement and easy-to-share solutions, triple-bottom-line approach, knowledge-sharing, and Buddhism

Organic India, India

1997

Organic teas and Being a global leader herbal products of providing genuine organic products and services that support more conscious and healthy living, promoting True Wellness and respect for all Beings and Mother Nature

Reliability, innovation, love and respect for service and dedication to all Beings and Mother Nature, holistic approach, consciousness, inspiring others, honesty, integrity, and Hinduism

Source Author’s construction

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ethical, ecological, and spiritual values to respect other beings, nature, or the source of life and selflessly serve the common good. Trusteeship and leadership in a higher sense, pursuit of flourishing of all of the stakeholders can become reality in their practices. Future research directions can broaden the study by investigating values of other organizational actors such as employees and collaborative partners of ecologically conscious businesses. Increased sample of the empirical study can improve the generalizability of the findings. Also conducting longitudinal studies may help to see and understand tendencies and dynamics of co-evolving values, consciousness, and spirituality in alternative business organizations.

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Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility: Insights from Indian Ethos Sumona Ghosh

Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Laureate poet and philosopher from India in his essay Tapovan, “Forest of Purity,” elucidates that “Indian civilization has been distinctive in locating its source of regeneration, material and intellectual, in the forest, not the city. India’s best ideas have come where man was in communion with trees and rivers and lakes, away from the crowds. The peace of the forest has helped the intellectual evolution of man. The culture of the forest has fueled the culture of Indian society. The culture that has arisen from the forest has been influenced by the diverse processes of renewal of life, which are always at play in the forest, varying from species to species, from season to season, in sight and sound and smell. The unifying principle of life in diversity, of democratic pluralism, thus became the principle of Indian civilization” (Tagore, 1922). We are living in an era where our civilization is plagued by the global environmental crisis which has imposed a serious threat on our planet and the future of our civilization. We are surrounded by threats of global climate change, depletion of natural resources, loss of biodiversity, and evils of pollution on one hand and ever-increasing poverty, widening gap between have and have-not’s, unemployment, ill-health, and lack of education on the other. Sustainability garnered a great deal of attention and discussion because Sustainability or Sustainable Development was regarded to be the solution to combat such evils. Sustainability or Sustainable Development implies “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment & Development, 1987). In other words, sustainability has environmental, economic, and social dimensions to it. Sustainability has been extensively reported in the Indian scriptures. Our connection with nature has always been emphasized by the Indian classical wisdom, which says that the philosophy of our country, based on scriptures, written by sages living in the forests, is a way of life. The earliest S. Ghosh (B) St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Kolkata, Calcutta, West Bengal, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_15

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messages on ecological balance and the importance of ethical treatment of nature were contained in some of the Classical Indian wisdom literature and epics like Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, and Mahabharata which we have all enjoyed from childhood but failed to realize its significance and applicability. Our scriptures recognize harmony with nature and the divinity of all the natural elements. Pathak (2014) presents the story between K. T. Shah an industrialist and Mahatma Gandhi. “The story goes that just after independence K. T. Shah an industrialist who was a great admirer of Gandhi and had contributed magnanimously to the Indian National Movement planned a school at Wardha. Gandhi was requested to come to the place along with several eminent people. Shah wanted Gandhi to give his views on the type of education that was to be provided to the children so that the nation learns the right lessons. In the beginning Gandhi was not willing to say anything but when asked repeatedly he obliged. For Gandhi education had to be different. He said that if he asks the students that suppose he bought an apple for 25 paisa and sold it for a rupee what would he get, and if the students say that he should get jail, that was the kind of education to be imparted.” There cannot be any justification to seek an unreasonable profit of 300 percent, erosion of the value system, and the greed for Unbridled Profit. Our scriptures emphasize on striking an equitable balance between human values, economic development, and environment. The UN Secretary-General in their report highlighted how sustainable development initiatives have enabled communities “to reconnect with the Earth” at the sixty-fifth session of the UN General Assembly, in 2010. The report recognized that, “Around the world, ancient civilizations have a rich history of understanding the symbiotic connection between human beings and nature.” It was a session devoted to “Sustainable development: Harmony with Nature.” It noted, “The Vedic philosophy of India has always emphasized the human connection with nature. Vedism is a way of life based on scriptures called Aranyakas, or forest books, which were written by sages who lived in the forest. The Mahabharata, Ramayana, Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Puranas and Smriti contain some of the earliest messages on ecological balance and the need for people’s ethical treatment of nature. They emphasize harmony with nature and recognize that all natural elements hold divinity” (UN General Assembly 2010).

1 Sustainability and CSR in India: Ancient Roots, Modern Reality Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) stemmed from the realization that companies are bound to face the consequences of their operations. Seers of ancient India always felt that the Ethical way of doing business would certainly bring about social and economic sustainability, universal peace, and happiness. The roots of CSR can be traced to Rig Veda which observed that “a person who enjoys himself being

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totally oblivious of society is taken over by sin.” Charity (daana), sacrifice, ethical (“dharmic”) way of doing business, and living in harmony are the essence of the literature of ancient India. Convictions towards CSR and strengthening the planet for our future generations can be obtained only by searching for spiritual routes. Various ethical business practices were taught and promoted by philosophers as well as statesmen like Kautilya. Our ancient literature emphasized on the concept of helping the weaker sections, thus reflecting a more spiritualistic and intuitive world view. Supreme importance is placed on morality, taking precedence over money and other desires, and community involvement by the Indian classical wisdom, and this explains India’s tradition of prolific philanthropy and “do-good” approaches. The modern-day corporate social responsibility is based on the philosophy of “prosperity for all” and “in harmony with nature.” But the question arises that with a high illiteracy rate, high percentage of people living below the poverty line, low financial inclusion, poor health facilities, poor employment opportunities, and high corruption level we forgotten our Vedantic philosophy with its strong focus on morality and community involvement. Here the Governments with dynamic leadership and good governance can help in fostering more inclusive forms of growth and implementing more sustainable policies. Businesses can come forward and join hands with the government in contributing towards inclusive growth which in turn will ensure its own survival and sustenance. The statement of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, made on the eve of India’s independence is the most appropriate mission statement for India’s future: “The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.” There is hardly a word that is not relevant today. Post mandate CSR trends show that there has been an increase in the CSR initiatives but the question lies has such increased CSR trends been able to bring about inclusivity, “prosperity for all,” ecological balance, and ethical treatment of nature? The answer may not be positive since CSR activities undertaken so far have concentrated on immediate outcomes but not long run. The spirit of the Indian Classical Wisdom which looks upon the entire universe as a single largest family including all the living beings of the world can be achieved if CSR can be aligned with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) because the main objective behind developing and implementing sustainability goals is securing economic development for all, social equity and justice for all, and environmental protection. These development goals can be met by India as a developing nation by directing CSR funds towards the SDGs. This paper, therefore, would like to study the organic link existing between CSR, its alignment with sustainability, and our Indian ancient classical wisdom.

2 The Evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility The World Business Council for Sustainable Development states that “Corporate social responsibility is the continuing commitment by business to behave ethically

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and contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the workforce and their families as well as of the local community and society at large.” While CSR practices date back to ancient Greece (Eberstadt, 1977) from the Indian perspective, CSR development in the Indian subcontinent was based on the Vedic philosophy (Pandey & Tripathi, 2002). Religious virtues and values such as honesty, love, truthfulness, and trust were regarded to be the pillars of CSR, values which were dominant in Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative (Evan & Freeman, 1998). This golden rule was applied to understand the company’s responsiveness to stakeholders and society at large. (Donaldson & Preston, 1995; Evans & Freeman, 1998) Companies that failed to practice such values were regarded as unethical and not concerned of societal welfare. According to Muniapan and Dass (2008), “Since then, civilizations have been in the process of wealth accumulation through a series of business venture travels to colonize; then industrial revolution to capitalize production processes; and finally multinational corporations to maximize profits from the modern theories of comparative advantage. Practices of CSR were neglected and overshadowed by the pursuit of wealth accumulation.” The time period of 1920–1950s was more concerned with the social responsibilities of businessmen as highlighted in some of the notable works like Chester Barnard’s “The Functions of the Executive” (1938), J. M. Clark’s “Social Control of Business” (1939), and Theodore Kreps’s “Measurement of the Social Performance of Business” (1940). Corporate Social Responsibility as a concept started taking shape from the 1950s onwards. Howard Bowen’s “Social Responsibilities of the Businessmen” (1953) was regarded to be a revolutionary work which tried to establish the synergy between companies and society (Carroll, 1999; Preston et al., 1975; Wartick & Cochran, 1985). CSR for him “refers to the obligations of businessmen to pursue those policies, to make those decisions, or to follow those lines of action which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society” (Bowen, 1953). The 1960s was the era that accurately formalized the meaning of CSR (Carroll, 1999). Keith Davis, Joseph W. McGuire, William C. Frederick, and Clarence C. Walton made significant contributions in this field during this time. Business ethics and its relationship with CSR also came into prominence during this time. The time period of the 1970s opened a new era wherein Committee for Economic Development described corporate social responsibility as “related to products, jobs, and economic growth; related to societal expectations; and related to activities aimed at improving the social environment of the firm.” (US Committee for Economic Development in Wheeler et al., 2003). Besides research on CSR increased manifold during this period (Ackerman, 1973; Fitch, 1976; Murray, 1976). The era of the 1980s swathed the emergence of the concept of “Sustainable Development” (Tilbury & Wortman, 2004; World Commission on Environment & Development, 1987). The era of the 1990s saw the integration of CSR with strategic management. Major themes like CSP, stakeholder theory, business ethics theory, and corporate citizenship came into focus (Carroll, 1999). Nancy Lee, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Michael Porter, Philip Kotler, and Stuart Hart, some of the prominent strategic management scholars, emphasized on more practical applications of CSR. Empirical research on CSR and related topics

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such as business ethics, stakeholder theory, sustainability, and corporate citizenship became the crux of the twenty-first century. Lydenberg (2005) in his book “Corporations and the Public Interest: Guiding the Invisible Hand,” saw CSR as “a major secular development, driven by a long-term reevaluation of the role of corporations in society.” Corporate Social Responsibility in India—A Journey Culture, religion, family tradition, and industrialization were the determining factors for the first phase of CSR in India. CSR was influenced predominantly by charity and philanthropy. The merchant class in pre-industrial India up to the 1850s committed themselves for the welfare of the society. They established educational institutions, temples, and social infrastructures; opened up treasure chests; distributed food grains; and even donated any kind of relief work from their repositories at times of hardship such as famine or epidemics. Their commitment towards the society was for religious reasons. CSR started changing from 1850 onwards due to the advent of western types of industrialization. Industrialization in the nineteenth century in India saw a pivotal role played by a few families like Bajaj, Lalbhai, Godrej, Shriram, Singhania, Modi, Naidu, Mahindra, Annamalai, and the Tatas. “The early pioneers of industry in India were leaders in the economic, as also in the social fields” (Arora 2004). Mohan (2001) pointed out that their engagement in social fields was merely altruistic in nature but “it had business considerations in supporting efforts towards industrial and social development of the nation and was influenced by caste groups and political objectives.” The entrepreneurs not only contributed money to schools or hospitals but also institutionalized traditional corporate philanthropy through trusts and hence they were regarded as “social leaders” like the Tata family. 1914–1960 saw India’s struggle for independence. Indian businesses actively engaged themselves in the institutional and social development, and they contributed to the causes of social upliftment, poverty eradication, women empowerment, caste systems, etc. Hence, CSR had a strong nationalistic element involved in it during this phase. This era also experienced the introduction of Gandhi’s theory of trusteeship, whose focus was to foster social development. The companies engaged themselves in programs like the abolition of untouchability, women’s empowerment, and rural development. So CSR was primarily for social upliftment. The third phase (1960–80) witnessed an “era of command and control” (Arora et al. 2004). Corporate governance, labor, and environmental issues became the area of legislation. Industrial pollution control measures were adopted by India in the 1970s, and during this time, one witnessed the first set of environmental regulations. This phase experienced the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor, and unbridled encouragement for domestic industries also led to maximizing of profit by a few, resulting in corruption and unethical practices by many companies. This enhanced the demand for more effective corporate responsibility, and corporate interests in social concerns were renewed once again. During this phase, businesses were asked and expected to behave like responsible corporate citizens, with regular communication with stakeholders, social accountability, and transparency (Mohan, 2001).

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In the fourth phase (1980 onwards), Indian companies transited from philanthropic CSR to integrated CSR by partially adopting the multi-stakeholder approach. This transition was primarily due to economic liberalization in 1991 and greater levels of privatization. So from the 1990s, the modern approach, “doing all that we can to do the most good, not just some good” was adopted by the companies. This was regarded as a win–win situation for all because by this it gets a license to operate and enhances its image. In order to encourage businesses to be more responsive towards social development, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) issued the Corporate Social Responsibility Voluntary Guidelines in 2009. However, Indian firms failed to incorporate CSR as a part of their duty even after the 2009 guidelines which proved that these voluntary guidelines did not have much impact on the Indian firms. However, CSR from 2013 onwards took a major leap as Corporate Social Responsibility Voluntary Guidelines issued by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs of India in 2009 resulted in the enactment of Sect. 135 of the Companies Act 2013 (MCA, 2013)CSR was made mandatory for organizations in both public and private sectors. CSR and Sustainability—Global Perspectives Globalization is now creating blind distribution and adding on to it is the rapidly advancing technology adding more complexities to this disequilibrium that is now threatening the smooth functioning of democracy, disturbing the traditional economic ladders, and weakening social cohesion. People are more interested in smarter mobiles sets, social media attention, automation, and artificial intelligence rather than strengthening social cohesion. Growing inequality has been making a severe impact on social cohesion and moral compass. Climate change, industrialization, and urbanization are aggravating these challenges. Climate change challenges across continents are making the planet and the people look so vulnerable and helpless. We observe the creation of SDGs and the signing of the Paris Climate Agreements to minimize these uncontrollable consequences swallowing our planet. At the same time, we also observe a global moral consensus emerging centering around the issue of resource efficiency, where questions are being raised “Are we using more resources than we need and depleting the same, depriving the future generations?” “Are we inculcating the values of saving the world into day to day life for sustainable development?” “Are we leaving enough for our future generation?” Sustainability (CSR being an element of this mammoth term), as a concept, was originally used in forestry, where it meant “never harvesting more than what the forest yields in new growth” (Wiersum, 1995). Nachhaltigkeit (meaning sustainability in German) was first used with this meaning in 1713 (Wilderer, 2007). The concern was to preserve natural resources for the future. In fact, sustainability as a concept has its roots in all cultures. “The idea of sustainability is neither an abstract theory dreamt up by modern technocrats nor a wild fantasy hatched by Woodstock-generation ecofreaks…It is our primal world cultural heritage” (Grober, 2012). Manchau gagog changau gagog chaugo gagog amaug, a lake in South America is an evidence of this, which means “We fish on our side, you fish on your side and nobody fishes

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in the middle.” This is “obviously a simple instruction for the sustainable use of natural resources” and indicates that sustainability is a “survival strategy.” This is also more pronounced in the “management of commons,” which shows a deep motivation towards sustainability, a sense of responsibility, and respect and love for nature (Chasek et al., 2006). We get to learn about sustainability and the relationship between man and nature and between society and the environment from ancient texts, like Francis of Assisi, Nikolaus von Kues, Spinoza, von Lenné, Goethe, and Novalis. As early as 600– 470 BC Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism propagated the idea of being in harmony with nature, about ecological sensitivity, about developing pro-environment beliefs of living with nature rather than over it, and leading sustainable lives in his book Tao Te Ching, “Tao” referring to the natural ways of living in harmony with the universe and “Te” meaning virtue (Xing & Sims, 2012). Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) considered to be the father of wildlife ecology in his revolutionary book “A Sand County Almanac” highlighted on the benefits of living in harmony with nature and treating humanity and nature as a holistic, integrated community. According to him “This community logic emphasizes the relationships that inspire care and empathy, while focusing on a holistic model of biotic community in which human beings and nature operate interdependently” (Leopold, 1949). But our greed for more has surpassed the knowledge and teachings of our ancient texts and our forefathers. We are now demanding more at the cost of nature. Globalization has created a civilization which is greedy and full of love for power and the spirit of the machine worldwide. Such a civilization shall be based on violence. Thus, in his essay titled “The Spirit of Freedom,” Tagore had warned: “The people who have sacrificed their souls to the passion of profit-making and the drunkenness of power are constantly pursued by phantoms of panic and suspicion, and therefore they are ruthless…They become morally incapable of allowing freedom to others” (Tagore, 1922). He criticized the interferences and disturbances caused to this melodious relationship in the name of progress (Sarkar, 2012). In “Atma Shakti,” he warned of the increasing complications that may arise if we try to disturb the natural balance for our personal satisfaction. Tagore always felt that the basis of contemporary western civilization was built of brick and wood and was rooted in cities but “Indian civilization has been distinctive in locating its source of regeneration, material and intellectual in the forest, not in the city.” The great ideas that originated in India were due to the fact that man was in harmony with nature and was away from the maddening crowd. The peace and tranquility of the forest have helped in the intellectual evolution of man, and its culture of renewal of life changing from species to species and from season to season has fueled the culture of Indian society. The forest stands as an epitome of harmony in spite of the diversity of life which forms the basis of Indian civilization. Thus, in his essay Tapovan (“Forest of Purity”), Tagore writes “Not being caged in brick, wood and iron, Indian thinkers were surrounded by and linked to the life of the forest. The living forest was for them their shelter, their source of food. The intimate relationship between human life and living nature became the source of knowledge. Nature was not dead and inert in this knowledge system. The experience of life in

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the forest made it adequately clear that living nature was the source of light and air, of food and water” (Tagore, 1922). Tagore a firm believer of sustainability, wanted to raise the awareness of harmonious living with the environment and protecting the mother earth through his “Prakriti-Parjaay” where “prakriti” stands for nature and “parjaay” stands for form. His concern for protecting nature could be seen in his play “Muktadhara” (The Waterfall) which centers on a mountain stream known as Muktadhara (the Free Current, a dam built by Bibhuti of Uttarakut, the engineer; the king of Uttarakut, Ranajit; and the prince Yuvaraja Abhijit). The play shows how the prince succeeds in destroying the dam and allowing the water of the river to flow with its usual course going against the king and the engineer. The play shows Tagore’s contempt against all those unbridled human activities that disturb nature. If India is to obtain ecological stability, if every Indian citizen is to be guaranteed a dignified life, basic amenities of life, and a well-deserved livelihood as envisioned in the SDGs, then India needs to adopt the road that leads to conservation and sustainability. But ecological sustainability without being sensitive towards the Spiritus meaning breathe cannot be a movement to be cherished. There is a breath of life all around us, embracing us, loving us, and caring for us but are we ready to pay heed to these movements of Nature that keep us alive? We don’t because we have forgotten how to listen just like the entire village which had gathered to watch the installation ceremony of a hydro-electric plant in Germany on the bank of the river Rhine. A little far away was sitting the philosopher Martin Heidegger with worry in his eyebrows and wrinkled forehead, his eyes painfully watching the turbine blades striking and churning the waters. A passer-by asked why he was not participating in the grand celebration. He lamented and said, “Can’t you see the river is getting hurt?”(Mukherjee, 2018).

3 Indian Perspectives Even though CSR and sustainability are a coinage of the western management thinkers, a careful analysis will show that these concepts were in existence in India for centuries. However, such practices were not only confined to business organization, but it was also applicable in the context of self, political governance, or state governance. These concepts were rooted in the cultural soil of our country. The practice of social responsibility and sustainability is engrained in the Indian value system, references of which can be found in the Vedas. It can be linked to dharma or virtue. “Dharma is the basis of order whether social or moral” (Radhakrishnan, 1929). The essence of the Vedanta philosophy is based on the concept of trivarga, i.e., dharma, artha, and kama which is believed to bring about economic stability, societal welfare, cultural development, and general welfare of its diverse population. CSR is rooted in the concept of trivarga. The ancient tradition of daan (charity), prevailed in Indian society from a very ancient time, and what we recognize as CSR can be seen as an extension of this tradition. Renowned persona like Raja Bali in Satya yuga and

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Danveer Karna in Dwapar yuga showed the world the importance of daan in ancient Indian thought. Classical Indian wisdom emphasizes the fact that business is an integral part of society; therefore, it should generate wealth through the right means and for the welfare of the society. The Vedic philosophy emphasized on the continuous flow of money to the marginalized. “Sarva loka hitam” or the “well-being of all stakeholder” enshrined in the Vedic literature meant “ethical and social responsibility system must be fundamental and functional in business undertakings.” Business as depicted in the Vedic literature can be clearly understood by the following quote: “May we together shield each other and may we not be envious towards each other. Wealth is essentially a tool and its continuous flow must serve the welfare of the society to achieve the common good of the society” (Atharva Veda 3-24-5). The need for the rich to plant trees and build tanks for the society has been mentioned in the Rig Veda, the ancient Hindu scripture. Atharva Veda promulgated the idea “that one should procure wealth with one hundred hands and distribute it with one thousand hands.” The Yajurveda observed that riches should be used for social good. Sri Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita (3–13) that, “all sorrows from the society would be removed if socially conscious members of a community feel satisfaction in enjoying the remnants of their work performed in yagnaspirit (selfless welfare of others)” (Chinmayananda, 1992). Kautilya’s Arthashatra, one of the ancient Indian literature, provides some insights to CSR. Kautilya states “in the happiness of his subject lies the happiness of the king; and in their welfare lies his welfare. He shall not consider as good only that which pleases him but treat as beneficial to him, whatever pleases his subjects,” “Bahujana sukhaya bahujana hitayacha”(the welfare of the many and the happiness of the many) (Radhakrishnan, 2005). Hence, CSR and sustainability are nothing new, and they are rooted in our ethos. In 1893, two great Indians met for the first time on a steamer that sailed from Yokohama to Vancouver on May 31st. One was a monk who would go on to take the Indian Classical Wisdom and India’s spiritual tradition to the West, Swami Vivekananda, and the other was an industrialist who would go on to become one of the finest visionaries that India has ever seen, Jamsetji Tata. Swamiji shared his travel experiences in search of truth and expressed his agony over the oppression and repression that his countrymen are experiencing at the hands of colonial authorities. According to him, the real progress of a country depended on the welfare of the ordinary, and this could be achieved with proper education and livelihood opportunities. Jamsetji Tata was influenced by his words and later on went on to establish The Tata Institute of Science in 1909, renamed later on as the Indian Institute of Science (IISC) in 1911, since he believed that research in science was the key to any country’s progress. Jamsetji Tata, the Founder of the Tata Group in the late nineteenth century, strongly supported the development of indigenous industry in our country and also was in favor of upholding the rights of the people with respect to the wealth created and generated by these enterprises. He strongly advocated the long-term creation of value for all stakeholders, the basic essence which governs the concept of sustainability and formulation of the SDGs. He had a strong belief that for the progress of any

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country, the progress of enterprise, welfare of people, and the health of the enterprise should be interlinked. That is the reason Tata gave a priority and was the first to give a green signal to labor welfare practices, even before these were made statutory laws across the world, and also come up with its code of conducting business. J. R. D. Tata, who was the Chairman of the Tata Group from 1938 to 1991, realized that social progress is not the responsibility of the government alone. Way back in December 1969, J. R. D. Tata at the Anantha Ramakrishna Memorial lecture in Madras had observed “Every company has a special continuing responsibility towards the people of the area in which it is located and in which its employees and their families live. In every city, town, or village, large or small, there is always a need for improvement. Let industry established in the countryside adopt the villages in its neighborhood; let some of the time of its managers, its engineers, doctors, and skilled specialists be spared to help and advise the people of the villages and to supervise new developments undertaken by cooperative effort between them and the company. Assistance in family planning in the villages would be a particularly valuable form of service. None or little of this be considered as charity” (Ghosh, 2017).

4 Concluding Reflections The basic philosophy behind CSR and sustainability is “enlightened self-interest.” It’s the ability to be inclusive in nature, be motivated so as to go beyond its premises, and embrace all stakeholders and even the absent others. Since our belief of the “self” is so myopic in nature that we fail to see beyond the financial parameters into the deeper linkages with others and thus fail to be enlightened. It is essential to light the spark in one’s heart and then ignite the mind in order to understand the beautiful philosophy of CSR or the true spirit of “Seva.” The Bhagavadgita is the crystallized wisdom of the Upanishads, a vast body of ancient Indian literature. No wonder the sage of Ishopanishad, the first of the Upanishad left us the message—“Tena Tyaktena Bhunjitha” (Enjoy by renunciation). Vivekanandas and Gandhis may be rare and hard to find these days especially in a competitive corporate world but their messages are alive and relevant to any business leader world over if we are open and receptive to light of wisdom from other sources beyond the confines of conventional management. Let us now turn to a poverty-stricken village where electricity was a distant dream. As the sun sets, the ladies of each of the huts can be seen lighting an earthen lamp under a “tulsee” tree in the courtyard. Part of the light enters the house through the small doors, while the other part falls on the adjacent path. If you are a passer-by who lost your way in the dark, do not worry. The light from these earthen lamps will show you your way. CSR and sustainability are essentially about sharing and caring with others and about others—the unknown others and pulling them out of the darkness. Isn’t this also sharing—the Indian way?

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References Ackerman, R. W. (1973). How companies respond to social demand’s. Harvard Business Review, 51(4), 88–98. Arora, B., & Puranik, R. (2004). A review of corporate social responsibility in India. Development, 47(3), 93–100. Bowen, H. (1953). Social responsibilities of the businessman. Harper. Carroll, A. B. (1999). Corporate social responsibility: evolution of a definitional construct. Business and Society, 38(3), 268–295. Chasek, P., Downie, D. L., & Brown, J. W. (2006). Global environmental politics (4th ed.). Westview Press. Chinmayananda, S. (1992). Commentary on Bhagavad-Gita. Sai Enterprises. Clark, J. M. (1939). Social control of business. McGraw-Hill. Donaldson, T., & Preston, L. E. (1995). The stakeholder theory of the corporation; concepts, evidence, and implications. Academy of Management Review, 20, 65–91. Eberstadt, N. N. (1977). What history tells us about corporate responsibilities. In A.B. Carroll (Ed.), Business and society review (autumn) in managing corporate social responsibilities. Little, Brown and Company. Editor’s Note. (2012). Manoa, 24(2), vii–xiii. https://doi.org/10.1353/man.2012.0029 Evan, W. M., & Freeman, R. E. (1998). A stakeholder theory of the modern corporation: Kantian capitalism. In T. Beauchamp & N. Bowie (Eds), Ethical theory and business. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Fitch, H. G. (1976). Achieving corporate social responsibility. Academy of Management Review, 1, 38–46. Ghosh, S. (2017). Reporting of CSR activities in India: are we still at a nascent stage even after the legal mandate? In M. Nayan & S. René (Eds.), Corporate social responsibility in India: Cases and development after the legal mandate. Springer Grober, U. (2012). Sustainability. Green Books. Kreps, T. J. (1940). Measurement of the social performance of business. In An investigation if concentration of economic power for the Temporary National Economic Committee, Monograph No. 7. Government Printing Office. Leopold, A. (1949). A sand county almanac: And sketches here and there. Oxford University Press. Lydenberg, S. D. (2005). Corporations and the public interest: Guiding the invisible hand. BerrettKoehler Publishers Inc. MCA. (2013). Companies Act, 2013. Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India. http:// www.mca.gov.in/Ministry/pdf/CompaniesAct2013.pdf Mohan, A. (2001).Corporate citizenship: Perspectives from India. The Journal of Corporate Citizenship, 2, 107–117. Mukherjee, S. (2018). Management and liberal arts: A transformational odyssey with Rabindranath Tagore. In L. Bouckaert, K. Ims, & P. Rona (Eds.), Art, spirituality and economics. Springer. Muniapan, B., & Dass, M. (2008). Corporate social responsibility: A philosophical approach from an ancient Indian perspective. International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management, 1(4), 408–420. Munshi, S. (2011). Universalising Europe: In the spirit of Rabindranath Tagore. Asian Journal of Social Science, 39(3), 296–303. Murray, E. A., Jr. (1976). The social response process in commercial banks: An empirical investigation. Academy of Management Review, 1, 5–15. Pandey, R. K., & Tripathi, P. S. (2002). Vedic values and corporate excellence. In S. C. Dhamija & V. K. Singh (Eds.), Vedic values and corporate excellence. Gurukul Kaugri University. Pathak, P., & Employment News. (2014). Cover story Gandhi as an economist (Vol. XXXIII, No. 26) 28 September–4 October. Preston, L. E., & Post, J. E. (1975). Private management and public policy. Prentice Hall.

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Radhakrishnan, P. (2005). Kautilya Arthshastra. Available at: http://www.chinfo.org/%5Cdown loads%5CScholars%5CEssay1.pdf Radhakrishnan, S. (1929). Indian philosophy: Volume 1 (2nd ed.). George Allen and Unwin. Sarkar, S. (2012). A note on the roots of sustainable development in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore. Impressions of Eternity, 3–4, 125–129. Tagore, R. (1986). Rabindra Rachanavali, 2(l7), 14. Tagore, R. (1922). Creative unity. Macmillan. Tagore, R. (2002). The waterfall. Rupa and Company. The Rig Veda. (1896). Translated by Griffith, R. Available http://www.sacredtexts.com/hin/rigveda Tilbury, D., & Wortman, D. (2004). Engaging people in sustainability. Commission on Education and Communication, IUCN. UN General Assembly A/65/314 Sixty-fifth session, Item 20 (i) of the provisional agenda, Sustainable development: Harmony with Nature, 19 August 2010. Para 17. UN General Assembly A/65/314 Sixty-fifth session, Item 20 (i) of the provisional agenda, Sustainable development: Harmony with Nature, 19 August 2010. Para 21. Wartick, S., & Cochran, P. L. (1985). The evolution of corporate social performance model. Academy of Management Review, 10(4), 758–769. Wheeler, D., Colbert, B., & Freeman, R. E. (2003). Focusing on value: Reconciling corporate social responsibility, sustainability and a stakeholder approach in a network world. Journal of General Management, 28(3), 1–28. Wiersum, K. F. (1995). 200 years of sustainability in forestry: Lessons from history. Environmental Management, 19, 321–329. Wilderer, P. A. (2007). Sustainable water resource management: The science behind the scene. Sustainability Science, 2, 1–4. World Commission on Environment and Development. (1987). Our common future. Oxford University Press. Xing, Y., & Sims, D. (2012). Leadership, Daoist Wu Wei and reflexivity: Flow, self-protection and excuse in Chinese bank managers’ leadership practice. Management Learning, 43(1), 97–112.

Potentials and Pitfalls of Spiritual-Based Leadership

Reflections on “Spirituality as the Context for Leadership” Peter Pruzan

Prologue In July 2001, I made a presentation at the “Spirituality in Management” workshop in Szeged, Hungary, the first such organized academic activity in Europe that focused on the relationship between spirituality and management. My presentation there was inspired by my close teamwork over the preceding five years with Professor Shitangshu Kumar Chakraborty (1941–2018), the founder of the Management Centre for Human Values, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC). In fact, earlier that year I had discussed the draft of my presentation for the Szeged workshop with him at an international conference he helped organize at IIMC: “Blending the Best of the East & the West in Management Education”. Based on a suggestion by the editors of this book, this article is an updated version of the article that was a result of my 2001 presentation: “Spirituality as the Context for Leadership” (Pruzan, 2004). That article commenced with the proposition that developments in the theory and practice of management can be better understood and integrated into personal and organizational behavior via reference to spirituality as the context for purposeful behavior. My personal observations since the 2001 presentation in Hungary and the 2004 article, together with a large number of publications since then that have focused on spirituality in management, support that proposition. It is still valid. The article’s extensive endnotes provide up-to-date support for the reflections provided in the text. The paper is based on the author’s previous publication, Peter Pruzan: “Spirituality as the Context for Leadership” in Laszlo Zsolnai (Ed.): Spirituality and Ethics in Management, Kluwer, London, 2004, 15–31; (2nd edition, Springer, Dordrecht, Germany, 2011, pp. 3–22). Also, some paragraphs are used from the author’s book Rational, Ethical and Spiritual Perspectives on Leadership: Selected Writings. (2009. Peter Lang Academic Publisher, Oxford) P. Pruzan (B) Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_16

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However, before proceeding to the substance of the revised version, and because this book is in honor of Professor Chakraborty, I have chosen to commence with some personal reflections on him, who I affectionately refer to as SKC. I met SKC in Calcutta in 1996. The following is an excerpt from my diary that year: “I have been introduced to the literary production of Professor S. K. Chakraborty, Indian Inst. of Management, Calcutta. I must meet him. He is just the person I am looking for. Deeply rooted in Indian culture, 100% value-oriented and with considerable teaching and consulting experience. … he comes the closest I can imagine to a person who not only shares my views, but who also has both considerable experience and a grounding in his Indian culture.” To make a long story short, when I was finally able to contact him, and this was not all that easy, SKC immediately invited my wife and me to visit him at IIMC. That visit prepared the ground for what developed into an inspiring, though at times demanding teamwork that lasted for more than 15 years. A few years later, I invited SKC and his wife to visit us in our home north of Copenhagen so that he could deliver lectures at the Copenhagen Business School. We continued to meet each other and to be in regular contact until 2011, most often when I was in India teaching or visiting the ashram of my guru Sathya Sai Baba in southern India. Our last close contact took place in February 2011 at a conference in the ancient pilgrimage site Haridwar, where the Ganges river exits the Himalayan foothills; the conference focused on spirituality in leadership and we were keynote speakers. Although our meeting there was cordial and we both referred to each other with affection and respect in our presentations, I knew then that this would be the last time we would work together. Although he would call me his elder brother, he was not an easy “younger brother”. SKC had a highly developed sense of his own worth and found it difficult to accept criticism or viewpoints that deviated from his own. I am convinced that it was just such a strong willpower and conviction as to the significance of his teachings that enabled him, pretty much on his own, to found the Management Centre for Human Values at IIMC and to develop it into an internationally recognized institution for integrating spiritual wisdom into the teaching of leadership. While my guru, the Teacher of teachers, Sathya Sai Baba (1926–2011), was and still is the source of inspiration on my spiritual path, SKC was the Indian academician who provided the inspiration I required to attempt to integrate eastern and western perspectives on spirituality and leadership.

1 Introduction Recent developments in the theory and practice of management can be better understood and integrated into personal and organizational behavior via reference to spirituality as the context for purposeful behavior. In the “West”, there has been a focus at both leading schools of business and a growing number of highly successful and admired corporations on leadership as a supplement to or an overarching background for management. This focus has not only

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led to broader and more inclusive concepts of purpose and success than traditionally associated with management. It has also given rise to deeper existential questions as to the identity and responsibility of both corporations and their leaders, questions very similar in nature to those faced by the person with a spiritual quest. In the “East”, developments have paralleled that of the “West”, however, with the major distinction that the focus at a number of leading-edge institutions of higher learning is on the leader rather than on the processes and methods of leading. The emphasis there is on the virtues a leader must possess to be a “good” leader in both a moral and an operational sense. These virtues have their origin in age-old perspectives on the purpose of man’s existence and on his spiritual nature. The connection between the leader and his/her spirituality is more direct and explicit. In the following, I present these ideas with specific reference to developments in Northern Europe, particularly Scandinavia, and India. It is argued that these developments can provide an expanded basis for reflection on the identity, purpose, responsibility and success of our organizations and their leaders. A basis that is rooted in an awareness that the underlying context for all purposeful organized activity is spiritual in nature and not just utilitarian via the pursuit of material gain. It will be argued in particular that the perspective from the “East” is a precondition for the successful development of leadership as it is evolving in the “West”. Introductory remarks on terminology, purpose, delimitations and personal biases Some of the terms employed in this paper—such as for example East, West, management, leadership and spirituality—are part of our everyday vocabulary and are quite open to interpretation. I note too that the observations to be presented are often based on personal experience and do not claim to be “objective” or “scientifically based”. Therefore, this is more an essay than a traditional scientific paper. It is based on my experiences as a professor in Denmark who was born and educated in the United States, who has worked with the theory and practice of management/leadership in Northern Europe for almost 60 years and has visited India more than 40 times, spending roughly seven years there, and who has lectured at a number of India’s premier educational institutions including a majority of the so-called “Indian Institutes of Management”. Let us start then with some terminological considerations and personal biases. My point of departure is those developments at business schools that seek to contribute to a humanistic, democratic and sustainable frame of reference for the profession of management. By sustainable here, I refer to a perspective on corporate governance, which encompasses economic, environmental and social viability. This leads to a particular perspective on the concepts of management and leadership. The term management traditionally has been conceived of as comprising such activities as budgeting, planning, administration and control. In recent years, particularly in the last decade in the “West”, the term “management” has been increasingly supplemented with the term “leadership”. This latter term is being used today to relate to concepts, processes and roles that had not previously been central to the traditional themes of management. These include such notions as corporate vision,

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change-management, stakeholder-dialog and social and ethical accountability in selforganizing, values-based and sustainable organizations. Perhaps one can refer to a “mutation” in the process of organizational evolution that is proving to be advantageous for both individual and organizational survival: the hybrid leader-manager who masters both leading and managing. I note in this connection that in the last roughly 100 years there have been three major shifts in conceptualization in the “West”: from “business administration” (still employed in the names of some of the oldest and most prestigious “business schools” in the US) to “management” (newer institutions have been called “schools of management”) to “leadership”. Parallel to this development in the “West”—and to some extent, as a reaction to the hegemony of its materialistic focus—there has been a return to basics in the “East”. Here, at some highly reputed schools of management, the focus has been not just on leadership, but also on the leader—on the qualities, values, virtues and integrity of the leader rather than on methods and processes. This focus is rooted not in new concepts and catchwords, but in fundamental perspectives on the purpose and potentials of human life—and therefore of human organizations. In other words, while developments at the forefront of management education in the “West” have tended to focus on the practice and processes of leadership, in the “East” the focus has been on the qualities and competencies of the leader. As will be argued, we in the “West” have much to learn from the perspective of the “East”, a perspective that is rooted in an understanding of humans as spiritual beings and of spirituality as the context for purposeful organized activity. By “West”, I will primarily refer to a Scandinavian perspective on leadership education since this is my home base. There are many differences in attitudes and behavior between, e.g. Danish developments in the theory and practice of leadership and those in, e.g. Spain, Poland, the UK, Brazil and the US. These differences reflect the different historical, cultural and political traditions of such countries as well as differences in the roles and responsibilities assumed by business and government in these countries in developing societal welfare. The Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway and Sweden are small and relatively homogeneous countries. They all have a high standard of living, highly educated populations, a high “quality of life” and a narrow spread of incomes compared to the rest of Europe (for example, it has often been said of Denmark that it is “a land where there are few who have too much and fewer yet who have too little”).1 In addition, the Scandinavian countries are characterized by a high level of social order and welfare and a concomitant high level of taxation—and perhaps even more important with respect to the task at hand, a high level of trust in their business and political leaders compared to almost all other nations in the world. In connection with these comments on the relative homogeneity of the Scandinavian countries compared to the heterogeneity of the West, it is instructive to compare some of the above-mentioned characteristics of the Scandinavian countries with those of another part of the West, the US, which has dominated much modern thought with respect to perspectives on corporate success and management education. While the US is a world leader in the generation of economic wealth, this has been achieved at

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considerable costs to broad segments of its society and the environment. For example, the spread of incomes in the US and the rate of incarceration are shocking to someone from Scandinavia and are indicative of and underlie the tensions, inequality, violence and lack of trust, which appear to exist in the US society and which appear to have been amplified in the years of former President Trump’s administration.2 So the concept of the West is not very precise—and in the sequel, my reflections on the theories and practices of management/leadership will be based on a Scandinavian, and primarily a Danish, perspective. Similar remarks are called for with respect to the East. Following the arguments presented regarding the heterogeneity of the West, the reflections and generalizations to be provided would suffer in accuracy and relevance if one were to consider an East that is a conglomerate of such different nation states as, e.g. India, Australia, China, Pakistan, Japan, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam, countries with different religious, political and cultural traditions. Therefore, my reflections here will be delimited to India. Of course, India itself is a highly heterogeneous society (with more than 20 major languages, the world’s second-largest population of Muslims, a great and an increasing spread between the incomes of “those,who have too little and those who have too much” and considerable barriers to societal mobility due to caste distinctions). Nevertheless, my experience indicates that it is not unreasonable to speak of “Indian” management education as there is far greater similarity between the curricula and pedagogy of India’s leading schools of management than there is between its varied cultural and religious traditions.3 Therefore, in the sequel, the terms (nouns) "West" and "East" will refer to Scandinavian and Indian contexts, while West and East (without quotation marks) will refer to our ordinary, more inclusive geographical and cultural demarcations. The corresponding adjectives are “western”/“eastern” and western/eastern. Finally, some words are called for with respect to the terms “spirit”, “spiritual” and “spirituality” since their meaning is crucial to the gist of the paper and since these words invite many interpretations. One can, e.g. be in good spirits, alcoholic beverages are referred to as spirits and it is not uncommon to refer to a person who evidences sincere emotional behavior as being of or having a spiritual nature. The word “soul” is often used as a synonym for “spirit”—and one speaks of “soul music” and of loving someone “heart and soul”. And the term spiritual is often used as a synonym for religious. To avoid confusion, I will use the terms spirit, spiritual and spirituality in the following senses: Spirit or soul is distinct from the mind, which is a product of/dependent on the brain. The spirit (or the “atma” as it is referred to in some of the major traditions of the East) refers to the essence of our being, our very nature and our true permanent identity which is independent of our physical body and which is after death. According to these traditions and major religions of the East, the purpose of life is not simply to achieve, to gather material comforts and to have a long life. Rather it is to realize who we really are, not just this name and this form, but the spirit/soul/atma— pure, eternal and blissful. When the “lower self” sheds its attachment to the body

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and experiences itself as the “higher self” or simply the “Self”, it has achieved “selfrealization”, a state of perfect being, awareness and bliss. It no longer participates in the cycle of birth and death and is said to be liberated. These notions are central to the concepts of reincarnation in, e.g. Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Buddhism4 and early Christianity,5 as well as the mystical forms of Judaism (Kabbala) and Islam (Sufism). Spiritual refers to behavior that knowingly seeks to cultivate spiritual experiences and self-realization. The phrase “spiritual path” typically refers to a set of practices (e.g. meditation, serving the less privileged, and prayer), which a person might choose to expedite his or her realization of the true self. Spirituality is the noun corresponding to the adjective “spiritual”. It is the basis of religious beliefs and traditions. While a religion is typically based on a set of tenets that are shared by its members, a bible or gospel, a set of well-established rules and rituals, a house of worship and, in general, a priesthood that interprets the holy texts and the rules, spirituality is simply the context for all religious belief. But it is more than that since a person can be spiritual—follow a spiritual path—without adhering to any particular religion. And a person who, as a matter of social convention, follows the rules and traditions of a particular religion can appear to be religious, without in fact being spiritual. In summary, then the exposition here will emphasize the relationship between modern “western” leadership theories on the one hand and modern “eastern” notions of a good leader’s virtues that build on age-old “eastern” spiritual concepts on the other hand. The essay concludes with an optimistic observation that there is much to be learned in both “East” and “West” from these complementary frameworks. They both provide challenging bases for reflection on the purpose, responsibility and success of our organizations and their leaders. They are both rooted in an awakening awareness that the underlying context for all purposeful, organized activity is spiritual in nature and not just the pursuit of material gain. Yet their focuses are different—and it will be argued that the view from the “East” is a precondition for the development of good leadership in the “West”.

2 Developments in the Theory and Practice of Leadership in Scandinavia The following provides a reflection on what appear to be rather striking developments in leadership and in leadership education in my part of the world, even though these developments have not yet achieved widespread explicit recognition in the academic literature. To do so, I will assume a rather simplified concept of cause and effect between the two; that leadership education is reacting to observable developments in the world of business. Of course, in reality, the theory and teaching of leadership on the one hand and business practices on the other feedback on each other, so the relationships can be said to be systemic rather than linear. Nevertheless, for the

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sake of our exposition, the more simplified linear cause-and-effect relationship is assumed since it permits a more straightforward logic while not seriously weakening the arguments provided. In the world of Scandinavian business, spiritual-based leadership is developing as just such a perspective on leadership that is leading to new developments in the mindsets of leaders and therefore, with a time-lag, to new developments in leadership education here. The following are some of these developments in the world of Scandinavian business that are leading to/inviting a spiritual-based perspective on leadership. First the strong trend toward, less hierarchical organizations. The “distance” between the top management and the workers is significantly less than a generation ago. New forms of organization and communication characterize these flatter organizations. There is far greater use of self-organizing project teams, where employees from different departments and having different specializations and competencies come together to meet a specific challenge by a specific deadline. Communication in these more fluid organizational forms is more dialogical than earlier, where it was dominated by top-down communication in the form of orders to be carried out by those lower down in the hierarchy and by the return of information permitting management to control that the orders were carried out. This development has been facilitated by the progress in information technology, an area where the populations of the Scandinavian countries have a relatively high degree of literacy/competence.6 These developments in organizational structures and communication have led to educational programs emphasizing concepts of business ethics, autopoietic (self-organizing/regulating) organizations, corporate social/societal responsibility, sustainability and self-leadership. These new perspectives raise deep, existential questions as to the very nature and purpose of an individual’s and an organization’s existence. Questions, which are central to spiritual enquiry. A second factor supporting a conceptual framework of spirituality as the context for leadership in the “West” has to do with new types of production and production processes. While agriculture and the production of physical goods used to provide the major share of national revenues in Scandinavia, the major sources of both wealth and employment are now service industries and, in particular, so-called knowledgeheavy sectors, e.g. IT. This has led to a greater reliance and dependence on the individual “knowledge worker” and to more flexible forms of employment. This has become even clearer starting in 2020 due to the COVID-19 virus pandemic, where the high level of computer competency in the Scandinavian countries has led to a rather remarkable increase in individuals working at home instead of meeting up at their place of work. There is strong evidence that this shift in the work environment will continue if and when the pandemic is under control.7 Furthermore, considerable evidence indicates that starting in the late 1990s with the advent of the so-called “post-industrial society” or “knowledge society”, younger people began to emphasize their own personal development in their choice of workplace, while such matters as title, income and opportunities for leadership roles began to be of lesser importance.8 This is reflected in an increased emphasis in our “business language” on the development of leadership competencies (as opposed to managerial skills). The

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competencies deal with such matters as the ability to develop meaningful visions and to generate enthusiasm and a strong sense of purpose among the employees; personal integrity; the ability to instill confidence, openness and trustworthiness; “emotional intelligence” and other such talents and characteristics not traditionally dealt with in management education. But not only has there evolved an increased emphasis on personal competencies. The developments as to more flexible forms of organization, employment and production are also reflected in the increased focus in modern leadership education here on organizational-existential concepts of corporate identity and reputation. The ability of organizations to develop a sense of corporate “we’ness” is considered vital today if the corporation is to be able to attract and keep the creative, dynamic, talented, reliable employees who want to be proud of their place of work and the meaning they derive from their employment. And if it is to be able to maintain the trust and respect of its customers, local societies, financial institutions, shareholders and the omnipresent media (Pruzan 2001a). This leads to consideration of a third factor underlying developments in Scandinavian leadership education: demands from the relatively new social creation, the “stakeholder”. While the concept of the shareholder is as old as the concept of a corporation, roughly 200 years, it is only since the late 1980s that serious explicit attention has been paid in the Western literature to the concept of the stakeholder. Stakeholders are those groups who affect and/or are affected by an organization’s decisions. This attention has led to what could be called a “stakeholder theory of the firm”, where the organization is not simply conceived of as a judicial unit with employees, a management, assets and a corporate name—and is not solely responsible for its shareholders. Rather it is conceived of as an arena for interplay between its diverse stakeholders. These three factors—more fluid forms of organization, the shift from production to service, and the more inclusive depiction of an organization—are reflected in a number of relatively new foci in our leadership education and in the vernacular. Included here are, for example, the following concepts: “values-based leadership”: A perspective on leadership whereby the values of the organization are based on the values shared by the organization and its stakeholders and constitute a framework for corporate identity and self-reference (Pruzan, 1998); “social and ethical accounting”: Alternative forms of reporting that report on how well the corporation lives up to these shared values and provide thereby a multistakeholder, multi-value measure of corporate success that supplements traditional financial reporting (Zadek et al., 1997), https://www.accountability.org/; “corporate social responsibility”: Extends the notion of managerial and corporate responsibility from that of maximizing return to owners while obeying the law to that of being a “corporate citizen” that is accountable to all its stakeholders; “corporate reputation/corporate branding”: A focus on image and identity that enables the corporation to be sensitive to the demands of critical consumers, who focus not only on functionality and price but also on who made the product, how it

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was made and where—and to the expectations of potential and existing employees who seek meaningful work in an enterprise they can be proud of (Pruzan 2001b); “ethical investing”: Traditional investment criteria are supplemented by considerations of which types of products and production methods are to be rejected and which are to be supported. Typically consideration is given to such matters as human rights, pollution, production of products that are known to have impacts on health and welfare, the use of non-replenishable resources, gender issues, etc. Summing up, the focus on leadership and leadership education in my part of the world is closely related to underlying shifts and trends in the way the citizenry perceives of the roles and responsibilities of corporations and their leaders. What have not been in focus, at least so far, are the personal competencies and qualities which characterize the leaders of flexible, reflective and responsible organizations— competencies and qualities such as deep personal integrity and moral as well as operational excellence and that are essential for integrating these new perspectives on leadership into organizational and personal self-reference. We are clearly not speaking here of traditional skills or techniques but of matters relating to the spiritual nature of human beings, of existential questions dealing with purpose, identity, success and responsibility and of spirituality as the context for organized activity. It is from this perspective that we in the “West” have much to learn from the “East” with its focus on the leader and on spirituality as the context for leadership. Granted—a perspective of spiritual-based leadership is by no means mainstream; my colleagues at business schools as well as many of the business leaders I have interacted with shy away from such a framework for understanding and communicating. They are so used to a conceptual scheme based on utilitarianism and economic rationality, that the notion of spirituality and spiritual-based leadership makes them feel uncomfortable—particularly as it is often confused with religion. Fortunately, however, there is a growing awareness and focus on the importance, both for the leader herself and for the organization where she participates in the leadership process, that there is a need for a more inclusive understanding of and approach to leadership. An approach where the leader not only focuses on the observable, external context for her leadership, but also draws upon the internal context for leadership—the promptings of one’s conscience. As will be emphasized in the conclusion, there are many indications that just such a complementary perspective—on the leader as well as on leadership—is evolving in the “West”. However, before we are able to consider this matter of synthesis, we will have to consider here vital lessons we in the “West” can learn from the developments in the theory and practice of management in the “East”—in India.

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3 Developments in the Theory and Practice of Leadership in India Let me start with a reservation. My personal experience with Indian business leaders and in teaching at Indian institutions of higher learning is limited and I have not carried out a systematic study of the theory and practice of leadership in India. My reflections are primarily based on the following: an interest in Indian society, culture and spiritual heritage; having spent more than seven years of my life in India due to more than 40 visits starting in 1974 when I led a project for the World Bank in Bangladesh; interviews with leaders of a number of major “values-based” Indian corporations; the establishment of cooperation between the Copenhagen Business School and a number of India’s premier schools of management as regards exchange of students and faculty; lecturing at these institutions; teaching and advising Ph.D. students at the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning and finally here, a close and inspiring teamwork with Professor S. K. Chakraborty, the Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV) at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta—to whom this article and the book in which it appears are dedicated. While my reflections on developments in Denmark/Scandinavia led me to focus primarily on the theory and practice of “leadership” as opposed to “management”, I will not emphasize this distinction here. This is because my observations indicate that, with a few notable exceptions, the term “management” tends to characterize current business practice and teaching at Indian schools of business, many of which have been inspired by traditional western, particularly American, management education.9 This focus on management rather than leadership reflects as well what is still in my opinion the dominating organizational framework for Indian corporations: hierarchical, and in many cases patriarchal, organizational structures with a reliance on planning and control systems. Fortunately, however, a number of major Indian organizations, particularly in the increasingly important it-industry, have far more flexible/fluid organizations and it is the leaders in that industry that are being looked upon as role models.10 Thus, I will not focus on the practice of leadership in Indian corporations. Rather, the focus will be on developments in theory and teaching at leading-edge institutions of higher learning regarding the personal qualities and competencies of leaders, i.e. on leaders, rather than on leadership. There are two major factors, which are currently challenging the existing organizational structures and managerial mindsets and, therefore, the educational programs in India. One of these is the market dynamics and competition arising from the more liberal trade and monetary policies that began with the opening of the Indian economy in 1991. The most visible reaction to this development appears to have been a belief among many educators and business leaders that the best way for Indian corporations to compete with foreign producers and with multinationals that establish themselves in India is by emulating their views and management methods. If not, so the argument goes, they will not be able to be as effective and innovative as these competitors. Nor will they be able to attract and keep top quality Indian employees who may find it

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more attractive to work for the multinationals or to leave India—leading to a “brain drain” similar to that which previously characterized, e.g. the medical and university teaching professions and, more recently, the IT sector. These developments appear to be accompanied by a shift in traditional Indian values and behavioral patterns that are contributing to increased job mobility.11 The second, but far less manifest challenge to current Indian managerial mindsets and education programs is not directly precipitated by external competition. Rather, it appears to be a purely internal matter, although it can be said to be catalyzed by the external challenges arising from globalization and its deification of materialism. I am referring to the challenges to corporate governance in India from a perspective on corporate purpose, success and identity based on India’s ethos. Instead of attempting to meet the challenges arising from western materialism on their own terms, a number of leading educators and managers are seeking guidance from India’s deep-rooted and rich cultural and spiritual heritage, a heritage that transcends the barriers arising from its pluralistic diversity. Before proceeding, however, it must be noted that it would be naive and irresponsible to suggest that the two perspectives considered in this paper, a modern Scandinavian focus on leadership and a framework for Indian corporate governance based on its ethos, are antithetical or mutually exclusive. Just the opposite is true. As best I can judge, the real challenge facing Indian enterprises and schools of management is how best to build upon the rich Indian spiritual and cultural values while at the same time utilizing and modifying the best relevant approaches from the West. In other words, a question to be answered by Indian managers and providers of management education is the following: How can Indian organizations maintain those aspects of their identity, integrity and strengths which are rooted in the Indian ethos while competing with firms having a western materialistic focus where “the business of business is business”. The mirror image of this challenge to “eastern” (Indian) business and management education is the challenge to “western” (Scandinavian) business and management education: how can the current focus on corporate leadership integrate an “eastern” focus on personal qualities and on the spiritual nature of man as a corrective to the dominating economic rationality. In my earlier overview of a Scandinavian perspective on leadership, I referred to the “stakeholder theory of the firm” where the corporation is conceived of as an arena for interplay between its diverse constituencies. I also introduced a number of terms and concepts characterizing this more inclusive, multi-stakeholder and multivalue perspective on corporate identity and success. Included were values-based leadership, corporate social and societal responsibility, social and ethical accounting, ethical investing and sustainable development. These were all concepts relating to how the more inclusive organization can interact with those constituencies it affects and is affected by. A similar list can be developed to characterize a modern Indian perspective on management. Only this time the focus will not be on methods and tools of leadership but on the qualities required by a good and successful leader, qualities which can best be described as characterizing spiritual-based leadership (Pruzan and Pruzan

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Mikkelsen, 2007). I must recall my earlier warning that I am now writing about a heritage far removed from my own. With this reservation in mind, let me present a brief list of concepts that can be considered as central to such an Indian perspective on management. As will be seen, these concepts are all closely related and it is impossible to consider any of them without involving one or more of the others. Nishkamakarma: A perspective on the action and decision-making that emphasizes selfless service, i.e. performing one’s deeds without attachment to the fruits thereof and where both the action and the fruits are offered to the divine.12 A leader who behaves in accordance with this perspective is in a state of equanimity and grounded in wisdom. This perspective is in stark contrast to the prevailing emphasis on success, material wealth, growth and competition—and the resultant high levels of stress in the West.13 The performer of deeds who follows his conscience and is sensitive to the needs and values of those affected by his behavior does not require courses in “stress management”. He follows his conscience, “walks his talk” via values-based leadership and promotes corporate social responsibility and sustainability via his respect and reverence for the organization’s stakeholders. His motivation for such behavior is not traditional “success” but his own spiritual progress as well as that of all those affected by his behavior. Selflessness and non-attachment: Prominent terms in an “eastern” concept of spiritual growth and closely related to the concept of nishkamakarma. Although these concepts are foreign to most Westerners, the Catholic concept of “holy indifference” is similar.14 A useful synonym is “detached involvement”. The underlying idea is that instead of plying our egos and appraising our activities by the payoffs that result, and instead of being elated when our desires are fulfilled and depressed when they are not, there is another way of performing the action. This is by acting without attachment to the fruits of our efforts. From this perspective, all work can become transformed into selfless service. This should not be confused with indifference to the work itself; rather the work is to be performed with detachment. Nor should this be confused with fatalism. We must follow our inner voice, our conscience, and do what we find to be important to do to the best of our ability. But such action is selfless in that it is performed with indifference to the outcomes, be they success or failure, praise or blame. Another way of looking at this is to say that past is past. Certainly, we can learn from our experiences, but we cannot turn the clock back and undo what has been done. Work performed in accord with one’s values and a sense of interconnectedness with others leads to the transcendence of the lower, ego-dominated self. Detached involvement frees one from the chains of personal desires and ambitions, the mind becomes “free of and above the dualistic see-saw of daily experiences” (Chakraborty, 1991: 163). A person who works in this spirit is not bound; his efforts become a sacrament of devotion to his duty. He manages his selfishness and gains access to his higher self. Servant leadership: Although developed in the West (Greenleaf, 1977), this perspective on leadership is inspired by an “eastern” concept of duty and leadership.15 The leader who gains the trust and goodwill of her employees and her other stakeholders

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is the antithesis of the power-seeking manager who gives orders and controls their effectuation. She is sensitive to the needs of others and realizes the interrelationship between herself and those she serves by leading and leads by serving. In so doing, she earns their trust as a person of deep integrity. And she gains their confidence in her ability to elicit and effectively promote organizational values that are in harmony with their individual values. She is, thus, able to coordinate and motivate employees who seek meaningful work that contributes to their personal and spiritual development. She performs her work as worship and inspires others to follow her example and to serve. Duty or right action (dharma in Sanskrit): A fundamental concept in an “eastern” approach to one’s relationship with others. With its focus on one’s duty to others, it complements the notion of servant leadership and is in stark contrast to the current western focus on rights. For example, a western understanding of the concept of freedom typically is based on having the right to do what one wants to do. A concept of freedom based on an “eastern” approach to human development might typically include searching for a clarification of one’s duty in relation to one’s position in life and behaving in accord with that duty. In the modern “western” organization, characterized by such terms as “flat”, “learning” and “self-organizing”, traditional power is becoming powerless—it is increasingly difficult and counter-productive to control creative and independent employees and expect them to be enthused, productive and loyal (Pruzan 2001c). Their commitment and sense of obligation are obtained in a workplace that lends meaning to their lives, promotes those values they adhere to and contributes to their personal development. In such environments, a leader who selflessly performs his duty is a trustworthy source of inspiration. (Hawley, 1992) provides an American perspective on “right action” in management. Santhi: The term that Hindus and Buddhists conclude their prayers with. It connotes being able to have such equanimity and peace of mind that one is able to be calm and discerning even in contexts characterized by turbulence and chaos. This world’s pairs of opposites no longer disturb a self-realized person who has obtained a state of equanimity. He experiences joy and sorrow, success and failure with the same spirit of detachment since he acts in accord with his conscience and is one with his higher self. The leader who is able to perform his work in such a state is able to conserve energy, avoid destructive stress and act with concentration, discernment and effectiveness. In so doing, he gains the respect and confidence of the organization’s stakeholders. Self-realization: The direct experience of one’s higher consciousness, the Self , the spark of the divine within all human beings. According to an “eastern” perspective, there is a divine purpose to life and it is not simply the fulfillment of materialistic desires or a life of comfort and pleasure. Rather it is to develop the knowledge of one’s true self, i.e. to obtain self-realization. This knowledge, experience or realization cannot be obtained via the study of learned books or holy texts, although these can help one on one’s path. A paradox here is that although a goal in life is to seek this knowledge of the higher Self, it can only be realized by the person whose ego has

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been tamed/ignored and who is selfless and does not seek rewards for his deeds. The selfless leader who is not attached to the fruits of her actions does not only achieve spiritual growth, peace of mind and freedom from fear. She also becomes an exemplar for her employees and her surroundings in general. She is stable, strong, trustworthy and, based on a sensitivity to the aspirations of the organization’s various stakeholders, clear in her visions as to what is in the best interests of the organization as a whole. She not only motivates, but she also inspires. Without seeking it directly, she is granted power. Unity: Refers to our oneness or identity with the creation and the source of creation. This is often referred to as a non-dualistic perspective on reality, i.e. that God is all that is. It is a notion that can be disturbing for a Westerner who has been brought up to focus on his individuality and his individual success in a dualistic world. It expresses the belief that we and everything that exists are interrelated at a deep existential level. In other words, when we peel away the various physical and psychological factors that distinguish us from each other, we share an identical core. When we ask, “who am I?” the answer is not provided by either our name or physical form, but by our very essence—what we referred to earlier as the atma, the higher Self. From this perspective, oneness is the attainment of union with the Absolute. With a focus on the inter-relatedness of all life, the empathetic leader’s sincere sense of compassion for his employees inspires and empowers them. Non-violence or ahimsa: An ideal value in Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity, closely related to the concept of “unity”. According to Chakraborty, cited in (True & Datta, 1999, 198), the “feeling of oneness … eliminates separative egoism (and) is the ultimate emotional foundation of non-violence”. Non-violence here does not just mean physical violence. Rather it refers to non-violence in thought, word and deed. The leader who is guided by the value of non-violence performs his duties in peace, free from the demands of his lower self and ego and in a deep awareness of his connectivity to all living beings and to all that is. His spiritual practices, e.g. of meditation and prayer, lead him to shed his feelings of anger, hatred, jealousy and greed. He realizes that when he hurts others, he is hurting himself. Non-violence in thought, word and deed becomes a creed for him. He is acknowledged as a person of deep integrity and obtains the respect and trust of not only his employees and his local society, but of all his stakeholders. Four leaders in modern times, each from their own continent and culture, have exemplified this concept: Mahatma Gandhi in India, Martin Luther King in the United States, Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Vaclav Havel in former Czechoslovakia. They achieved almost universal respect by “fighting” their respective “wars” in a non-violent way due to their belief in the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.

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4 Conclusions and Recommendations I have taken a normative position and argued that in order for the current emphasis in the “West” on leadership methods and processes to lead to a humanistic, democratic and sustainable frame of reference for the behavior of leader-managers and for their organizations, it should be based on an “eastern” emphasis on the leader and his/her virtues—a focus that derives nourishment from India’s age-old ethos and spiritual traditions. The basis for this recommendation is two-fold. The first argument has essentially been pragmatic and deals with the efficacy of the leader. The successful implementation of these leadership methods and processes in more fluid, autopoietic and dialog-based organizations is highly dependent on the character of the leader. Unless she is so rooted in her own integrity, compassion, self-knowledge and fundamental aspirations as to personal development and self-realization, she will not be able to “walk her talk” and inspire by example. The second argument is moral in nature. Unless our enterprises develop broader, what we have referred to as multi-stakeholder, multi-value perspectives on success and identity, there will not be a firm foundation for sustainable development and corporate social and ethical responsibility. With the growth in the power and influence of the modern corporation, societal welfare, justice and peace are becoming far more dependent on the leadership of these enterprises than ever before in history. Fortunately, it appears that such a more holistic approach, which includes a focus on both process and character, on leadership and the leader, is in fact in an embryonic phase in the West. As early as 2000, the annual Davos meeting provided evidence that there is an increased awareness among younger leaders of major corporations of a need for a greater educational focus on the personal character of business leaders.16 In addition, since the turn of the century, there has been an increasing focus among “western” management educators and leadership organizations on activities that are based upon or inspired by an “eastern” approach with its spiritual footings.17 But the lessons are not unidirectional. There is also a major opportunity available to institutions of higher learning in the “East” to do more than supplementing the teaching of management by building upon the rich heritage and ethos of the “East” with its focus on the character of the individual leader, which of course is a major challenge in itself. The challenge from the “West” is to “teach the teachers” to expand their perspectives by integrating “western” approaches to leadership that focus on more fluid organizational forms than hitherto have characterized Indian business (and management education). This includes developing perspectives and attitudes dealing with concepts of collective/corporate identity, success, responsibility and sustainability, where the leader is not simply a powerful, competent and respected decisionmaker, but is also a visionary, inspiring, empowering and ethical role model. These challenges are already being met at a limited number of leading Indian schools of management, often via collaboration with leading western educational institutions.18 Before concluding, some comments are called for as to the question of “how?”. Attempting to integrate these complementary focuses, and in particular to base the “western” approach to leadership on an “eastern” approach to leader virtues, cannot

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simply be achieved via traditional courses and pedagogies. The perspectives place demands on both professional skills as well as on the mindset, character and personal competencies of the leader—and the teacher as leader. We are here speaking of such matters as the ability to generate trust and confidence, to embody work with a meaning which transcends traditional notions of success such as effectiveness and profitability and to contribute to the well-being and the (spiritual) development, of all those affected by the leader’s decisions and actions. While at the same time promoting effective, competitive, sustainable and profitable enterprises. The fact that notions of character as well as skills are at the forefront does not mean that such an expanded concept of management and of managerial virtues cannot be taught and realized in practice. Rather it means that “management education”, at institutions of higher learning as well as in the corporate domain, must develop arenas for the development both of professional leadership skills and personal leadership qualities—by teacherleaders who embody such skills and virtues. Developing one without the other will not be efficacious or wise. Ethics, values, personal character and spirituality are not simply “management tools”. Traditional management tools are used by the manager—and can be replaced or renewed when economic rationality deems appropriate. Personal qualities and competencies on the other hand cannot be separated from the individual; they are the essence of his or her being. The “tool” and the wielder of the “tool” are one. Attempts by educators to simply teach matters dealing with values, responsibility and sustainability without embodying these virtues and being a role model for the students will lead to cynicism and an instrumental approach to ethics in business and to spiritual-based leadership. Attempts by managers to simply develop such qualities as if they were technical skills or tools will lead to cynicism among employees and other key stakeholders—rather than to a feeling of corporate “we’ness” and to a sense of commitment and pride in “who we are” and what “we stand for”. They will regard with distrust managers who are not compassionate people of deep integrity as alchemistic managers whose only interest in human values is to transform them into shareholder value. There is much to be learned from the spiritual perspectives and traditions from the “East”. May our teacher-leaders be blessed with the wisdom that will enable them to promote such sharing—for the benefit of us all. Notes 1.

According to an article in Forbes by Laura Bloom, March 20, 2020: “For the third year in a row, Finland has placed at the top of the list as the happiest country in the world, with Denmark coming in second, followed by Switzerland, which pushed Norway out of the top three this year.” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2020/03/20/ran ked-20-happiest-countries-2020/#7fc1a1bd7850). The article is based on the latest “World Happiness Report”, an annual publication of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The results are not surprising as such evaluations have for many years underlined the relatively high degree

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of happiness and satisfaction experienced by citizens of Northern Europe. For example, as far back as 1999, according to a press release by Associated Press Newswire on June 7, 1999 “Northern Europeans (are) wealthier, happier with their jobs than Southerners”. This observation was based on a survey carried out by the EU Statistics Office among 60,000 households in 13 of the EU’s 15 member states. The results indicated that “Happiest with their jobs were Danes” (37% totally satisfied). Similarly, according to the article “Britons in 7th heaven” by Matt Born in The Daily Telegraph, December 15, 1999, based on a Roper Starch survey of 22,500 adults in 22 countries throughout the world, “the Danes are the happiest people on the planet … happier by a comfortable margin than the people of any other country.” According to the article “Science Tracks the Good Life - It turns out the Bluebird of Happiness roosts in Denmark” by Keya Davidson in The San Francisco Chronicle, December 24, 2000, “The ‘happiest place on Earth’ isn’t Disneyland: It’s Denmark.” This conclusion was based on an analysis of several decades of social surveys conducted by scholars around the globe that. The surveys had one question in common – "How happy are you?" – and covered hundreds of thousands of people in more than 20 nations. Finally, an analysis of data from an “International Crime Victim Survey” presented in the article “Denmark is the world’s safest country” in the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende, June 13, 2001 shows that 54% of the Danes feel very secure when they walk around in their local community, the best result among 12 European countries. Based on the World Bank Gini Index (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ SI.POV.GINI?view=map) where 0% represents perfect income equality and 100% represents maximal inequality, the latest published results for the three Scandinavian countries (2017) were: Denmark 28.7, Norway 27 and Sweden 28.8 - and for the US (2016): 41.4. In other words, income inequality in the US was between 45 and 50% higher than in the Scandinavian countries. The high level of income inequality in the US compared to the Scandinavian countries is not new. If we look back roughly 20 years, as we did in the preceding endnote considering ‘happiness’, we can observe similar disparities. For example, according to (Gray, 1998, 114–119) who provides a detailed analysis of economic developments in the US until the turn of the century, the United States had a distribution of wealth “that resembles the Philippines or Brazil more than it does any of the world’s other major economies.”. Similar findings reflect significant differences in incarceration in the US and the Scandinavian countries. According to (Sawyer & Wagner, 2019), “In 2016, almost 7 million people were under some type of control by the correction industry (incarcerated, on probation or parole, etc.)”. According to the World Population Review (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/inc arceration-rates-by-country) accessed Sept 1, 2020, “The United States is the world leader in incarceration … with about 25% of the world’s prison population being in the US. The United States currently has over 2.1 million total prisoners. … The United States prisoner rate (number of prisoners per 100,000 people) is 737, the highest in the world”. The corresponding figures for the

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Scandinavian countries are Norway 60, Sweden 61 and Denmark 71, all less than 10% of the prisoner rate for the US. Once again, we can see that this is not new. An analysis of data from an “International Crime Victim Survey” presented in the article “Denmark is the world’s safest country” in the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende, June 13, 2001 showed that 54% of the Danes felt very secure when they walk around in their local community, the best result among 12 European countries. In contrast, according to the demographic analyses in (Gray, 1998), 28 million Americans lived in privately guarded buildings or housing developments. Furthermore, in 1997 roughly one out of 50 adult males in the US was incarcerated and one out of 20 were on bail or probation. The male homicide rate that year was roughly 8 times that of the EU (and ¾ of all child murders in the industrialized world took place in the US) while for each robbery in Japan there were 147 in the US. More than 1 out of 3 lawyers in the world were in the US and tort liability payments in the US in 1987 represented 2.5% of the US GDP! This characterization does not hold true if one considers all the schools of management in India today. Since the introduction of trade liberalization policies in the start of the 1990’s, the number of schools of management has grown significantly and the business of running business schools has become big business A result is that the quality of students and education is far more variable today than earlier. According to an April 28, 2016 report by the Education Committee of the Associated Chambers of Commerce in India, https:// www.assocham.org/newsdetail.php?id=5651.%20, India had at least 5,500 Bschools in operation, but that number would increase greatly if one included unapproved institutes. In the five years prior to the study, the number of Bschool seats had tripled and the study indicated that only 7 per cent of MBA graduates were actually employable. The goal of followers of both Hinduism and Buddhism, which evolved out of Hinduism, is to escape from the cycle of birth and death (samsara). Nevertheless, they disagree as to what it is that reincarnates. Buddhist religious texts do not accept a non-dualistic Hindu belief that an eternal self (atma), that is identical to a Universal Self, reincarnates. Their concept “anatta” (no-atma) indicates in fact a negation of these beliefs, which are central to the Hindu understanding of reincarnation, and Buddhists tend to employ the concept of “rebirth” rather than “reincarnation” (Mann, 1995). The fifth Ecumenical Council, held in Constantinople in the year 553, decreed that a number of beliefs promoted by Origen (approximately 185–254) were heretical, among these the concepts of reincarnation and the pre-existence of the soul (Bevan, 1948). Nevertheless, his teachings are still the subject of considerable theological research and are accepted by some groupings within the Orthodox Church. For example, once again comparing developments in 2020 in the US to the three Scandinavian countries, the rankings of the percentage of the population that has accessed the Internet during the last 12 months are as follows: US 70, Denmark 10, Norway 12, Sweden 13, i.e. the citizens of the Scandinavian

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countries are far more ‘it-literate’ than those of the US: (https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users). According to a Danish survey in May 2020, 46% of Danes whose workplace was temporarily shifted to their home want to work at home in the future. (https://via.ritzau.dk/pressemeddelelse/naesten-halvdelen-vil-arbejde-merehjemmefra-efter-coronatiden?publisherId=11341474&releaseId=13592814). According to an extensive survey among Danish people in their 20’s (reported on in Ugebrevet Mandag Morgen, 2001), this is “a generation that without compromise seeks positions and working environments that stimulate their personal project and for whom everything else is secondary. … The project generation clearly places a higher priority on independence and personal development than on improved wages and job security. … Almost 8 out of 10 young people say no to collective wage negotiations. Only 15% have a clear wish to be a leader. Only one out of four want fixed working hours and a fixed number of hours to work.” The overall quality of the education provided at leading Indian business schools appears to be comparable to that provided by leading institutions of higher learning in the West. Many of the faculty at these institutions have either been guest lecturers or received their Ph.D.’s at western institutions – and their students, who face intense competition when they apply to these schools, tend to be highly motivated and competent. According to the Indian Brand Equity Foundation (https://www.ibef.org/ind ustry/information-technology-india.aspx), updated July 2020, “The IT-BPM sector in India stood at US$177 billion in 2019 witnessing a growth of 6.1 per cent year-on-year and is estimated that the size of the industry will grow to US$ 350 billion by 2025.” The sector has increased its share of the country’s GDP from 1.27% in 1998 to 7.7% in 2017. As of 2020, IT corporations account for 4.36 million employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform ation_technology_in_India#:~:text=Information%20Technology%20in%20I ndia%20is,1998%20to%207.7%25%20in%202017). For example, there is evidence that the traditional extended family will be an “endangered species”. The threats arise from a number of factors. One of these is the powerful influence of the media, which continue to spread glamorous pictures from the West of the materialistic (and egoistic) nuclear family, which is not letting itself slowdown in its search for wealth by traditions and cultural heritages. Another factor is the increasing number of females who are receiving higher education and finding well-paid employment and who will not accept their more traditional roles in an extended family. Both of these factors characterize developments in the increasingly important it-industry; see too the previous endnote. Chapter two of what has been referred to as the Gospel of Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita, describes in detail the qualities of a sthitaprajna, a man of steady wisdom, characterized by equanimity and peace of mind, qualities closely related to those of selflessness and non-attachment to the fruits of

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one’s actions. See for example the poetic translation of the Bhagavad Gita provided by (Prabhavananda and Isherwood, 1972). The report (American Institute of Stress, 2019) draws upon Gallup’s 2019 data on emotional states and shows that over half of the American population experience stress during the day. This is 20% higher than the world average of 35%. These figures are even higher when we consider only the working population; 83% of US workers suffer from work-related stress and in 2019 63% of US workers were ready to quit their jobs due to stress. This is not a new development in the West, nor is it just an American phenomenon. According to the report on stress in Europe, (European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. 2000), more than 40 million Europeans, corresponding to 28% of all employees, had health problems due to stressful working conditions. Only back pains were a more frequent work-related health problem. This concept was central to the teachings of St. Francoise de Sales (1567– 1672), Bishop of Geneva. According to Aldus Huxley in his “Introduction” to (Prabhavananda and Isherwood, 1972), de Sales’ follower Camus summarized his master’s teaching on this point as follows: “‘He who refers every action to God and has no aims save His glory, will find rest everywhere, even amidst the most violent commotions.’ So long as we practice this holy indifference to the fruits of action, ‘no lawful occupation will separate us from God; on the contrary, it can be made a means of closer union.’” The concept of “holy indifference” can be said to have had its roots in the writings of Plato and “indifference” was a core value of the Roman Empire’s ethics. In a more modern western context, the concept of indifference permeates many of the themes in the highly influential book (Covey, 1989); see e.g. the discussion of peace of mind and integrity on page 298. According to (Greenleaf, 1977; p. 13) “The servant-leader is servant first … It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. … The best test is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?” Greenleaf’s idea of the servant as leader was inspired by his reading Hermann Hesse’s short novel from 1932, Journey to the East that explores a search for selfknowledge and spirituality. So although promoted by a Westerner, the concept is in fact eastern. At the Future Leaders Forum, 16–18 November 2000 at Davos, Switzerland, 100 young leaders (average age around 35) from 16 European countries were surveyed as to the major issues of importance to them in their roles as “high flyers”. A striking result was the response to the question as to “which skills for future leaders are not properly addressed by education?” 73% of these up-andcoming top leaders referred to “interpersonal skills” and 66% to “ethics” – while only 7% referred to “technical/technological skills” and a bare 2% referred to “financial skills” (Kearney, 2001).

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The following are just a few of the many examples of this focus in the West: Before the turn of the century, several influential books were published that focused mainly on spirituality at the workplace. These included business best-sellers such as (Renesch, 1992), (Conger 1994) and (Mitroff and Denton, 1999). Since the turn of the century, this development accelerated. A number of more evidence-based books were published in its first decade, including (Pruzan & Mikkelsen, 2007), and the anthologies (Biberman and Whitty, 2000), (Giacalone and Jurkiewicz, 2003) and (Biberman and Tischler, 2008). During the last decade, the focus in the West broadened and a number of anthologies were published that focus on the integration of spirituality in leadership, economics and society. For example, (Zsolnai, 2015), (Bouckaert et al., 2018) and (Zsolnai and Flanagan, 2019). In addition, since the turn of the century, there have also been a large number of workshops and conferences in the East and the West that focused on spiritualbased leadership. Noteworthy in India were the activities at the Management Centre for Human Values at IIM Calcutta (see too the next endnote). In the West, in 2002, the first European workshop on spirituality and management was held at Szeged, Hungary and, in the same year, the American Academy of Management had a session on ‘Management, Spirituality and Religion’ that lead to the publication two years later of the first issue of the Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion. It is now time to return to the major role played by Professor Shitangshu Kumar Chakraborty. Perhaps the most significant single event that served as the foundation for the current research and teaching in India on spiritual-based leadership and that also led to international teamwork in that domain was the inauguration on November 23, 1995 of the Management Centre for Human Values at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC). This was the result of dedicated activities of Professor Chakraborty who was the founder of the Centre and who also was the founder-editor in that year of the Journal of Human Values. In the early years of this century’s first decade, Sunita Singh Sengupta, Professor at the University of Delhi, formed a ‘one-woman army’ that took the initiative of holding a number of significant international conferences and workshops in India, now under the umbrella of ISOL (Integrating Spirituality and Organizational Leadership Foundation). ISOL’s goal was and is to promote leadership that nurtures the spirit of each person in order to create harmony at the workplace and in society. Since 2013, ISOL has published both the International Journal on Spirituality and Organizational Leadership and the International Journal on Vedic Foundations of Management.

References American Institute of Stress. (2019). 42 Worrying Workplace Stress Statistics. Weatherford, TX. Bevan, E. (1948). Christianity. Oxford University Press.

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Biberman, J., & Whitty, M. (2000). Work & spirit: A reader of new spiritual paradigms for organizations. University of Scranton Press. Biberman, J., & Tischler, L. (2008). Spirituality in business: Theory, practice and future directions. Palgrave. Bouckaert, L., Ims, K., & Rona, P. (Eds.) (2018). Art, spirituality and economics. Springer. Chakraborty, S. K. (1991). Management by values: Towards cultural congruence. Oxford University Press. Conger, J. (1994). Spirit at work: Discovering the spirituality in leadership. Jossey-Bass. Covey, S. (1989). The 7 habits of highly effective people: Restoring the character ethic. Simon & Schuster. European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. (2000). Research on work-related stress. Bilbao. Fairholm, G. (1997). Capturing the heart of leadership: Spiritual community in the New American Work Place. Praeger. Giacalone, R., & Jurkiewicz, C. (2003). Handbook of workplace spirituality and organizational performance. M.E. Sharpe. Gray, J. (1998). False dawn—The delusions of global capitalism. Granta Books. Greenleaf, R. K. (1977). Servant leadership: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. Paulist Press. Hawley, J. (1992). Reawakening the spirit in work: The power of Dharmic management. BerrettKohler. Kearney, A. T. (2001). Results of the live electronic voting held in Davos on ‘Innovation and Leadership in International Organizations’. www.futureleadersforum.com Mann, A. T. (1995). The elements of reincarnation. Elements Books. Mitroff, I., & Denton, E. (1999). A spiritual audit of corporate America: A hard look at spirituality, religion, and values in the workplace. Jossey-Bass. Prabhavananda, S., & Isherwood, C. (trans.) (1972). Bhagavad Gita—The song of god. Mentor. Pruzan, P. (1998). From control to values-based management and accountability. Journal of Business Ethics, 1998, 1379–1394. Pruzan, P. (2001). The question of organizational consciousness: Can organizations have values, virtues and visions? Journal of Business Ethics, 29, 271–284. Pruzan, P. (2001). Corporate reputation: Image and identity. Corporate Reputation Review, 4(1), 47–60. Pruzan, P. (2001c). The trajectory of power: From control to self-control. In Chakraborty, S.K., & Bhattacharya, P. (Eds.), Leadership and power—Ethical explorations (pp. 166–181). Oxford University Press. Pruzan, P. (2004). Spirituality as the context for leadership. In L. Zsolnai (Ed.), Spirituality and ethics in management (pp. 15–31). Kluwer; 2nd edition, Springer, 2011, pp. 3–22. Pruzan, P., & Pruzan Mikkelsen, K. (2007). Leading with wisdom: Spiritual-based leadership in business. Sage Publications/Response Books and Greenleaf Publishing. Renesch, J. (Ed.). (1992). New traditions in business: Spirit and leadership in the 21st century. Berrett-Koehler. Sawyer, W., & Wagner, P. (2019). Mass incarceration: The whole pie 2019. www.prisonpolicy.org. March 19, 2019. True, M., & Datta, A. (1999). The tradition of non-violence: The American experience and the Gandhian. Journal of Human Values, 4. Zadek, S., Pruzan, P., & Evans, R. (1997). Building corporate accountability: Emerging practices in social and ethical accounting and auditing. Earthscan. Zsolnai, L. (Ed.). (2015). The spiritual dimension of business ethics and sustainability management. Springer. Zsolnai, L., & Flanagan, B. (Eds.). (2019). The Routledge international handbook of spirituality in society and the professions. Routledge.

Translating Swami Vivekananda into Management Practice Swami Narasimhananda

1 Swami Vivekananda’s American Love Swami Vivekananda reached Chicago for attending the World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893 much before the parliament and had to seek lodgings at many places. When the parliament was near, he was accommodated at the house of Mrs. John B. Lyon at 262 Michigan Avenue, Chicago. In the words of Cornelia Conger, the granddaughter of Lyon, who was six years old at that time, their house was “a pleasant, somewhat old-fashioned frame house, painted olive green with boxes of red geraniums across the front” (His Eastern & Western Admirers, 2017, 309). Vivekananda looked upon Lyon as his mother. Once he told her “that he had had the greatest temptation of his life in America”. When Lyon asked him “Who is she, Swami?”, Vivekananda laughed aloud and replied, “Oh, it is not a lady, it is Organization!” (His Eastern & Western Admirers, 2017: 314). This was Vivekananda’s American love. Vivekananda was enamoured by American organization. He had no doubts that “for the Indian work [of spreading the message of Vedanta] a strong organizational structure based on spiritual values was important. The Hindu monasticism that he envisioned was to be organized, and this organization was to be founded on utter selflessness and such other spiritual virtues as conduce simultaneously to ‘the liberation of the spirit and the good of the world’” (His Eastern & Western Disciples, 2015, 1: 544). He urged his brother-disciples—the other monastic disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, his master—to develop the structure of an organization. He wrote from the United States of America: “What is wanted is a power of organisation … The term organisation means division of labour. Each does his own part, and all the parts taken together express an ideal of harmony” (Vivekananda, 2016, 6: 302). This love for organization continued till Vivekananda’s last breath, and he gave life S. Narasimhananda (B) Secretary, Ramakrishna Mission Sevashrama, Kozhikode, Kerala, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_17

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to two massive institutions that serve the God in the human beings in an organized manner—the Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission.

2 The Need for Organized Work Vivekananda constantly explained the need for organized work to his disciples and brother-disciples. He said: “The conviction has grown in my mind after all my travels in various lands that no great cause can succeed without an organisation. In a country like ours [India], however, it does not seem quite practicable to me to start an organisation at once with a democratic basis or work by general voting. People in the West are more educated in this respect, and less jealous of one another than ourselves. They have learnt to respect merit” (Vivekananda, 2016, 6: 477). Vivekananda was aware of the drawbacks and limitations of any unorganized undertaking. He wrote to his brother-disciple Swami Akhandananda: “Our nation is totally lacking in the faculty of organisation. It is this one drawback which produces all sorts of evil. We are altogether averse to making a common cause for anything. The first requisite for organisation is obedience. I do a little bit of work when I feel so disposed, and then let it go to the dogs—this kind of work is of no avail. We must have plodding industry and perseverance” (Vivekananda, 2016, 6: 329). To another brother-disciple, Swami Ramakrishnananda, he wrote: “We want great spirit, tremendous energy, and boundless enthusiasm … Organisation is power, and the secret of this is obedience” (Vivekananda, 2016, 6: 369). For Vivekananda, organization was the conduit of all power and enthusiasm. According to him, it was organization that could translate great visions into practice. To Swami Saradananda, another brother-disciple, he wrote: “Now what you want is organisation—that requires strict obedience and division of labour. … I am determined to make you decent workers thoroughly organised” (Vivekananda, 2016, 6: 97). Akhandananda started the first relief work of the Ramakrishna Mission, Ramakrishnananda started the Mission’s work in South India, and Saradananda was the first General Secretary of the Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission. Vivekananda was grooming the future foremost bearers of the mantle of his organization. Vivekananda repeatedly warned his disciples about the Indian tendency to avoid working in teams. He wrote to another of his brother-disciples, Swami Brahmananda, who was to become the first President of Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission: “My great anxiety is this: the work has somehow been started, but it should go on and progress even when we are not here; such thoughts worry me day and night. Any amount of theoretical knowledge one may have; but unless one does the thing actually, nothing is learnt. I refer repeatedly to election, accounts, and discussion so that everybody may be prepared to shoulder the work. If one man dies, another—why another only, ten if necessary—should be ready to take it up. Secondly, if a man’s interest in a thing is not roused, he will not work whole-heartedly; all should be made to understand that everyone has a share in the work and property, and a voice in the management. This should be done while there is yet time. Give a responsible

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position to everyone alternately but keep a watchful eye so that you can control when necessary; thus, only can men be trained for the work. Set up such a machine as will go on automatically, no matter who dies or lives. We Indians suffer from a great defect, viz we cannot make a permanent organisation—and the reason is that we never like to share power with others and never think of what will come after we are gone” (Vivekananda, 2016, 8: 131). He told to Nanjunda Rao, one of his disciples: “In India the one thing we lack is the power of combination, organisation, the first secret of which is obedience. … Jealousy is the bane of all slaves. It is the bane of our nation. Avoid that always” (Vivekananda, 2016, 5: 102–103). Vivekananda was not blind to the limitations of organization. He wrote to Mrs. Ole Bull: “Organisation has its faults, no doubt, but without that nothing can be done. And here, I am afraid, I will have to differ from you—that no one ever succeeded in keeping society in good humour and at the same time did great works. One must work as the dictate comes from within, and then if it is light and good, society is bound to veer round, perhaps centuries after one is dead and gone. We must plunge heart and soul and body into the work. And until we be ready to sacrifice everything else to one Idea and to one alone, we never, never will see the light” (Vivekananda, 2016, 6: 311). Vivekananda alerted his disciples about the necessary evil of organization: “Governments, societies, etc. are comparative evils. All societies are based on bad generalization. The moment you form yourselves into an organization, you begin to hate everybody outside of that organization. When you join an organisation, you are putting bounds upon yourself, you are limiting your own freedom. The greatest goodness is the highest freedom. Our aim should be to allow the individual to move towards this freedom. More of goodness, less of artificial laws. Such laws are not laws at all. If it were a law, it could not be broken. The fact that these so-called laws are broken, shows clearly that they are not laws. A law is that which cannot be broken” (Vivekananda, 2016, 6: 106). This was the reason that Vivekananda built his organization on love and gave it broad guidelines of laws. He believed that his master, Sri Ramakrishna, was the embodiment of love and was the foundation of Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission. Thus, he gave an ethos to the organization. Vivekananda envisioned a fiery missionary zeal in his workers: “We want an organisation. Off with laziness. Spread! Spread! Run like fire to all places. Do not depend upon me. Whether I live or die, go on spreading, yourselves” (Vivekananda, 2016, 6: 278).

3 Vivekananda’s Model of Leadership Vivekananda mainly advocated two models of leadership—one as a servant and the other as a baby. Though the concept of servant-leadership has gained currency in many management circles, the concept of baby-leadership remains to be properly understood. Vivekananda said that a great leader would be selfless like a baby and yet lead the entire team like the baby leads an entire household. He explained this concept to his disciple, Sister Nivedita: “Some people do the best work when led. Not

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everyone is born to lead. The best leader, however, is one who ‘leads like the baby’. The baby, though apparently depending on everyone, is the king of the household. At least, to my thinking, that is the secret. … Many feel, but only a few can express. It is the power of expressing one’s love and appreciation and sympathy for others, that enables one person to succeed better in spreading the idea than others. … The great difficulty is this: I see persons giving me almost the whole of their love. But I must not give anyone the whole of mine in return, for that day the work would be ruined. Yet there are some who will look for such a return, not having the breadth of the impersonal view. It is absolutely necessary to the work that I should have the enthusiastic love of as many as possible, while I myself remain entirely impersonal. Otherwise, jealousy and quarrels would break up everything. A leader must be impersonal. I am sure you understand this. I do not mean that one should be a brute, making use of the devotion of others for his own ends, and laughing in his sleeve meanwhile. What I mean is what I am, intensely personal in my love, but having the power to pluck out my own heart with my own hand, if it becomes necessary, ‘for the good of many, for the welfare of many’, as Buddha said. Madness of love, and yet in it no bondage. Matter changed into spirit by the force of love. Nay, that is the gist of our Vedanta. There is but One, seen by the ignorant as matter, by the wise as God. And the history of civilisation is the progressive reading of spirit into matter. The ignorant see the person in the non-person. The sage sees the non-person in the person. Through pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, this is the one lesson we are learning” (Vivekananda, 2016, 8: 407–408). Vivekananda’s leadership has this “impersonally personal” love as its bedrock. Since it is quite rare to find this attitude among ordinary people, it is difficult to cultivate this leadership model. Swami Vivekananda started the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission in 1897 and introduced fund accounting even then. Fund accounting is the concept that we are all quite familiar with today, the concept that funds meant for a particular purpose would be utilized only for that purpose. It was only much later that this concept was practiced by the business world. Vivekananda was particular that all funds should be used only for the purpose it was donated by the donor. He envisaged a self-sustaining model of financial management for the organization and therefore told that all the branch centres have to find their sources of income independently without any support from the headquarters. Vivekananda drafted detailed rules for the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission which still govern these organizations. Detailed records are maintained of all activities and meetings that are periodically audited by the local and central authorities. Each monastic of the organization has to give a detailed account of one’s activities to the head of the branch centre. Every branch centre has daily meetings of monastics at regular intervals. Since the Ramakrishna Mission is managed entirely by monastics, such meetings are of paramount importance. All the monastics of the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission are continuously evaluated, and this ensures that there is transparency and team spirit in the organization. To his Madras disciple, Alasinga Perumal, Vivekananda wrote: “An organisation that will teach the Hindus mutual help and appreciation is absolutely necessary. … The whole national character [Indian character] is one of childish dependence. They

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are all ready to enjoy food if it is brought to their mouth, and even some want it pushed down. … You do not deserve to live if you cannot help yourselves. I have given up at present my plan for the education of the masses. It will come by degrees. What I now want is a band of fiery missionaries. We must have a College in Madras to teach comparative religions, Sanskrit, the different schools of Vedanta, and some European languages; we must have a press, and papers printed in English and in the Vernaculars. When this is done, then I shall know that you have accomplished something. Let the nation [India] show that they are ready to do. If you cannot do anything of the kind in India, then let me alone. I have a message to give, let me give it to the people who appreciate it and who will work it out. My name should not be made prominent; it is my ideas that I want to see realised. The disciples of all the prophets have always inextricably mixed up the ideas of the Master with the person, and at last killed the ideas for the person. The disciples of Shri Ramakrishna must guard against doing the same thing. Work for the idea, not the person. The Lord bless you.” (Vivekananda, 2016, 5: 65–6). It was Vivekananda’s second nature to envisage a complete system, including marketing and publicity, for any work that he envisioned. The above letter is a case in point. However, he was against self-aggrandisement. Vivekananda always advocated publicity of the ideas, not of persons. When Vivekananda was alive, he used to return the donation money that remained unspent for a particular purpose. Even in the present-day, it is common in the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission to return unspent funds to the donor, many a time, the local government. According to Sri Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, “Yoga is dexterity in action” (Bhagavad Gita 2: 50). Translating this precept into practice is the goal of all the activities of Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission. This requires technical knowledge and a spirit of self-surrender or selflessness. Vivekananda was particular that all monastics or members of the organization should be well-trained in the empirical sciences and other technical subjects that were essential for carrying out the various tasks of the organization. Vivekananda was thorough to the minutest detail. He instructed Brahmananda about the maintenance of accounts in his letter dated 12 October 1897: “(1) To all those who collect money and send it to the Math … the acknowledgment of the amounts will be issued from the Math. (2) The acknowledgment must be in duplicate, one for the sender, and one for filing in the Math. (3) There must be a big register in which all the names and addresses of the donors will be entered. (4) Accounts, accurate to the last pie, must be kept of the amounts that are donated to the Math Fund, and fully accurate accounts should be obtained from Sarada and others to whom money is given. For lack of accurate account-keeping … see that I am not accused as a cheat. These accounts should afterwards be published. (5) Immediately go and register a will under lawyer’s advice to the effect that in case you and I die then Hari and Sharat will succeed to all that there is in our Math” (Vivekananda, 2016, 8: 412).

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4 Chakraborty’s Teaching of Vivekananda Management I was fortunate to come into contact with S. K. Chakraborty, who invited me to give a class at the Rabindranath Tagore Centre for Human Values that he set up in Kolkata. His books like Management by Values, Ethics in Management, and Human Values and Ethics are like ready reckoners that teach us to apply Vivekananda’s and Vedanta’s precepts into management practice. In Swami Vivekananda: Leader of Sacred Nationhood, Chakraborty portrays Vivekananda as a powerful leader who could revolutionize Indian understanding of nation and religion. Chakraborty was particular that Vivekananda’s ideas of values- and ethics-based management and leadership should reach Indian youth. He was concerned that the youth did not get enough and proper guidance regarding values and ethics, and that a living model of Vedantic management like that of Vivekananda was the need of the hour. Even at an advanced age, Chakraborty’s fire of zeal and enthusiasm did not ebb, and they charged the listener with unsurpassed fervour. He taught generations of managers to inculcate values, particularly Indian values, in the management of large organizations. This festschrift would become meaningful only when a well-defined strategy is developed for translating Chakraborty’s ideas of putting Vivekananda into practice in management in the corporate world.

References Chakraborty, S. K. (1993). Management by values: Towards cultural congruence. Oxford University Press. Chakraborty, S. K. (1997). Ethics in management. Oxford University Press. Chakraborty, S. K. (2012). Swami Vivekananda: Leader of sacred nationhood. Advaita Ashrama. Chakraborty, S. K., Chakraborty, D. (2006). Human values and ethics: Achieving holistic excellence. ICFAI. His Eastern and Western Disciples (2015). The life of Swami Vivekananda. 2 vols. Advaita Ashrama. His Eastern and Western Admirers (2017). Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda. Advaita Ashrama. Vivekananda, S. (2016). The complete works of Swami Vivekananda. 9 vols. Advaita Ashrama.

Dharma of Leadership: Wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita in an Uncertain World Debashis Chatterjee

1 Introduction ‘Do not let your dogma run over your dharma’. This was my parting counsel to the CEO of a luxury hotel that was struggling to cope in the Covid ‘19 world. ‘How does my business survive in these uncertain times?’, the leading hotelier in the city asked in exasperation. ‘The tourism sector is going downhill. People are distancing themselves socially. They are travelling less and refraining from staying in hotels. Global supply chain is disrupted. All the certainties of our industry are vanishing quickly. The world seems to have been hijacked by a pandemic that has brought the economy to a jolting halt. The revenues are expected to go down to anywhere between 20 percent and 80 percent for most hotels, the next few months will see bankruptcies for some industries and ruthless cost reduction measures for most.’ He then turned around and asked me, ‘So how does one fix this?’ I counter-questioned, ‘You can fix a product. But how can you fix a mindset that is not functioning? How do you fix your own worn-out theories and thinking about enterprise in these turbulent times?’ ‘True, tell me more he said.’ ‘Think of the of the word, dharma.’ ‘That’s so religious!’ he groaned! ‘Dharma has little to do with religion, although religious leaders seemed to have co-opted that word’, I argued. ‘Then, what does it mean?’ It simply means those essential principles that hold everything together. Violation of dharma is violation of these principles. ‘Please elaborate more!’ D. Chatterjee (B) Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, Kunnamangalam, Kerala, India URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/debashischatterjee1/ © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_18

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Dharma is the unchanging essence of the ever-changing nature of our universe. Think of the dharma of water anywhere in the world: ocean water, river water, rain water or a glass of water. You may pollute the water and have mud water and sewage water. Yet, the essence of water will remain the same. The essence of water is its wetness. You cannot separate water from its wetness just as you cannot separate fire from its heat. Dharma is also the unvarying principle that holds and unifies the diversity of organizations, cultures, nations and everything that exists as an entity. From the infinite to the infinitesimal, dharma pervades every aspect of our existence. ‘What is the difference between dogma and dharma, then?’, the CEO quizzed me. If dharma is the sustaining principle of our ecosystem, dogma is the mental blueprint of our ego-system. The path of dharma is creative and multi-linear. The path of dogma is rigid and linear. Dharma is about the source while dogma is about the surface. Dharma is existential, dogma is mental. While dogma points towards disconnects between mind and matter, dharma strives towards deeper integration of mind and matter. How does one get out of dogma and embrace dharma? Dogma is nothing but the stubborn holding onto a mental model from the past that has outlived its utility. You cannot fix all of today’s problem with yesterday’s thinking. As Albert Einstein famously said, ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’ For instance, capitalism that was locked up in a narrow mental model based on profiteering for stakeholders and outsourcing the social and environmental cost of doing business to the marginalised people does not work anymore. There is now a serious rethink of capitalism itself and the birth of such concepts as ‘conscious capitalism’ and ‘triple bottom line’ suggests that the dharma of sustainable wealth creation is upstaging the dogma of profit maximisation. In crisis situations you have to examine your dogmas characterised by flawed thinking. You have to go deeper than the surface of your dogma. The Covid situation has thrown up the unintended consequences of globalisation of consumerism. Our mental models that were geared towards producing more will now have to yield space to enterprises that are caring more Some industries are seeing sunsets, while some are witnessing sunrise. Nature, including human nature, is poised for selfcorrection based on the deep integrating principle of dharma. Dharma re-integrates mind and matter in a fine equilibrium whenever this balance is lost. In the classical spiritual narrative of India, The Bhagavad Gita, mentor Krishna asserts that whenever dharma declines in society, a spiritually evolved leader emerges to establish the lost equilibrium. What method does Krishna suggest to his protégé Arjuna to restore dharma? The Bhagavad Gita weaves a battle-field conversation into a narrative of 700 verses on the problems faced by leaders such as Arjuna and the solution provided by Krishna from a perspective that is both compelling and contemporary. Arjuna refuses to fight a battle of redemption for fear of causing disintegration of society. Krishna convinces him that leaders are not fighters of shadows but warriors of light. Their primary job is to restore the light of dharma in dark times. If Arjuna refuses to terminate the unethical reign of a land grabber and eve teaser Duryodhana, he will

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default in the warrior’s duty of upholding dharma. In short, Krishna tells Arjuna that it is not a sign of health to fit into and perpetuate a sick society. Krishna is an expression of timeless dharma in the human form; he is wholeness embodied. He is the unity of life in diversity of forms. He integrates the divisive aspects of our war-torn self into one whole understanding of who we really are. In this understanding, our separate and conflicting ego-edges dissolve. We find meaningful connection even with our sworn enemies in the unity of purpose: our collective sacred identity—the dharma of our soul. Krishna teaches Arjuna how to lead in the battle of life with his undying and imperishable soul Self. He teaches us the secret of invincible dharma. Krishna takes the fear out of the heart of Arjuna by clarifying that dharma transcends the appearances of life and death of forms in nature. It is the underlying consciousness of dharma that reinvents and regenerates. One is reminded of Steve Jobs’ insight during a graduation speech he delivered at Stanford University: Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. (Steve Jobs in his Stanford Graduation Speech, Spring 2005)

The first step is toward integration is to be conscious of an old mindset that you are carrying like deadwood in your head about business as usual. Yet, you can see that business as usual does not work anymore. Leaders of the future will have to ignite the rites of renewal and restoration by which organizations can transcend the very rationale of their existence from mere discontinuity to a deeper and greater continuity; from disharmony to sustaining harmony.

2 Leaders Integrate People and Processes One of the fundamental tasks of leadership is the task of integration. Leaders do not take sides in the case of a conflict; they often bring two sides together. Leaders integrate the world of diversity and differences into a unity of purpose. Leadership is the search for synergy, symphony and symmetry in a world of conflict and disorder. Krishna uses a striking metaphor to explain this role of the dharmic leader to Arjuna: “O Arjuna, everything is held together by me like a necklace of pearls on a string” (Bhagavad Gita 7.7) The pearls in a necklace represent the diversity of people and forms in an organisation. Like diverse people these pearls come in different shapes and sizes and colours. The unseen, invisible thread holding the pearls together is the integrating life force of the dharmic leader. The pearls represent the body-mind-senses complex while the leader represents the unifying, silken thread of the spirit that ties many such complex human beings into a whole and harmonious system. Krishna is drawing Arjuna’s attention to the reality of systemic intelligence that renders complex organizational processes into a coherent whole. This intelligence is like the ignition of a car that sets the different parts of a car into a well-coordinated

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movement. Without this ignition the car would remain a static structure devoid of its inherent dynamism. From where does the leader derive the power of integration? What is the source of a leader’s ability to connect people to a common cause? What is that discipline that enables a leader to attract people to such a cause? Krishna now invites Arjuna to undertake this timeless journey of leaders: the journey toward an integral being. Integral beings become conscious of a life of oneness with themselves and their universe. This the Gita describes as ekatmanubhuti—unitary consciousness. They act from the wholeness of this consciousness. In actual behaviour, they demonstrate a harmony and unique synchronicity between their beliefs and their actions. Their body-mind-senses complex orchestrate themselves to the effortless rhythms of the universe. Krishna emphatically tells Arjuna ‘Everything depends on me, as pearls on a thread.’ Krishna here is pointing toward the integrating power of the universe as it works through the being of a dharmic leader. What is that power that holds all planets in their orbits? What is it that creates the symphony of the stars? Everything in the universe depends on this unifying and integrating principle that Krishna embodies. An integral leader begins to experience spiritual affinity with the natural order of the universe; his inner nature becomes one with outer Nature. Leaders with integrity attract followers spontaneously even beyond their lifetimes. For such a leader life becomes one song—a universe—of thought, feeling and action. Integrity is another expression for this one song. Integrity is more than just socially sanctioned, conditioned behaviour. It is a spontaneous life force that connects all our life’s experiences in a unique wholeness—like the string in the necklace that holds the pearls together.

3 The Leader’s World Reflects Unmanifest Dharma Dharma, I have stated in my book, Timeless Leadership (Chatterjee 2012), is the integral and living principle that holds us. To act according to our dharma is to act righteously in accordance with this integrating principle. How does the leader know that there is such an integrating principle? Imagine that you have a glass prism that scatters light into seven different colours: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. We can see these seven colours distinctly with our naked eyes. Yet, the pure light from which these colours have emerged remains invisible to us. Just think of this: we can see the colours emerging from this light, yet we can’t see the light itself. The pure light is universal (sanatana) dharma while the refracted light is contextual (vishista) dharma. Universal dharma varies from one context to another. Dharma works through us like the invisible light that manifests itself in many shades. In human nature dharma manifests in three psychological forces: inertia, dynamism and illumination. These are the three forces that reveal themselves through the colourful kaleidoscope of human nature. Behind these forces is the invisible of light of unmanifested dharma. Krishna explains this principal to Arjuna as he says:

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Know that nature’s qualities come from me—lucidity, passion, and dark inertia; I am not in them, they are in me. (Bhagavad Gita 7.12)

In the human form, everyone can experience the manifestation of our dharma in the three observable states: inertia, dynamism and illumination. It is one dharma of human consciousness manifesting in three different states. When we are asleep, we are in the grip of inertia. Our body’s movement is restricted in this sleep state. When we wake up, we are propelled by the force of dynamism that leads us to activity. But when illumination prevails, we become reflective and peaceful. All these states are three different modifications of one unbroken consciousness just as ice, fluid and steam are three different modifications of one unmanifest dharma of water. We can’t see the dharma of water with our naked eyes, yet we know that such a dharma exists as an unalterable and universal law of water (a compound containing two parts of hydrogen combining with one part of oxygen). We cannot see the ‘wetness’ of water yet we know it when we are wet in contact with water. Just as all different qualities of water come from its basic dharma, all qualities of human nature come from one unmanifest source. Krishna explains to Arjuna that he is that source. Krishna is the unmanifest spirit that is hidden behind our waking, sleeping, dreaming states. He further says, ‘I am not in them; they are in me.’ Quite simply, dharma is inaccessible through our sensory modes of perception in sleeping, dreaming or wakeful states. Neither can dharma be spoken about as it manifests in deeds not in words. In reality dharma has to be lived. Water does not announce its basic dharma of wetness: it just acts out it dharma by wetting whoever comes in direct contact with it. Those leaders who live dharma rather than just speak about it understand that the power of dharma comes only when you practice it. How does a leader act out his dharma in the world if he can’t see it? One way to act out one’s dharma is through righteous action for a cause greater than one’s personal interests. Righteous action follows the axiomatic truth that whatever is good for the whole is good for the part. Arjuna represents the minority Pandavas of five in the war against the majority might of the Kauravas. Yet, Arjuna’s strength comes from the dharma of a righteous war that he is fighting. Arjuna is fighting for a just cause. Action has no power in itself. It draws its power from the unmanifest purpose or dharma behind it. Ordinarily, righteousness implies ethically right action. Righteous action is however not merely superficial morality. In its true sense, righteous action means acting according to the law of one’s being. Righteous action also implies that the means used for performance of action are just as important as achieving the end result. Thus, doing the right thing assumes as much importance as doing the thing right. That’s why action backed by the right cause is important. A leader’s action bears the signature of the justness of a great cause.

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4 The Three Integral Values of Dharmic Leadership: Authenticity, Sustainability and Wholeness1 This integration of mind and matter takes place in the awareness of source Self? The Gita describes it as atman. This source Self is where dharma originates. When the world is up against crisis, decay and disintegration, the primary task of a leader is to integrate people and processes of the organisation into a unity of purpose. However, this unity is first achieved within the leader’s own source Self. In order to act out of one’s dharma, the leader has to embrace the integral values of authenticity (satyam), sustainability (nityam) and wholeness (purnam). Authenticity or satyam represents the dharmic leader’s ability to seek after truth. Truth is self-luminous. However, it is clouded by layers and layers of misperceived facts. Authenticity therefore is not just about telling the truth but also about perceiving the truth from debris of misleading factual information. Facts are easy to put together by the click of a few buttons. But truth demands psychological commitment to sift through facts until they reveal the face of Reality. An iconic CEO of one of India’s largest information technology companies often said, ‘In God we trust but bring data to the table.’ Truth is however much more than a collection of bare facts. Truth is contextual, subtle and the earnest pursuit of truth requires the leader to have the fortitude to go through truth ache. Satyam is the leader’s mental alignment with Reality. Our limited intellect cannot grasp the whole of Reality of our universe. However, if leaders lead authentic lives and pursue truth diligently, they can have a greater hold on Reality. Here is the equation of Facts, Truth and Reality in the ascending order of subtlety and authenticity (Chatterjee et al. 2014): Facts < Truth < Reality There is an extraordinary amount of information overload that leaders carry in their heads today. Never before has the swarm of information hit leaders so badly. And alongside that, there is emotional turmoil. Leaders have to be constantly in the ‘watch’ mode. As a result, the pressure on the leader’s psyche is huge. For leaders to make sense of this overload and see what is critical becomes the number one global skill. Yet another element of authenticity is acting from a clear mind. Gita’s notion of karmayoga reveals that when the leader’s occupation is clouded by her preoccupation, she is not really doing her work—whatever work it may be. The challenge is how does a leader deal with her preoccupations. The Gita shows how one can take away one’s preoccupation from one’s occupation. This means that the leader has to deal with her emotional overload that comes from ego-centric work and shift the balance towards purpose centric work. Then the balance will be automatically restored in the leader’s life. The Gita points towards attitude shifts that leaders need to bring, to be able to see life in its unity and not compartments of me and others. 1

Portions of this section appeared in the author’s newspaper article https://www.newindianexpress. com/opinions/2014/mar/24/2047-globalising-indian-thought-589876.html.

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Sustainability or nityam is a difficult notion to grasp as nothing in the material world is absolutely sustainable. Everything that germinates in time must necessarily terminate in time. All discussions on sustainability are therefore essentially around the relative endurance of an observable phenomenon when compared to another. In the corporate world, a robust culture is more sustainable that strategy. Likewise, a good strategy tends to be more sustainable than a clever tactic. From the perspective of leadership, sustainability becomes a challenge in the face of rapid discontinuities that are taking place in technology and climate change. Leaders need greater skills of adaptability to gear up and change themselves and their organizations. The corporate CEO of today, not unlike Arjuna, the protagonist of The Gita, is taking on turmoil of the proportions of a battle and is not able to handle the pressure. He requires an unwavering consciousness to sustain himself in the backdrop of discontinuities. So, leaders of today need to adapt to another kind of consciousness where they are able to take in a lot more of the disturbing stimuli of life and still remain tranquil. The Gita calls this the state of sthitapragnya, being established in the stillness of wisdom in order to make sense of the landscape and mindscape of rapid change. Their neural architecture has to be reshaped differently through meditative practices, reflection and discrimination. It is the discriminating faculty, viveka buddhi, that will help a leader discern that changelessness behind change and the stillness behind all movement. The pursuit of nityam in an ever-changing world or anitya is vivified by two expressions in the Gita: kshara and akshara. Krishna reminds Arjuna, There are two aspects in Nature: the perishable and the imperishable. The perishable are creatures of the world; the imperishable is the changeless being. (Bhagavad Gita 15.16)

Kshara is the transitory and perishable world of objects, form and phenomenon. Akshara is the indivisible consciousness of being that stands behind the passing spectacle of the world. The leader recognises the power and potency of pure being before he negotiates the temporary world of being this and being that. This enables the leader to understand the subtle distinction between his changing roles and his imperishable source Self. This ability to distinguish the Self from the role helps the leader survive the vicissitudes of life. Sustainability is about learning and leading from the future. Our future world has come to grips with the notion of sustainable development. Nityam provides that discerning mindset that will enable the present generation of leaders to meet their requirements without compromising the future generations to meet their own needs. Committing to nityam puts the shared values of the organisation before selfish needs of its members. Mahatma Gandhi articulated the notion of nityam in a poetic expression: ‘The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. Wholeness or purnam is the final goal of a dharmic leader. Purnam is wholeness. In the psychological sense, purnam is complete fulfilment. The wisdom of the Gita does not define wholeness as an assembly of parts. The seers of India realised the importance of a part-less whole as the abiding definition of purnam. They had the vision of the universe where the micro and the macro were integrally linked by one unbounded consciousness of the whole. So purnam did

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not refer to an object or a concept. Rather, it was about a conscious and realisable intelligence that kept planets in their orbit and everything in order and harmony with each other. An expression from Isa Upanishad explains the wholeness of this conscious intelligence in this telling expression: That is wholeness. This is wholeness. From that wholeness this wholeness came. If you remove that wholeness from this wholeness, what remains is still whole. The nature of wholeness can be best explained by the analogy of an oil lamp. The flame that is lit up in the lamp is an apt metaphor for wholeness. You can light up a million lamps from that original lamp, yet the source lamp remains undiminished. The realisation of wholeness awakens in us a reverence for life, reverence for each species and fosters the need for harmony and interdependence in existence. The Gita gives a comprehensive view of purnatwa or wholeness incorporating Individual (vyashti), Organization (samashti), Creative process (srishti) and Transcendental Creative spirit (parameshti). In the ultimate analysis, Gita explores dharma as an interplay of Abhyudaya and Nihshreyasa. Abhyudaya signifies rising prosperity and human development in society. Nihshreyasa refers to attainment of happiness and contentment. The first term refers to external progress and the second to internal evolution of a human being. Abhyudaya and nihsreyasa together, like the two wings of a bird constitute the means of soaring towards purnatwa. That then is the end of dharma, wholeness or fulfilment through attainment of purnatwa. Thus, when a leader fulfils his dharma, dharma fulfils him.

References Chatterjee, D. (2012). Timeless leadership: 18 Sutras from the Bhagavad Gita (pp. 84–87). Wiley. Chatterjee, D., Das, A., & Ramnath, A. (2014). 2047: Globalizing Indian thought. Visual Quest Books. Knowledge at Wharton. (2012). How relevant are leadership lessons from an ancient Indian classic? https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-relevant-are-leadership-les sons-from-an-ancient-indian-classic/

Krishna: A Study in Trans-ethical Leadership Satya Chaitanya

Young Prince Devavrata Bhishma in Vyasa’s immortal Sanskrit epic Mahabharata comes across to us as a youth with immense leadership potentials. Taken away by his mother in his infancy and presented back to his father Emperor Shantanu in his early youth, it is as a brilliant young man that we see this scion of the Bharatas first. He impresses us as someone who has the personality, the competencies, and the values needed to become one of the greatest emperors this land has seen. Devavrata is a master of all weapons of the day, ordinary as well as those endowed with magical powers. He is mighty in strength, of tireless energy and determination, fearless, and a superb master of the chariot. He has learnt all the Vedas from the greatest teacher himself, and such is his valor that even the powerful gods and the formidable Asuras respect him. He has studied thoroughly, along with all its branches and sub-branches, the laws of Brihaspati as well as the science of Niti. His master in archery was none other than the redoubtable Parashurama himself. Besides, he is a great scholar of political science, administrative science, and the science of economics. Shantanu anoints Devavrata as the crown prince and people are delighted with their future ruler. They know they have a great emperor waiting to take over at the death of Shantanu whom they love and revere dearly. Four years pass and then tragedy strikes Devavrata, metamorphosing this wonderful youth into Bhishma the terrible. One day while out hunting on the banks of the Yamuna, old Emperor Shantanu is inebriated by a wonderful fragrance and finds out it comes from the body of a fisher maid called Kali Satyavati. Smitten irrecoverably, he approaches Satyavati’s father asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage and the father says Satyavati is his adopted daughter, she is a princess by birth, and for that reason he would give her in marriage to Shantanu only on the condition that the first son born to her would inherit his throne. This would mean disinheriting his dear Devavrata and he refuses S. Chaitanya (B) Jamshedpur, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_19

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to do that and goes back to his capital. However he is unable to forget Satyavati and pining for her, loses interest in royal affairs and confines himself to his chamber. Bhishma learns why his father has lost interest in royal matters and going to the fishermen’s village, takes two terrible oaths which gives him the name Bhishma, meaning the terrible. He vows before Satyavati’s father that he is giving up all claims to the throne and that he shall never marry, never have anything to do with women so that he will have no children who might challenge Satyavati’s future children’s claims. Shantanu marries Satyavati, they have two children but both of them die before they can have their own children. Now there is a crisis at Hastinapura, the capital: Shantanu and both his sons are dead and there is no one to sit on the throne of the empire. Satyavati herself requests Bhishma to break his vows that have by now become redundant, sit on the throne and get married so that the royal line does not come to an end. Bhishma refuses to back out from his vows. If his vows were terrible earlier, the words in which he now refuses to break them are even more terrible. He says: I shall give up the three worlds, I shall give up the empire of the gods, and if there is anything greater than these, I shall give up that too. But never shall I give up my truth. The five elements may give up their nature, but I shall not give up my truth. The sun may give up its splendor, the moon its coolness, Indra, slayer of Vritra, his valor and the lord of justice, justice itself, but I shall not give up my truth. Let the world end in dissolution, let everything go up in flames, but I shall not go back on my word. Immortality holds no temptations for me, nor overlordship of the three worlds. (Mahabharata Adi Parva 104.13–18)

If Bhishma proved his character one way earlier when he took the vows, he proves it in another way now when he refuses to break those vows. For him, his oath is more important than the survival of the world itself. What Bhishma does here is being true to his oath taken years ago. And keeping one’s promises, not breaking one’s vows, to oneself and to others, is a very admirable quality in any one. Societies, nations, organizations, and cultures are sustained by such individuals. This is one of the qualities that generate trust in individuals. And leaders of men particularly should be able to command such trust by their integrity. In an organization, in a society, in a culture where people break their word, distrust sets in soon, and that makes people weary of each other, there will remain no solid ground on which people can interact with each other, and soon disintegration follows. Fidelity to the spoken word is at the very foundation of all group endeavors. It is as though the vows he took in his youth have made him very bitter. Throughout the rest of his life, he goes by old conventions, rules and regulations, never breaking any single rule. For instance, when the bride of the family Queen Draupadi was being disrobed publicly in the royal court at the end of a dice game in which she was staked and lost, one strong word from him could have stopped the entire horrendous scene but he refuses to say anything even when she appeals to him for help. He forgets that he is a kshatriya and his first duty is to help anyone who appeals for help, especially a woman in distress. He says what is right and what is wrong is too difficult to decide under the circumstances because in one way she had been won in the dice game and

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has become a slave to the winners and in another way, she has not been won and is a free woman, as though disrobing a woman slave in public was all right. Examples could be multiplied but as the foregoing makes it clear, Bhishma repeatedly remains bound by conventional morality, by old world values in a world in which those values were increasibgly becoming redundant, even ridiculous. He looks at the world around him not from the present but from the past. What is not is as real to him as what should be. The vows he took as an adolescent become the be all and end all of his life. That moment becomes the peak of his life and Bhishma climbs no more. There are plateaus thereafter, and there are valleys and abysses, but no more peaks in his life. While Bhishma is a competent leader within strictly ethical limits, as a transethical leader, he fails completely. He fails to rise beyond ethics even when those ethics are obstacles to doing good to others. He forgets that ethics are for people and people are not for ethics. He forgets that ethics are not ends in themselves but only a means for what India calls lokasangraha, the common good. A competent leader should not let morals stand in his way of his doing good. In comparison, Krishna comes across to us as an outstanding trans-ethical leader in situation after situation. Again and again, throughout his life, he takes the risk of rejecting conventional morality and rises to levels of higher morality for a cause he espouses throughout his life. In doing so, he calls upon himself possible censure of his own generation and generations to come. But to him his cause was larger than himself, larger than his personal ego, larger than his name and fame, which could all be sacrificed for the larger good, the welfare of mankind, lokasangraha. If we accept the tradition that says Krishna was God incarnated in flesh, then that goal was what he states in the Gita as Yadaa yadaa hi dharmasya glaanir bhavati bhaarata, Abhyutthaanam adharmasya tadaatmaanam srijaamyaham. Paritraanaaya sadhoonaam, vinaashaaya cha dushkritaam Dharma-sansthaapana-arthaaya sambhavaami yuge yuge. Whenever righteousness declines and unrighteousness prospers, I create myself. For protecting the good and destroying the evil, for establishing righteousness, I am born again and again in age after age. (Bhagavad Gita 4.7–8)

And if we look at him not as an incarnation but as another human being like us, then again, we find this is what he did all his life: protecting the good, destroying the evil, establishing dharma where adharma reigned. And this mission was so sacred to him that at its altar he could unhesitatingly sacrifice his personal glory and honor. Krishna burnt—so that others might get light and warmth. Looking at Mahabharata’s Krishna, we find that several of his actions are of questionable morality from a conventional standpoint. During the Mahabharata war, he encourages “unrighteous” acts repeatedly—and many of these acts that the Pandavas perform throughout the war are first conceived in his brain. Thus we find Krishna suggesting to the Pandavas a treacherous plot to kill Acharya Drona, the Commander-in-chief of the Kaurava army, on a day when Drona’s fury

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and skill in the warfield have become impossible to face and he is causing the death of thousands of Pandava warriors by the minute. Drona was like a whirlwind on that day, uprooting mighty warriors and ordinary soldiers alike by their scores. Seeing the Kaurava side losing the battle, Drona had entered into a savage rage and after using other weapons to decimate huge chunks of the Pandava army, he had eventually begun using the brahmastra itself, one of the most powerful weapons of mass destruction of the day, breaking war conventions. Krishna realizes the grave seriousness of the situation and tells the Pandavas how Drona is simply invincible—not even the lord of the gods himself can defeat him in war so long as he wields weapons in his hands. Krishna asks them to forget conventional morality and rise up to the need of the hour. “The only way he could be killed is if he lays down the weapons,” says Krishna. “And therefore, Pandavas, forget about the sin of killing one’s teacher and do what is needed for victory… I believe he will give up battle if he hears that his son Ashwatthama is dead. Someone should now go to him and tell him that Ashwatthama has been killed.” (Drona 191.11–13). A mean, vicious, cruel plan. Unrighteous to the core. The fake news that Ashwatthama has been killed is given to him and Drona lays down his weapons and is then killed as he sits in yoga in his chariot. A treacherous act. Unless, of course, you look at it from the perspective of the higher morality— that of lokasangraha, the larger weal. This mighty warrior, the man of many virtues, was battling on the side of darkness and his victory would have meant a failure to dharma, failure to Krishna’s mission of establishing a righteous world, to his vision of a world of light. Conventional morality cannot justify it, the morality of the word cannot justify it, but from the vantage point of higher morality, morality based on not just rules and regulations but on the larger good, it is not only justifiable, but essential. Except for that one thing, the larger good, it flouts all other rules of established behavior in cultured societies, social norms and traditions, the values cultivated through centuries of noble living. But Krishna was looking at the situation not from the standpoint of lower morality, but from the perspective of the higher dharma for which he had lived all his life. True, by choosing the higher dharma over conventional dharma, over the dharma of tradition and customs, Krishna made himself open to the criticism that he betrayed truth and trust, that he fouled, played the game of war treacherously. Higher morality and immorality are often confused. The wicked fall into immorality and truly great men soar to the level of higher morality. The movie “Lincoln” shows a scene from the life of Abraham Lincoln. Some additional votes are needed in the Senate to get the bill making slavery unconstitutional passed. And Lincoln says he is the President of the United States and as such enormous powers are invested in him. Using those powers procure those votes needed, he orders. And he means by any means, foul if necessary, because his cause is so enormous—freeing generations of black people from the evils of slavery. That is an example of higher morality. Krishna again breaks the rules when he had Bheema kill Duryodhana treacherously at the end of the war. Here again, as in the case of Drona, he had no choice

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except to follow a path and take his followers through a path that the world at large, with its values of ordinary morality, called immoral. Yudhishthira, when he challenged Duryodhana to come out and fight, made a stupid blunder by promising that if Duryodhana beat any one of the Pandava brothers, using any weapon of his choice, then the entire kingdom that they had won through the war would go back to him. Duryodhana was the best mace warrior of the day, with none of the Pandava brothers, including Bheema an equal to him. He could easily have beaten Sahadeva or Nakula, or even Arjuna or Yudhishthira himself in mace and the kingdom would have gone back to him and all the war, and all those deaths and misery, would all have been wasted. It was partly the nobility in Duryodhana and partly his arrogance that made him choose Bheema for a battle with the mace—and even Bheema was losing and the only way to save the situation was to do what would be ordinarily called an act of adharma, but was necessary for the welfare of the world and was therefore a higher dharma. And that is what Krishna chooses to do when he asks Bheema to strike Duryodhana below the waist and kill him against the rules of the mace. When Draupadi was being disrobed in the dice hall of Hastinapura, there were many persons present in the assembly who could have intervened decisively on her behalf. Except for Vidura and Vikarna, two not very powerful figures there who did intervene at least in words on her behalf, the others who felt for her were all afraid of speaking out on her behalf, not to say anything about doing something. These included mighty warriors like Bhishma, Drona, Ashwatthama and Kripa, and all five of Draupadi’s own husbands. I do not think it was fear of the physical might of Duryodhana that cowed them down—they were fearless men in the battlefield and an encounter with weapons is something that thrilled them all, excepting perhaps Yudhishthira. What made them keep quiet was confusion regarding dharma. In some corner of their minds, they felt what was going on was fine. What was being done to Draupadi there was monstrous and ugly, but Duryodhana had the right to do it because Yudhishthira had staked her in the dice game and lost her and therefore she was his slave and tradition and customs gave the master the right to do what he liked with his slave—he could sell her if he so wished, gift her to someone else, have sex with her, give her for sex to another, make her do whatever he wished, do with her whatever he desired, including denuding her and parading her naked in an assembly. So what was to be decided was the question that Draupadi had raised: Was she a slave or not? If she was, even if not because Yudhishthira had staked her but by the fact that she was the wife of men who had become slaves and everything that belonged to the slave belonged to the master and in that sense, she belonged to Duryodhana and was his property and he could do what he liked with his property, then he had the right to do what he liked with her, including denuding her and parading her naked. Na dharmasaukshmyaat subhage vivektum shaknomi te prashnam imam—“when I examine the situation, oh beautiful one, I am not able to arrive at a clear answer to your question because dharma is very subtle”. This is what Bhishma tells Draupadi finally responding to her question whether she has been won in the dice game or not—jitam vaa ajitam vaa maam manyadhve sarvabhoomipaah: “what do the kings present here consider—that I have been won, or that I have not been won?”. (Sabha 67.41) A little later he repeats:

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Uktavaanasmi kalyaani dharmasya paramaa gatih Loke na shakyate jnaatum api vijnair mahaatmabhih… Na vivektum cha te prashnam imam shaknomi nishchayaat Sookshmatvaad gahanatvaad cha kaaryasya asya cha gauravaat I have already told you, auspicious one, the path of dharma is subtle indeed. Even great men with immense knowledge find it difficult to comprehend it… I am not able to arrive at a definite conclusion about your question – because the matter is subtle, deep and of enormous import. (Sabha 69.14 &16)

The essence of dharma is difficult to comprehend; hidden is the path of dharma. Dharma is too subtle and, in this case, he is not sure what is right and what is wrong. That is what Bhishma says. And that is what ties him down. Bhishma is looking at the whole situation from the perspective of Duryodhana’s ownership rights and from whether Duryodhana owns Drauapdi now or not. He does not see the woman in distress standing before him, he does not see the bride of the family being so unforgivably humiliated before them all. Nor do Drona or Kripa or Ashwatthama see this. The four Pandavas feel their dharma does not allow them to act against their eldest brother and that eldest brother feels more or less the same as Bhishma and Drona feel. Krishna has no such hesitations; no such wrangling goes on within his heart. He sees the situation clearly from his higher moral standpoint. Here is a woman in distress, she needs his help, he is capable of rendering that help and he helps her. Whether Yudhishthira had a right to stake her, whether she is a slave and other questions like that are immaterial to him. He rises above such petty questions and sees with unerring clarity the human situation there and intervenes decisively showing how he can effortlessly rise to levels of higher morality when the occasion demands. There is a beautiful encounter between Krishna and Bhishma in the middle of the Mahabharata war. This happens in the latter half of the ninth day of the war. Bhishma is in a furious battle mood, at his very best as a warrior. Warriors are falling dead all around him in heaps, as are horses and elephants. Banners fall from flagstaffs in their hundreds, broken chariots form mounds around where he is battling. Bhishma is no less than a fierce forest fire. Unable to stand his ferocity, the Pandava army screams and runs helter-skelter. Such is the terror and confusion, says the Mahabharata, that fathers start killing sons, son’s fathers, and friends, friends. Maddened by dismay and dread, the army loses its mind. Krishna tells Arjuna time has come to put an end to this—Bhishma should be killed, and he should do that immediately and fulfill his earlier promise. Arjuna looks at Krishna and then he looks at Bhishma once again—the grandfather in whose lap he had played as a child. Once, he remembers, seated in Bhishma’s lap, he had called him father and Bhishma had corrected him—no, he was his grandfather. Arjuna goes into the vishada, melancholy, that he had gone into at the opening of the war, from which Krishna had brought him out through the teachings of the Gita. “Tell me, Krishna,” he says, “killing those who should not be killed and attaining a land [rajya]

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that would be worse than hell, and living a life of suffering in the jungle—of these two, which is better?” He then reluctantly asks Krishna to take his chariot to where Bhishma is. The two engage in a battle—fierce no doubt, but Krishna can see clearly that Arjuna’s heart is not in the battle, whereas Bhishma, in spite of all his love for his favorite grandson, is merciless in his attack. Bhishma’s attack grows more and more fierce by the minute, wounding both Arjuna and Krishna all over, bathing them in blood. As Krishna sees the Pandava army perishing all around and realizes that Arjuna is not going to strike back as needed, he realizes time has come to break his promise and act on his own. Leaving Arjuna in the chariot, he leaps down from it and still holding his whip in his hand and roaring like an enraged lion, rushes towards Bhishma to kill him with his bare arms. The earth quakes as Krishna’s wrath-filled steps fall on it. Cries rise up from a thousand terrified throats—“Bhishma is finished, Bhishma is finished.” Bhishma sees Krishna approaching him like a whirlwind, murder in his eyes. “Come, come Krishna, and put an end to my life today,” he says, readying his bow for battle. “I am honored, Krishna, as never before; it’s like all the three worlds showering blessings on me. Come and finish me, Krishna.” Arjuna jumps down from his chariot and runs after Krishna, and it is only after a furious struggle with him that he succeeds in stopping him by holding on to his legs from behind and clinging on to them. Krishna’s fury does not abate even after Arjuna reminds him repeatedly of his vow of not fighting in the battle. Arjuna tells Krishna that the world would call him a betrayer of his own word if he did not stop, a common liar. And then Arjuna vows not to spare Bhishma, to kill him. He vows to do so by all his merits, by the weapons that are sacred to him as a warrior and by his truth. And it is only then that he is able to lead Krishna back to their chariot. Here again we see Krishna breaking his word. He has vowed not to fight in the war and yet he rushes towards Bhishma in battle fury, ready to slay him. Once again proving that unlike Bhishma, he will break his word if the occasion demands of it—so long as his goal is the good of the world, Krishna does not mind committing that sin. Arjuna specifically reminds Krishna here—the people would accuse him of breaking his word, of being a hypocrite, a liar and a betrayer. But Krishna does not mind that, at least does not mind it enough to stop him from doing what he thinks is right. Once again, he does not allow his morals to stand in the way of his doing right, doing good to the world. Two other incidents that prove the trans-ethical nature of Krishna’s leadership need to be mentioned. Towards the end of the great war, a moment comes when Arjuna has to choose between conventional morality and higher morality. The wheels of Karna’s chariot are stuck in mud wet with the blood of warriors and the chariot wouldn’t move. Karna jumps down from the chariot and tries to pull up the stuck wheel, requesting Arjuna not to attack him while he was down. The conventions of war said that Karna could not be attacked under such conditions. Let to himself, Arjuna would not have attacked him. But Krishna knows this opportunity to slay one of the most formidable warriors of the enemy army, the most formidable one alive by then, should not be missed—and Krishna asks Arjuna to shoot Karna dead. He tells him the man who is now asking for justice and fair treatment, for dharma, has no right to do so, for this

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is the man who stood with Duryodhana as his mainstay in all his unrighteous acts, the man who not only stood by and watched when Draupadi was being humiliated publicly in the dice hall but ordered her final humiliation. Arjuna obeys Krishna. By ordering Arjuna to kill Karna, what Krishna does is to help Arjuna see the situation from the perspective of higher morality and give up the stance conventional morality would force him to take. Krishna as a leader raises Arjuna to the level of higher moral values here, which is one thing that a trans-ethical leader does. Krishna does the same thing during what has become one of the most important incidents in the Mahabharata. Arjuna’s inner conflict and the grief rising from that, about which he talks at great length in the first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita and in the beginning of the second chapter, is a result of his inability to see things from a higher moral plane. The entire message of the Gita is addressed to help Arjuna look at the war and his duty in it from the perspectives of Krishna’s vision—the higher values based on lokasangraha, the good of the world, destroying the philosophy widespread among leaders of the day that power is an end in itself and not a means for doing good to others. Here too Krishna functions as a supremely competent trans-ethical leader. And in doing so, he gives us what has become one of our greatest national treasures, the book that has guided our actions through millennia, one of humanity’s most cherished scriptures: the Gita, Krishna’s book of transcendental wisdom. It is interesting to ask oneself why Bhishma, the highly competent prince, fails repeatedly to provide trans-ethical leadership to his people where Krishna so effortlessly succeeds in doing so. The answer is that Krishna is not a prisoner to his own self-image, whereas Bhishma is. Narcissism in modern psychology stands for self-love, especially destructive, selfconsuming self-love. In his early youth young Devavrata took two vows, which transformed him into Bhishma the terrible. Bhishma liked his new image very much—he fell in love with it. It was a very honorable image, a glorious one: the martyr, the self-sacrificer, the man of unshakeable vows, the incorruptible man of total integrity. Bhishma became allured by this self-image, enticed by it. He had turned his back to life and life, like Echo who cursed Narcissus, had cursed him in her turn—he was now the accursed Narcissus, bewitched by his own self-image, pining all his life after his own reflection, his self-image created by the oaths. A narcissist cannot be a great leader of men, cannot transform people, cannot “touch” them. Bhishma, in spite of all his several great virtues, fails not because he is incompetent but because he is a man trapped in his own self-image, in conventional morality, trapped within himself. The patriarch of the Bharatas lives an astonishingly long life and comes into contact with several generations of people. What is shocking is that while all these generations admire and revere Bhishma immensely, Bhishma himself has no positive influence on any of these generations. He fails to touch any of them, to transform them into greater beings. Krishna, the supreme trans-ethical leader, transforms whoever he touches throughout his life.

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While whether Krishna is God come down as man or man risen to the level of God is debatable, what is not debatable is that he is worshipped as God in hundreds of thousands of temples across the world and there is not a single temple built for Bhishma anywhere. The philosophy Krishna teaches, the philosophy Krishna practices in his own life, is a dangerous one though. It could mean that the end justifies the means. And to say that is to say something frightening in its implications, its possible interpretations and applications. In the hands of the evil, the philosophy could be disastrous—as the world has seen again and again, is seeing right now. For what is a great end for one, in his preoccupation with his selfishness, in his greed and avarice, in his egotistic self-absorption, in his search for personal glory, maybe misery for another, maybe grief, death, and devastation for another. The only perspective from which the end can justify the means is when our goals are set by a truly noble heart: a heart that wishes ill for nobody, that loves the world as much as it loves itself, and is willing to sacrifice itself at the altar of the good of the other, at the greater common weal. It is only then that we rise to the level of higher values—otherwise what we do is immorality, plain, and simple.

Leadership as an Adventure of Consciousness Sanjoy Mukherjee

1 Introduction At a time of widespread globalization when the gospel of market economy has become the ruling ideology and fierce competition has come to determine the nature and dynamics of relationships between people, organizations and societies, the question naturally arises: what is the relevance of human values in the present context? When progress and development, human as well as organizational, are determined largely by techno-economic indicators, where is the space for ethics and values in leadership and management? When the corporate executive is leading the life of a busybody round the clock, where is the time to stand and stare, look back and think deeply in an age when, to use a Shakespeare’s phrase, “times are out of joint”? Though it is true that the world of industry and business is rushing ahead toward the one and only objective of attaining economic and material progress through the profiteering route, the search for managerial effectiveness and leadership excellence in modern organizations nevertheless continues. This drive for excellence implies that the human being within the leader is also gearing up to enhance his or her own all-round effectiveness. The vital question then remains, what is the notion of effectiveness that we are trying to achieve? Is effectiveness limited only to the notion of functional efficiency that is understood in technical and quantitative terms? Or is there a need to look at effectiveness from a deeper, wider and a more holistic This chapter has commonality in parts with my paper titled ‘Human Values at Work: A Consciousness Approach’ published in ‘3D…IBA Journal of Management & Leadership’ Vol. 9 Issue 2, January–June 2018, pp. 10–21 published from Indus Business Academy, Bangalore. The Chapter has been included in this Book after receiving consent for publication from Subhash Sharma, Director, Indus Business Academy and also the Editor of the Journal. S. Mukherjee (B) Sustainability and Liberal Studies Area, Indian Institute of Management, Umsawli Campus, Shillong 793018, Meghalaya, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_20

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perspective which includes and gives importance to the subtler and more qualitative aspects of human development and organizational growth? On the other hand, while our ‘global village’ is experiencing the glamor and glitter of the phenomenon of globalization, some of the biggest scams and scandals in the global industrial scenario have come to public knowledge. Many of the corporate behemoths are facing ignominy and disrepute of alarming proportions. Now the masterminds of manipulation, compelled to achieve financial success at any cost, were surely not lacking in competence from technical and economic considerations. The glaring absence of competence from humanistic considerations starkly reveals the colossal failure of the professional leadership in organizations to achieve effectiveness in a holistic sense. Irredeemable loss of corporate reputation and trust, that vital yet intangible asset, is its inevitable outcome. Now if we turn to the individual, one finds a dominant trend of glorifying material progress at the dire expense of deeper and finer aspects of life and work. While there is no intrinsic problem with pursuing material goals per se, a one-dimensional skewed emphasis on success and career upsets the balance of life. Standard of living gets equated with standard of consumption and the quest for enhancing the quality of life loses its significance. Constant drainage of psychological energy and severe stress in life and work become inevitable. Alarmingly enough, these also produce a tremendous negative impact on the family, especially the children, and society at large. Hence, it is for the overall well-being of the individual and the benefit of the organization that there is an urgent need to uphold the notion of an all-encompassing, holistic effectiveness. Existing literature on leadership places a lot of emphasis on the perceptual ability to have a ‘big picture awareness’ on the part of the leader. But, as a prelude to that, every individual must have the requisite competence to develop a more holistic perception of life and work. Only then it will be possible to redefine effectiveness in an integral manner beyond the narrowly circumscribed vision of efficiency with its thrust on merely its technical and quantitative imperatives. A comprehensive notion of holistic effectiveness accords due importance to skills development at a functional and operational level but anchors it on a strong foundation of human values. While the domain of application of skills is the outer world of human action and endeavor, the space for cultivating and flowering of human values is the inner world of the individual, through the evolutionary process of ‘becoming’.

2 Journey of Human Values Where do we begin our voyage in search of human values? As the age-old saying goes—Those who can see deepest into the past, can also see farthest into the future. Let us go back to Athens in Greece from where culture and civilization sprang forth in ancient Europe. The story goes like this. In the crowded street of Athens, one can see an old man, with long hair and unkempt beard and in tattered clothes, moving around with a lantern in broad daylight. He is Diogenes, the revered philosopher.

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When any passer-by would come his way, he would hold the lantern up close to the face of the stranger—looking for something! Then he would move on to the next person and do the same. A young man came near him and asked, “Signor! What is it that you are looking for, that you cannot see in broad daylight with naked eyes?” Diogenes stopped, held the lantern in front of the face of this young man and said, “Among these crowds of people, I am trying to find a human being”. The above episode brings us a symbolic message. While the process of ‘becoming a human being’ is going on within our inner space, it is not quite visible to the outsider even in broad daylight. One would need a different kind of searchlight, like a lantern, to have a glimpse of this inner world. The quest for holistic effectiveness, managerial or otherwise, by the cultivation of human values is a journey within the individual. This is the qualitative aspect of human development—subtle, invisible, intangible and not amenable to measurements. The veteran management thinker Peter Drucker (2005) titled one of his articles in Harvard Business Review “Managing Oneself”. Peter Senge (1990), another leading management expert from MIT, places great emphasis on cultivating the art of ‘Personal Mastery’ in his book “The Fifth Discipline”. Thus, self-management is the key to effective management of organizations in the outside world. Now, what do we mean by human values? Without trying to offer one single definition, it is more important to come to a shared understanding of human values. Often, discourses on human values tend to get diverted to arguments stemming from differences in opinions on the questions of universality and relativity of values. Hence, let us try to examine the whole issue of values from the perspective of the subjective experience of the individual. There exists a somewhat common agreement across cultures, religions and systems of thought on the perception of values like empathy, gratitude, kindness, charity, compassion, humility and the like, which are registered as ‘positive vibrations’ within the psychological space of the individual. On the other hand, the experience of greed, jealousy, suspiciousness, arrogance, hatred and so on are registered as ‘negative vibrations’ within our psychological space. Instead of labeling them as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, let us try to evaluate the impact of these kinds of vibrations on human relationships in life and work. In our daily life-world, every individual needs to interact with other human beings. To put it simply, ‘I’ am constantly engaged in relating to the ‘Others’. When the positive vibrations are active within the individual, the ‘I’ naturally reaches out to the others and includes them within his or her domain of concern. These positive vibrations can be called desirable human values that contribute toward expanding the ‘I’ to the ‘Others’ and fostering well-being and harmony in human relationships. On the other hand, the negative vibrations are undesirable because they resist the expansion of the ‘I’ into the others. The separateness and isolation from the others is the root cause from where arise most of our problems relating to unethicality in our thoughts, decisions and actions. The voyage to effectiveness through human values requires conscious cultivation of our positive vibrations and vigilant awareness of our negative vibrations. Then, how does one begin this journey? At first, it is important to realize that the developmental process for the cultivation of human values begins with the individual

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and not the organization and the society, nor the systems and the structures. Every individual has their own unique constitution of these vibrations—positive as well as negative. One must first identify one’s own strengths (positive vibrations) and weaknesses (negative vibrations) through honest and rigorous self-analysis. Then one needs to engage in the conscious effort toward strengthening and developing further one’s own positive vibrations. Human consciousness must be allowed to expand in our daily transactions and interactions with other human beings. Simultaneously, one needs to be vigilant of the presence and activation of the negative vibrations within oneself so that one does not fall into the easy trap of the degenerative tendency of rationalizing one’s own weaknesses. This helps in developing a positive approach to life, work and other human beings. This will finally culminate in one’s conscious effort toward identifying the strengths of the others and helping them develop their positive qualities.

3 Values Development: Roles of Reason and Emotion It has already been mentioned that the interplay and development or decline of values occurs within the inner psychological space of the individual. The question naturally arises—which ones among the human faculties are involved in this process of development? Generally speaking, the human being has two sets of faculties—the rational (reason/intellect/logic) and the emotional (emotions/feelings/impulses). If we take a deep look at the entire spectrum of vibrations as we experience them psychologically, then honest introspection will tell us that we experience many of these vibrations in our emotions and not the intellect. Charity or compassion, empathy or gratitude, greed or jealousy, hatred or arrogance are essentially feelings and not intellectual constructs. However, our formal education system, right from the days in school up to the highest level, places primary emphasis and importance on the development and sharpening of our rational faculties. Ironically enough, the emotional enrichment of the individuals, which is critical to the values-development process, hardly finds space in the modern academic curriculum. The situation becomes worse when one finds opinion leaders and experts coming up with such ill-founded and misdirected advice: “Don’t be emotional! Be rational”. There is hardly any appreciation of the simple truth, a hard fact of life, that most of the values-related problems primarily originate in the world of emotions and these cannot be overcome by the sharpening of the intellect alone. It may be worthwhile here to spend some time reflecting on the following insights from two illumined minds in the twentieth century on this issue. Albert Einstein said: “And certainly we should take care not to make our intellect our God…The intellect has a sharp eye for methods and tools; but it is blind to ends and values”. And Mahatma Gandhi said: “And I know that ultimately one is guided not by the intellect, but by the heart… Man often finds reason in support of what he does or wants to do”. But be it in the East or the West, the modern education system did hardly pay any heed to these insights on this vital aspect of human development. The discipline

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of management is no exception. From the very beginning of academic life in any management institute or a business school, the students are made to pass through a grind that enhances the sharpening of their faculty of logic, reason and intellect. This is extolled as the ‘rigor’ of the system while the faculty of the heart is either displaced or misplaced from the main curriculum. Let us now listen to words of wisdom from two more stalwarts from the East and the West. Bertrand Russell began his career as a mathematician and later evolved to be a philosopher of global eminence. Finally, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is what he has to say: “Even more important than knowledge is the life of emotions…Unless men increase wisdom as much as knowledge, increase in knowledge will be increase in sorrow.” Now we can turn to Swami Vivekananda, the spiritual ambassador of India to the West. His fiery and inspiring speeches ignited men and women from the USA and Europe. More importantly, he was an institutional leader, the founder of Ramakrishna Math and Mission in 1897, the first twin Indian international organization with headquarters in India and reach across the world, growing and thriving even today. Western devotees in numbers came and joined his movement with the twofold purpose of spiritual transformation and social development. These are his words of wisdom: “The intellect is blind and cannot move of itself. It is an inactive secondary help. The real help is feeling…Love.” In the light of the above, one needs to get back to some basics. Every human being is endowed with the faculties of the head and the heart. Both are equally important in the path of human development. But one cannot substitute the heart for the development of our rational faculties. Reason, of course, gives us direction as to ‘what’ to do whereas feelings give us the motive power or impulse to engage in action. Inspiration is not just an outcome of the spark of our reason but essentially an expression of our emotional effulgence. This is the crux of the point in any learning situation—leadership, management or otherwise. From day one in our schools, modern education has laid systematic and rigorous emphasis on the sharpening of intellect. But the enrichment of the quality of the emotions has suffered dire neglect. Even though we admit the importance of emotions in our life, work, relationships and organizational culture, developing our very approach to the theme of emotions is primarily along the level and direction of intellect. When one of our colleagues in the organization suffers from an emotional crisis that is hampering his or her performance and effectiveness, we often tend to offer our counseling from a rational standpoint. When the problem is right at the center of the heart, advice from the head does not deliver the solution. The problem has to be addressed from the level of emotions and the solution also needs to be offered from the domain of feelings. Over the last few decades, the field of management education has been enriched in this area by research and training on cultivating emotional intelligence and enhancing emotional quotient. But the modules of training still give thrust on a rational approach to the issues in question.

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Time has come when one needs to expand the frontiers of knowledge and wisdom in management to include literature from classical texts of time-tested relevance. Exploration of alternative and non-conventional sources and methods of learning can throw new light and fresh air into an education system that is bogged down with stereotypes of the rational approach. Let us take a few examples out of the structured mainstream curriculum. In his illuminating sessions on Human Values in Management, S. K. Chakraborty would often refer to the Bible, the Holy Koran and the Bhagavad Gita. Quoting from the Bible he would emphasize: “Blessed are those that are pure in heart.” This sacred text does not say that blessed are those who are brilliant in intellect! We ought to consider this before we make any tall claims on holistic human development in our organizations. Then he would quote from the Koran making the message sharp and bold: “Greed robs a learned man of his wisdom.” A learned man has developed his logical and intellectual faculties. But greed invades the domain of his feelings and creates a roadblock in the path of his ascent to wisdom. “We feel greedy”. We don’t ‘think’ greedy. While referring to the Bhagavad Gita, Chakraborty would highlight that the Blessed Lord had advised his disciple Arjuna to embark on ‘chittashuddhi’ or purification of emotions prior to engagement in action. Now the question comes—how can we enrich our emotional space? Let us first make it abundantly clear that intellect or reason has a significant role to play in our development process. By no means, we intend to underplay that role. The intellect generates alternatives in a decision-making process, weighs the options from multiple perspectives and gives us direction to action. But the final momentum to action often comes from the world of feelings. That is why Gandhi would often rely more on his ‘Inner Voice’ rather than calculations. The same was true for Socrates when he was listening to his ‘daimon’, that is conscience. So finally, we may need to get back to the center of the heart where there is a zone of silence. Silence is the space from where all our thoughts emerge. One must learn to be in intimate and intense touch with his or her inner silence so that the best of thoughts may emerge. But, in the midst of the blinding light and noise of modern life, where is the time and space to be in touch with our zone of silence and listen to the ‘Voice Within’? No wonder why the great poet T. S. Eliot lamented in his famous poem, The Rock, Where is life, we have lost in living? Where is wisdom, we have lost in knowledge? Where is knowledge, we have lost in information?

4 Pathway to Leadership Wisdom What is the secret of our voyage to wisdom? What are the sources of learning beyond learning from the “Book of Knowledge” by sharpening of reason and intellect? Modern education has perfected the learning process from the Book of Knowledge

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even to a fault. But it has missed out badly on opening our minds to two other important sources of learning—the “Book of Nature” and the “Book of Life”. Learning from Nature had been an essential feature of education in many ancient traditions, especially the Indian tradition and culture. Unlike many other civilizations, the Indian civilization grew in the lap of Nature. Observation of Nature and learning from the workings of Nature were integral to the classical system of education in India. Nature offers us profound insights relevant to us even today if we care to keep open our eyes and ears—our doors of perception. Here is an example from Nature. When the dawn breaks, Nature is quiet and serene. During the day, there is a grand ceremony of incessant activity going on in Nature. Again, when the evening falls, Nature recoils into silence. This cycle of conservation—application—renewal of energy takes care of energy replenishment in a natural way. The human being is also engaged in the application of energy throughout the day in all kinds of activities. Nature gives us the key to achieving effectiveness in our energy application. If we care to spend some time and effort in the conservation and renewal of energy before and after application, the chances of our energies getting dissipated become minimal. Nature does not feel the necessity of going out on holidays or weekend trips like us for rejuvenation! Now, what do we need to do for conservation and renewal? This is the time for reflection and contemplation, self-analysis and introspection. The energy or consciousness is always flowing out from within during the phase of application— the centrifugal movement. During conservation and renewal, this energy is drawn within us from the world outside. Unless this centripetal movement of human energy is introduced in our daily life cycle, the balance of life gets disturbed resulting in disorder and disharmony in our psychological space leading to dissipation and stress. This ‘going within’ or interiorization of awareness (‘antarmukhita’, using a Sanskrit term) is another important aspect of values development through introspection. If we care to take our time and look at the wonderful play of activities of Nature, we can sense a rhythm that brings joy to us. Nature transmits to us this rhythm and joy through her dance and movement. Effectiveness in our action also consists in transmitting this rhythm and joy through our actions in life and work. The journey through human values has to be made adventurous and enjoyable at the same time. Otherwise, it may not achieve the real transformation, which is the transformation of human consciousness. That is why the great savant J. Krishnamurti had observed that the problem is not in the world, it is in our consciousness. Leadership consciousness must be tuned to the rhythm and harmony in Nature in order to strike the right balance between multiple priorities and polarities in life and work. The works of Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Laureate poet of India, is a veritable treasure house of wisdom on learning from Nature. It may be mentioned Tagore performed the most comprehensive experiment on creating and institutionalizing a learning ambiance in the lap of Nature far from the humdrum of city life in his Visva-Bharati University at Santiniketan in West Bengal. Lessons from Tagore can open up the mind of the leaders towards natural flowering of human values and creative excellence.

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There is another important source of learning. This is the “Book of Life”. Learning from the Book of Life consists in keeping ourselves open and receptive to learning something from people we meet in our daily life, from the CEO to the doorman. Such learning is possible only when we have mastered the art of ‘seeing’ and ‘listening’. We are more interested in talking than listening. Proper seeing and listening demand high-quality attention to objects and persons, which is only possible by sharpening and expanding our consciousness.

5 Paradigm Shift in Management Toward Spirituality and Consciousness During the last decades, there has been a growing critique of mainstream management education and its dominant paradigm based on capitalism and industrial monoculture. It may be pertinent here to share some of the alternative initiatives that have opened up the avenues of entry of the notion of consciousness and spirituality in management discourse and practice. In 2004, Ian Mitroff, Professor of USC Marshall School of Business, sent an open letter to the deans and faculty of business schools in the USA where he came down bold and sharp on our existing management education where he identified five areas of failure that resulted in the following aberrations among the students and faculty: 1. A mean-spirited and distorted view of human nature; 2. A narrow, outdated and repudiated notion of ethics; 3. A narrow and highly limited definition of, and the role of, management in human affairs; 4. An overly reified conception of the ‘sub-disciplines’ of the field of management; and 5. A sense of learned helplessness and hopelessness among faculties, students and workers regarding control of their careers and lives. (Mitroff, 2004)

All this points toward some glaring pitfalls in both the process as well as the outcome of mainstream management education, dominance of our techno-economic identity over deeper and nobler aspects of human nature; failure to impart values and ethics education in a manner that is vibrant, engaging and relevant to the students; sharpening of instrumental reason at the cost of critical rational faculties; denigrating the power of lofty emotions in personal and organizational transformation; splitting the holistic conception of management into disconnected pigeon holes of areas and sub-disciplines; and, loss of meaning in work and purpose in life. In recent times, there has also been the emergence of a powerful critique of our prevalent methods of learning among the academic circles in business and management. Such a critical voice is often being raised by recognized stalwarts in this field (Bennis & O’Toole, 2005; Ghoshal, 2005). There is also a search for alternative paradigms so that “…our heart and head does not split knowledge into dualities of thought and being, mind and body, emotion and intellect, but resonates with a wholeness and fullness that engages every part of one’s being.” (Kind et al., 2005).

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To usher in fresh air and new light into an otherwise structured, fossilized and ossified management education, illumined thinkers and leaders are seeking insights from disciplines like humanities (literature, arts, films, music, theater, etc.), sports, spirituality and others to establish the missing connect between learning and life. Otherwise, we keep on ‘solving the wrong problem precisely’, that is, using methods that are primarily techno-economic in nature, whereas the systemic and spiritual perspectives are ruthlessly pushed out of our vista of vision and concern. The serious implications of attempting pseudo-solutions to the problems of our economy and society have been aptly depicted by Ims and Zsolnai (2006) in the opening chapter “Shallow Success and Deep Failure” of their book “Business within Limits”. In this book, they went ahead to present an alternative, holistic and humanistic world-view rooted in Deep Ecology and Buddhist Economics. Ray (1992), on his part, proposed a similar paradigm in which he advocated that vision must replace profit as the key aim of business. Chakraborty (1995) identified the main pillars of wholesome business transformation in his concept of ‘Business Ashram’ on the founding principles of Indian philosophy, culture and ethos. This resonates with Covey’s (1992) emphasis on character beyond professional competence in his proposed shift in management metaphor from ‘stomach’ to ‘spirit’. The need to explore certain non-conventional sources and methods of learning has been highlighted by myself for a comprehensive all-round development of the individual in organization (Mukherjee, 2007). This is aimed at developing a ‘quality mind’ (Chakraborty & Chakraborty, 2006) or ‘quality consciousness’ (Chatterjee, 1998, 2003, 2006). Thus, there has been an intense search for developing and implementing an enduring and sustainable Indian model of management with a spiritual foundation as an alternative to the dominant market capitalism model of management thriving on fierce competition. In the West too, the search for alternative sources of learning for management prompted Gelb (1998) to draw attention to the principles of learning and creativity laid down by Leonardo da Vinci, the stellar figure of Italian Renaissance. Weick (2006) propounded a new approach to learning through ‘heedful relating’ by cultivating the art of ‘mindfulness’. There has been an increasing interest in and a rising number of publications on spirituality in management (Bell & Taylor, 2004; Biberman et al., 1999; Cash & Grey, 2000; Dehler & Walsh, 1994; Fischer, 1999; Mitroff & Denton, 1999; Neal et al., 1999; Pruzan et al., 2007; Tischler, 1999). The concepts of synchronicity (Jaworski, 1998) and spiritual quotient (SQ) (Zohar & Marshal, 2000) are significant developments in this direction. Other important developments have been the concept of ‘soul work’ in organizations (Mirvis, 1997) and Spirituality at Work (SAW) movement (Benefiel, 2005; Fry, 2005; Labbs, 1996; Marques et al., 2007; Milliman et al., 1999).

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6 Concluding Reflections: Leadership as Adventure of Consciousness What is the essence of spirituality or spiritual pursuit? The Latin word ‘Spiritus’ connotes breath. Breath is the most fundamental and universal rhythm in our system that keeps us alive. We cease to live when we cease to breathe. Thus, spirituality is the life-breath of any individual, organization, society, system and planet at large. It keeps any system vibrant, dynamic and ever-flowing and enables us to have the flavor of every moment of our existence. When the flow of breath is harmonious, we feel the dynamic balance in our life and enjoy the drama of existence in its fullness and depth. When the harmony goes out of balance and the consciousness of breath is lost, our life, individual as well as collective, sinks into the abyss of dullness, monotony and oblivion. A sense of lack of purpose and direction then keeps us haunting until we find our anchorage in the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ within us. Spirituality is not merely an end point or a destination. It refers to the entire journey of evolution of consciousness. Rabindranath Tagore put it very succinctly in verse with his matchless literary mastery: “My pilgrimage is not at the end of my road/my temples are all there on both sides of my pathway.” (Translation by this author). Where does this pilgrimage or journey begin? It begins with the individual self. Each one of us has a certain notion of our own self. It is created by our perception of the body, the sense organs, the mind and the intellect. Usually, our experience of the self is limited within the body-mind frame, and we are often unaware of the fire in our heart and the flame of the spirit. The spirit is always soaring and pining for expression through expansion. This is the expansion of our consciousness that begins from our body but slowly reaches out to everything around us and finally unites with the world and the universe at large. The spiritual journey begins to take off when we cross the limits of the body and start reaching out to the others by way of expansion of our consciousness. The process of evolution of consciousness can be likened to the expanding of a sphere along concentric spheres with increasing diameters. It progressively covers and includes the family, the organization, the society, the nation and finally the planet and the whole cosmos. When it is limited to the domain of the body and the objects of proximate concern, then the human being is called selfish, that is, concerned merely with his or her material self and the immediate surroundings. The more it accommodates the others in its fold, the more its own petty concerns pale into insignificance. Finally, when the whole universe is engulfed in this process of evolution of consciousness the others find him or her a completely unselfish person. What is the implication of the spiritual journey for the organization? Firstly, it makes the organization a vibrant and throbbing entity that is always on the path of evolution. Like breath, it brings to society new life force so that it can come out of the stagnant dead habits and fossilized ideas and thoughts of the past while retaining its effulgent glory. It opens up new avenues of experimenting with our innate creative energy and finding out novel and pragmatic ways of resolving

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our pressing problems that apparently had created an impasse in our personal and social spaces of development. To use a current phrase, it shows us multiple ways of how to ‘think out of the box’. Spirituality in essence embraces different pathways of liberating the self so that we may reach the zone of enlightenment. Enlightenment is not a sudden flash of light from the above. An old poem will make it clear. “Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers, During enlightenment, mountains are no more mountains and rivers are no more rivers; After enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and rivers are once again rivers.” (quoted in Chatterjee, 1998)

Then what has changed? It is the way we look at the world and ourselves too. Secondly, another important aspect of spiritual culture is encouraging the art of questioning and dialogue. One may recall the powerful message of Socrates: “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Such examination begins with asking deeper questions that may often be uneasy. It may be mentioned here that the Upanishads have been composed in a mode of conversation between Teacher and Student or Master and Disciple. Profound subjects on philosophy and life in general have been raised here through questions from the student-seeker and the answers are offered by the Master. The text of the Bhagavad Gita is all throughout a conversation between the disciple Arjuna and his Master, the Blessed Lord (Shri Bhagavan) Himself. The conversations as mentioned above are logically structured and systematically evolving taking the seeker gradually up along the progressively unfolding layers of consciousness to the final rendezvous. When the leadership consciousness also evolves in a similar fashion, with increasing clarity and depth, the dead woods are cleared and it steers ahead toward creating an enlightened organization. Thirdly, with the human consciousness growing beyond the self and then flowing into the others, the constricted notions of consumption, self-aggrandizement, mindless competition gradually give way to concern for others, welfare of many and an individual as well as collective quest for something higher and deeper in life and world beyond our narrow limitations of a life that is closed and tight. Fourthly, at a macro level, with our growing connectivity with the planet and the cosmos in heart and spirit, there is a natural flowering of ecological sensitivity within us. This is qualitatively different from the number-crunching exercises that experts often engage in for generating environmental awareness. This is more a matter of feeling from the heart as one is in communion with Nature at the level of ecological consciousness. And finally, with the evolution of consciousness, the interaction with the world and our relationships with others becomes like a ‘sport’ that we begin to play as we are increasingly becoming aware that the others are essentially identical to us at the core but there is diversity in outer forms like body, mind, intellect, senses and so on. This reduces the chances of violence and strife and can create a climate of peace and amity through mutual understanding and cooperation. Above all, like a game, we all begin to enjoy the drama of life while playing all the while with ‘myself only’ in essence but apparently with ‘the others’ as if like a child!

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Sri Aurobindo, probably the most profound seer-philosopher of modern India, had given us a beautiful and vivid depiction of God: “What is God after all? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden!”

7 Postscript: An Indian Episode The paper begun with Diogenes with a lantern in the streets of ancient Athens. Let us conclude by keeping alive the search for this light—this time within ourselves—in the heartland of India around the same time—way back 2500 years. This is an episode from the last part of the life of Buddha. Buddha was old. In front of him was sitting his chosen disciple Ananda. Ananda was young and vibrant beaming with life and confidence. Ananda started speaking. My Lord, I am convinced today that of all sages and seers that have appeared on earth you are the greatest. Your messages are relevant to humanity like that of no one else before. I had been fortunate enough to sit at your feet and learn these messages. Now I pray that you may bless and allow me so that I can spread your messages to the world.

Ananda was exuding confidence. Buddha observed and kept silent for a while. Then he slowly started speaking. He asked the young man a few questions, five in a row. My dear Ananda, you said that I am the greatest of all the sages and seers that have come to earth. May I ask, do you know all the sages and seers? All of them?

Ananda was silent. Then the next question followed. Whoever among them you know have you read all their messages?

Ananda had no reply. The next question was Have you understood the full meaning of their messages whichever you have read?

Ananda was quiet and nervous. Now the fourth question Have you understood the full meaning of all my messages?

Silence fell. Then came the fifth and the last question: Then what is the basis of your confidence that you will go and spread my messages to the world?

The ebullient young Ananda now broke down at the feet of Buddha and asked: Then what do I do My Lord?

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Buddha gave his benign smile and uttered his precious gem of a message not just for Ananada but for all of us: Be a Light to yourself! (Atmo Deepo Bhavo)

When this light is kindled within us, it radiates spontaneously to the world just like the radiance of the Sun and the fragrance of the flower. And there is the magic transformation without any campaigns or promos. This also comes as a fitting response to the clamors of overconfidence bordering on arrogance that is often misplaced, something that is frequently encountered in modern organizations.

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Indian Models of Management and Leadership with Roots in Ancient Wisdom Subhash Sharma

1 OSHA Model of Management and Leadership This model with roots in Triguna theory of Tamas, Rajas and Sattva qualities of nature and human beings identifies four levels of human behaviour. These four levels are as follows: O: Oneness S: Spiritual H: Humanistic A: Animalistic/Aggressive As a theory of personality, this model identifies four types of persons, viz., ‘O’, ‘S’, ‘H’ and ‘A’ types depending upon the presence of the most dominant component. It may be indicated that the S element has its close equivalent in sattva. H in rajas and A in tamas. Figure 1 represents this model in diagrammatic form. ‘O’ level or oneness is metaphorically described through ‘Oceanic experience’. It implies oneness with self and oneness with nature. This may find its manifestation in an individual’s inner quest for SOS—Search of Shanti. O level also incorporates within itself the mystical meaning of shunya and its counterpart ananta (infinite). Experience of such ‘fullness of void’, i.e., experience of infinite at O level is variously described in spiritual literature. It is interesting to know that in mathematics such fullness of void is represented by O/∞ leading to an indeterminate quantity known as brahm (brahman) in spiritual literature. Symbolically, O also stands for a circle—a circle of consciousness. As an individual’s circle of consciousness expands, creativity shows its continuous natural flow. For an atheist, ‘O’ level simply implies oneness S. Sharma (B) Indus Business Academy, Bangalore, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_21

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Fig. 1 OSHA model for self-awareness. Source Sharma (1996: 127)

with nature. When oneness with nature is disturbed, the ozone layer disappears, and acid rain becomes a reality! ‘S’ level indicates the spiritual aspect indicative of supreme goodness in human nature, represented by values of love, amity mercy and so on. These arise as a result of seeing self in others and seeing SELF in everyone. This also represents the connecting thread between various spiritual philosophies influencing the human psyche. ‘H’ level stands for the humanistic dimension and is represented by humanistic values such as empathy, dignity, liberty and so on. ‘A’ level stands for ‘animalistic’ or aggressive aspect of human nature that can be easily seen in many conflict situations. ‘A’ level also stands for authoritarian as well as ‘asuri’ (fascist/demonic) tendencies. Different models of humans emanate depending upon the emphasis given to O, S, H and A elements. Further, within each element certain assumptions are made to refine or define some new models to fill up the details. For example, within A type behaviour, several behaviour patterns can be elaborated leading to the formulation of several theories of man and his personality. The OSHA model can also be used as a framework for analysis of inter-personal behaviour. For this purpose, an inter-personal interaction matrix as presented in Fig. 2 could serve as an analytical framework. This matrix represents two persons’ interaction in their various modes, viz., the spiritualistic, humanistic or animalistic mode. These modes are (S, S), (S, H), (S, A), (H, H), (H, A) and (A, A). Notation (S, S) represents the interaction between two persons at the S level. Similarly, (A, A) represents the interaction between two individuals both dominant in ‘A’, i.e., animalistic or aggressive level. (H, A) represents an interaction between two persons with one person dominant in the H level and other person dominant in the ‘A’ level.

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Fig. 2 OSHA interaction matrix. Source Sharma (1996: 128)

When (S, S) type of interactions dominate, synergy is generated. When (A, A) type of interactions dominate, negergy (negative energy) gets generated. An upward movement from (H, H) type interactions towards (S, S) type leads to synergy, while a downward movement from (H, H) type to (A, A) type leads towards negergy. At times, (A, A) type interactions can also induce an individual towards higher achievement, however, this achievement is likely to be at the cost of peace of mind. (H, H) and (S, S) type interactions would lead to achievement coupled with peace of mind. A difference between achievement with peace of mind and achievement without peace of mind is needed for a holistic approach to an individual’s self-development and personal effectiveness. This model has implications for managing and leading organizations, society and nations. If (A, A) interactions dominate organizations, society or nation, there will be a lot of conflicts leading to high energy dissipation that takes away attention from achieving goals. This can be reduced through (H, H) and (S, S) interactions as such interactions will create a lot of positive energy and synergy in organization, society or nation. According to this model, there are four types of leaders, viz., Oneness types who create oneness in organizations through Vision and HOPE: Higher Order Purpose of Existence; Spiritual types who use spiritual and non-violent approach in decisionmaking approach; Humanistic leaders who focus on the human side of management and leadership; and Aggressive types who use aggression and violence in managing and leading organizations.

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2 Theory K of Enlightened Leadership The idea of Theory K is a rooted idea of organization as Kutumbh or family/community and is derived from the Indian concept of ‘Vasudhev Kutumbhakam’, i.e., the entire world is our family. In a corporate context, a corporation can be viewed as a community/kutumbh of stakeholders. In managing a family or kutumbh, parents use a combination of approaches which includes the use of theories, X, Y or Z depending upon the situational requirements. Accordingly, theory K is essentially a combination theory where K is a combination of X, Y and Z. In real-life situations, exclusive use of only X or Y or Z is not possible. Indeed, a mix of the three can be easily seen in operation. Exceptions apart, most individuals are neither pure dictators nor 100% saints. Each individual is a mix of X, Y and Z represented in different shades depending upon the social and cultural upbringing. Societies that promoted colonialism are more likely to be high on theory X, particularly in its X− form. Similarly, ideologies that are rooted in violence are more likely to promote theory X. However, long-term implications of exclusive use of theory X particularly in its X− form are there to be seen in the collapse of colonialism as well as the Russian empire. This collapse has occurred because the “need for freedom” has always been very strong and in history, it has been manifested in the form of freedom struggles. We represent the theory K in the form of the following equation: K = X + Y + Z. Theory K can also be represented by the following equation: K = XaY b Zc wherein the powers a, b and c represent the intensities with which theories X, Y or Z are used. These equations indicate that theory K is an appropriate blend of X, Y and Z depending on the situational requirements. Indeed, theory K can also be referred to as the XYZ theory of motivation and management wherein X, Y and Z appear in various combinations. It may be indicated that in theory K, the use of X appears in its X+ form and not in its X− form. The equation K = Xa Yb Zc also represents a personality theory. Depending upon the values of a, b and c, an individual’s personality would have X, Y or Z tendencies or orientations. It may be indicated that each individual consists of all three types of qualities, viz., X, Y and Z. If X is dominant in an individual with Y and Z having secondary and tertiary intensities, then the individual can be referred to as X oriented. If Y is dominant with Z and X having secondary and tertiary intensities, then the person is Y oriented. If Z is dominant with X and Y having secondary or tertiary intensities, then the individual is Z oriented.

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In organizational contexts, the complexity of inter-personal conflicts gets enhanced because of the X, Y, Z personality mix of various individuals. Extending the above-discussed interaction approach to three levels, viz., managers, supervisors and workers, we can get a better understanding of the complexity of inter-personal interactions in organizations. A manager could be X, Y or Z oriented. His/her supervisor could be X, Y or Z oriented. Similarly, his/her worker could be X, Y or Z oriented. According to theory K, different situations may demand different treatments. A situation may demand consultation or the formation of teams. However, if manager/leader does not display style flexibility, he/she may use theory X in such a situation. This would obviously lead to a mismatch between the style and the situational requirements. Through experience, managers and leaders learn to fine-tune their styles to the situational requirements. Thus, theory K suggests that the situational requirements may demand style flexibility. Use of theory K is like car driving. Changes in situations may require a change in the gears. Thus, theories X, Y and Z can be considered as gears. Effective managers are able to make changes in the gears depending upon the requirements. Thus, they are able to get the best performance from their workforce. This idea of theory K can be presented as a matrix given in Fig. 3. The situations (X, X), (Y, Y) and (Z, Z) represent the style fit. The other situations given in the matrix represent the lack of fit between the style and the situation. In these situations, the manager will have to undertake the change of gear in order to attain a better situation-style fit. In the discussion, so far, we have outlined the key aspects of theory K. It is essentially a combination theory wherein the theories X, Y and Z are used in a blended form depending upon the situational requirements. In the discussion below,

Fig. 3 Theory K in matrix form. Source Sharma (2007:195)

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we provide a comparison of the theories X, Y and Z with similar Indian theories that are widely used though not written about in management textbooks. One of the limitations of the theories X, Y and Z has been the lack of emphasis on the ethical aspects as they are considered to be value-neutral. This also accounts for the appeal of these theories and makes them appear scientific in contrast to earlier traditional concepts that tend to be tilted in the value-positive direction. The seeming value neutrality of the theories X, Y and Z is not entirely true because they do tend to have certain ideological moorings. Indeed, to twenty-first century managers, it may appear strange that admired intellectual giants Weber, Freud and Taylor were indeed advocates of theory X. In management literature, the “need for justice” has not received much attention. Kautilya was perhaps the first scholar to give emphasis to the need for justice through his metaphor of the matsya-nyaya. Similarly, the “need for freedom” has not received due recognition. It may be indicated that the idea of “need for freedom” is derived from Tilak’s famous quote “freedom is my birthright”. In organizational contexts, the need for freedom finds its expression in autonomy coupled with accountability. Theory K, by emphasizing the justness in management actions, gives due importance to the “need for justice” and the ethical dimension. In addition, theory K also recognizes the “need for freedom”. Hence, it emphasizes a shift away from X− to other styles. The framework of theory K is both integrative as well as holistic because it not only integrates X, Y and Z theories but also takes a holistic perspective by incorporating the ethical and justness dimension in social and managerial actions.

3 Negergy-Synergy Grid of Leadership Negergy-Synergy Grid suggested here is rooted in the idea of ‘tamsoma jyotirgamaya’: from darkness to light. Darkness in an organization/social context represents negative energy, i.e., negergy and light represents synergy. Negergy-Synergy Grid is a blend of two strands of thought, ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’. The first strand of thought views humans in terms of the authoritariandemocratic modes of decision-making and action. The second strand of thought is derived from the lessons about human nature in Gita as indicated in chapter XVI. In this chapter, the ‘mental cast’ of humans is presented in terms of two types, viz., the divine-like and the demonic-like. It may be indicated that both strands make certain implicit or explicit value judgements as reflected in their assumptions about human nature or the ‘models of humans’. The divine-like human qualities include truthfulness, gentleness, modesty and steadiness, freedom from anger, forgiveness, freedom from malice and excessive pride, (Gita, XVI, 2 and 3). The demonic-likes display arrogance, excessive pride, anger, harshness and manipulation (Gita, XVI, 4, 10). In popular consciousness, these two types of qualities are depicted through the Ram-Ravana metaphor. Ram is ‘maryada purushottam’ (best among humans for his human qualities) and Ravana

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Fig. 4 Negergy-synergy management styles and leadership grid. Source Sharma (1996: 176)

is a master of vidhya (‘technology’ and ‘science’) and had his ‘Sone Ki Lanka’, but his mental cast is demonic-like. The demonic qualities could be referred to as savage-like, and divine-like qualities could be referred to as sage-like. When we juxtapose these two strands of thought about human nature, we arrive at a typology of humans indicating their mental cast and decision-making styles. This management styles and leadership grid are presented in Fig. 4. The grid discussed here identifies four types of managers and leaders. These are as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Democratic and Divine-like. Authoritarian and Divine-like. Democratic and Demonic-like. Authoritarian and Demonic-like.

The democratic and divine-like can be considered as an ‘idealized’ type of manager or leader. The authoritarian and divine-like is the typical benevolent-dictator. Democratic and demonic-like is the typical manipulator type of manager. This type uses the democratic process as a facade to cover up his/her manipulative tactics. This person is a typical manipulator putting up a double face. Authoritarian and demonic-like is an oppressor as depicted through many mythological characters. The grid discussed here has implications for organizations in general and organization-culture in particular. While expectations from managers and leaders vary from culture to culture, certain idealized archetypes play important role in determining these expectations. In this new age, a new idealized archetype is emerging. This is the democratic and divine-like leader/manager. Transformational leadership is likely to belong to this category.

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The grid presented here can be further refined. Instead of using the divine-like and demonic extremes, we could use the classification of gunas. Thus, on Y-axis, we can have four segments viz., sattvik, rajasik positive, rajasik negative and tamasik qualities. A person high on sattvik is divine-like and a person high on tamasik is demonic-like. Rajas quality is indicative of drive or activity. Rajas implies positive drive that is used for positive purposes. Hence, it implies positive self-actualization and positive use of power. Rajas negative implies that drive is used for manipulation and self-aggrandizement. Hence, it implies negative self-actualization and negative use of power. Both sattva and rajas positive imply positive use of human energy, while rajas negative and tamas imply negative use of human energy. The grid discussed here can be used as a framework for introducing change in organizations. If organizations’ culture is authoritarian-demonic type, there is likely to be high levels of negergy (negative-energy). The energy dissipation coefficient will be high, thereby leading to high frustration levels and at times revolts. The revolts may be manifested through subaltern processes of day-to-day resistance. If synergy is to be achieved, then a change must occur. This change should be in the direction of democratic-divine-like organization culture. It implies that modern organizations should be joyful places of work.

4 ‘MBA’ Model of Decision-Making The subject of decision-making has been a major concern of both researchers, as well as practitioners. The myth of the rational decision maker has been questioned. A number of frameworks have been suggested. These frameworks take into consideration the cognitive context of the decision situation. Further, they also focus on the ‘cognitive inference systems’ used by the decision makers. The ‘MBA’ model presented here draws upon ancient wisdom. In the ‘MBA’ model of decision-making, the individual letters stand for Manas, Buddhi and Ahamkaar. According to this model, in any decision-making there is an interplay of all the three ‘internal sense organs’. Manas, buddhi and ahamkaar are also referred to as anthakaran (internal sense instruments). As these terms are non-translatable in English, we will use them as they are. However, close English translations would be indicated. Manas refers to the mind, buddhi refers to the intellect and hamkara refers to self-sense/ego. However, it may be indicated that the term manas does not correspond exactly to the term ‘mind’. Hence, the term ‘mind’ is only an approximation. The term ‘manas’ may include an emotive content of the decision situation, like the term ‘heart’. So ‘manas’ is a sort of blending of the ‘mind’ and the ‘heart’. Buddhi is the subtle sense of all mental processes, and ahamkaar, the self-sense, i.e., the principle of ‘individualism’, arising from buddhi. Ahamkaar also leads to abhimana, i.e., the self-love in the individual. Manas acts as a ‘gatekeeper’ to filter and process the sense data. It does a preliminary screening of the information presented to the senses. It is also involved in suggesting alternative courses of action. In doing so, it plays the role of intuition.

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The external senses (indriyas) and the manas present the experiences to Buddhi the intellect, which in turn undertakes a rational analysis of the data. However, this rational analysis is interfered with by ahamkaar, the self-sense or the ego. This is because ahamkaar creates a frame of reference in the individual in the form of ego. Out of this interplay emerges the final decision, which leads to action. This interaction is also influenced by vritti and sanskaar. Vritti is defined as fluctuations in the mind that operate at the conscious level, while sanskaars are the subliminal impressions stored in the sub-conscious or the unconscious (Karamasaya, i.e., the saya or the storehouse of impressions resulting from karmas or the actions). Vritti and sanskaar also interact, and thus link the conscious and sub-conscious or unconscious. While Vrittis operate at the conscious level, the sanskaars operate at the sub-conscious or unconscious level. Both Vritti (mental orientations) and the sanskaars moderate the interplay of manas, buddhi and ahamkaar. Given his mental orientations and sanskaars (i.e., ‘repertoire of experiences’), a manager may display a greater reliance on one of the three ‘instruments’ of manas, buddhi and ahamkaar. Figure 5 presents the ‘MBA’ decision-making process. In the interplay of manas, buddhi and ahamkaar, there may be a dominance of one of them. Accordingly, decisions can be classified into three categories, namely manas-driven, buddhi-driven and ahamkaar-driven. Decisions in which manas plays a dominant role are usually intuition-driven decisions. In the decisions in which

Fig. 5 The ‘MBA’ model of decision-making. Source Sharma (1996: 136)

260 Table 1 Typology of decisions

S. Sharma Types

Metaphorical analogy

Major characteristics

Manas-driven

‘Heart’ and ‘mind’

Intuitive, holistic, non-rational

Buddhi-driven

‘Intellect’

Rational, analytical, objective

Ahamkaar-driven

‘Ego’

‘Irrational’, ‘subjective’

buddhi plays a key role, the attempt is to make an in-depth analysis, and thereby arrive at a ‘rational’ decision. In ahamkaar-driven decisions, the influence of ego is greater than that of rational analysis. Table 1 presents the major characteristics of these three types of decisions. In an increasingly ‘rational’ society, decisions tend to be more ‘buddhi’ and ‘ahamkaar’ driven. In fact, the reality of organizational life indicates that a number of decisions are ‘ahamkaar’ driven.

5 Corporate Rishi Model of Leadership: Rishi as Re-See In general, enlightened leaders display the integrative capacity to bridge the gap between vision and action through an enlightened worldview and dedication to the cause. In a corporate context, they are ‘Corporate Rishi’, i.e., individuals who have the ability to Re-see events, visions, strategies and action plans in new perspectives and new forms. Similarly, a ‘Business Rishi’ has the ability to Re-see changes in a business environment in new ways. A Corporate Rishi combines reason, intuition and business wisdom to sharpen his/her ability to see and re-see the reality in new ways. Individuals evolve to the Re-see level, through education, experience and continuous learning— wherein they acquire the abilities to make use of reason, intuition and practical wisdom in varying combinations and thereby provide enlightened leadership to their organizations. Their ‘Re-see competence’ is very high. This is the essence of the new age Rishi leadership model. It may be indicated that the ‘Corporate Rishi’ model can be considered as an extended version of the ancient models of leadership such as King-Philosopher, Raj-rishi (Chakraborty (2001) considers it as Wisdom leadership) and Spiritual-rishi models. With our new definition of Rishi as individuals who have the ability to Re-see events from new perspectives, Corporate Rishis can indeed be trained, and developed in educational institutions based on the philosophy of imparting holistic education that enhances an individual’s capabilities of combining reason, intuition and practical wisdom. The tools that help a Corporate Rishi to Re-see events, threats and opportunities from new perspectives include the following:

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4. 5. 6.

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Continuous learning through 3D approach of Discussion, Dialogue and Discourse. Communicative interaction through action-reaction-interaction processes. Acquiring practical wisdom through grounded praxis, i.e., relating theory to practice and practice to theory. This is further refined through action-reflectioncontemplation. Empowering others by providing them dignity, liberty and freedom through a divine-democratic approach. Integrating Intelligence Quotient (IQ), Emotional Quotient (EQ) and Spiritual Quotient (SQ). Using creativity and imagination as a basis for charting out a new path and a new direction.

Corporate Rishi uses the above approaches to prepare his/her corporate Vision, Strategies and Action plan (ViSA). This ViSA is used as a document as well as an instrument to mobilize positive energies and motivate employees to achieve extraordinary results. In an organization driven by Corporate Rishi, G/T (Giving/Taking) ratio is very high. Such organizations give back to society through activities such as corporate social responsibility in a gesture to what they have taken from society. This is the essence of the Corporate Rishi model of leadership. Indian models of management and leadership presented in this paper have been empirically tested and have also become part of the ‘received knowledge’ in the field of Indian Management. These have been cited in academic by various research scholars in their academic papers.

References Athreya, M. B. (2002). Indian dimension in management. In S. Siddharth (Ed.), Indian management for nation building: New ideas for new millennium (pp. 61–69). WISDOM. Chakraborty, S. K. (1995). Ethics in management: Vedantic perspectives. Oxford University Press. Chakraborty, S. K. (2001). Wisdom leadership. Wheeler Publishers. Chakraborty, S. K. (2003). Against the tide: The philosophical foundations of modern management. Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, D. (1998). Leading consciously: A pilgrimage to self mastery. Viva Books. Gupta, R. K. (1991). Employees and organization in India; Need to move beyond American and Japanese models. Economic and Political Weekly, 26, M68–M76. Gupta, R. K. (2002). Towards optimal organization: Indian culture and management. Excel Books. Sharma, S. (1995). OSHA model for relationship management (pp. 29–40). Abhigyan. Spring. Sharma, S. (2002). Corporate rishi leadership model: An Indian model for corporate development & ethical leadership. In U. Pareek et al. (Eds.), Human resource development in Asia: Trends & challenges (pp. 291–296). Oxford & IBH. Sharma, R., & Pardasani, R. (2018). Convergence of western and eastern perspectives into spirituohumanistic leadership. 3D…IBA Journal of Management & Leadership, 10(1), 15–25. Sharma, S. (1996). Management in New Age: Western windows eastern doors. New Age International Publishers.

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Sharma, S. (1998). Enlightened leadership in Indian ethos: The way of theory K. Management & Change., 2(1), 93–104. Sharma, S. (2007). New mantras in corporate corridors: From ancient roots to global routes. New Age International Publishers. Sharma, S. (2012). New Earth Sastra: Towards holistic development & management (HDM). IBA Publication. Sharma, S. (2013). Three paradigms in management: American, Japanese and Indian. International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior, 16(1), 30–41. Sinha, J. B. P. (2000). Integrative indigenous management in India: Practices and prospects. Indian Journal of Industrial Relations., 97(4), 439–460.

Wise Leadership—Lokasamgraha and Rajarshi Revisited Anindo Bhattacharjee, Apurva Shinde, and Sandeep Singh

1 Introduction One of the most provocative statements on the role of business in society came from the famous quote by the Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman, who said that “the one and only one social responsibility of business is to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” In an article in the New York Times, Friedman (1970) calls the drives for social responsibility in business “pure and unadulterated socialisms” further adding that—“Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society.” Friedman’s view has been critically viewed by many ethics scholars over the years who argued that his view was limited in scope to shareholders’ interests leaving out the other obligations toward the other stakeholders of a business, and a deontological view is equally necessary for a purpose-driven organization (Freeman & Dmytriyev, 2017; Freeman et al., 2007; Hasnas, 1998; Purnell & Freeman, 2012; Schaefer, 2008). In the twenty-first century, the narrative of businesses is shifting from shareholder primacy to stakeholder orientation. The stakeholder theory was proposed by Freeman (1984). As an empirical theory of management, the stakeholder theory holds that effective management requires the balanced consideration of and attention to the legitimate interests of all stakeholders, defined as anyone who has “a stake in or claim on the firm” (Freeman, 1984; Hasnas, 1998). The stakeholder theory asserts that a business’s financial success can best be achieved by giving the interests of the A. Bhattacharjee (B) ASMSOC, NMIMS Mumbai, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] A. Shinde NGO Management Consultant, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India S. Singh School of Management Sciences, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_22

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business’s stockholders, customers, employees, suppliers, management, and local community proper consideration and adopting policies which produce the optimal balance among them (Hasnas, 1998). Stakeholder capitalism is a more “humane” form of capitalism where we overcome the limitations of that Taylor’s mechanistic scientific management view of looking at corporations in terms of machines and humans as machine-like entities. According to Freeman et al. (2007)—“Stakeholder capitalism is a way to resolve some of the deep tensions within capitalism, and to better foster the powerful innovations that can help us all live better. Rather stakeholder capitalism is based on freedom, rights, and the creation by consent of positive obligations.” There has been a change also in organizational discourse as organizations now talk of stakeholders collocated with words like “responsibility”, “accountability”, “sustainability”, “environmentally friendly”, and the like (Bhattacharjee et al., 2016). Further, Moore (1993) in his famous article in Harvard Business Review introduced the concept of business ecosystems. He said: To extend a systematic approach to strategy, I suggest that a company be viewed not as a member of a single industry but as part of a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries… Successful businesses are those that evolve rapidly and effectively. They must attract resources of all sorts, drawing in capital, partners, suppliers, and customers to create cooperative networks.

The narrative of “stakeholder” and “stakeholder-centricity” certainly has shaped the way businesses have tried organizing themselves and their relationship with society. Either it has manifested in the form of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, social entrepreneurship/innovations, environment-friendly processes, or responsible business practices. In other words, organizations have tried to communicate an image where their core business purpose is in alignment with the purpose of social well-being and welfare. However, Friedman’s legacy and his propositions can’t be completely refuted because ultimately the sustainability of a business is related to its perpetuity, which is rooted in its economic well-being too. Management scholars have been divided over the years with their economic views at times where they argue that sometimes for the sake of welfare; profit-motives are not completely justified (Kolstad, 2007; Van Der Linden & Freeman, 2017). The dichotomy of profit and values/ethics that has existed mostly in the debates of contemporary Western philosophers and ethicists over the years can be resolved in Indian Ethos. In fact, the conception of Lokasamgraha (“well-being for all”) has always been at the root of all social/business activities. S. K. Chakraborty was the pioneer, who brought a counter-perspective to the way management was conceptualized (e.g., brainstorming versus brain stilling) by challenging the very foundational philosophies that guided the way organizations were conceived and the relation between business and society was conceived. Through his series of prolific writings and his activities/programs in the Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV) which he founded at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, he questioned the foundational tenets and their practical applicability in developing country contexts (e.g., India). Through his writings and dialogues, he introduced the values and ethics

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from an Indian Philosophy perspective and argued for contextualizing business to Indian business scenarios, based on Indian Ethos. He brought “spiritual values” into the discussions of Indian management frameworks, something which was not done before, and lighted the lamp of the Indian philosophy of management, which inspired a whole generation of business ethics scholars in India and across the world. In this chapter, we will discuss two important contributions of S. K. Chakraborty to the conceptualization of leadership and management, based on the Indian Ethos. They are Lokasamgraha from the Bhagavad Gita, and Rajarshi paradigm of leadership, which has its roots in Kautilya’s ancient treatise on political economy called Arthashastra. Based on Lokasamgraha and Rajarshi paradigms, we re-conceptualize Freeman’s stakeholder theory based on Indian ethos and propose a model of wise leadership which we call the LR Model of leadership (L stands for Lokasamgraha and R stands for Rajarshi). Re-conceptualizing Stakeholder Theory Based on Indian Ethos The notion of “stakeholders” was conceptualized by Freeman (1983) in his book Strategic Management—A Stakeholder Approach, and the work had influenced numerous research that happened subsequently around responsible organizations with stakeholder orientation. Hence, we have also used Freeman’s conceptualization of stakeholders as the starting point of our discussion on stakeholder orientations. However, as we will see subsequently, the concept of stakeholders and responsibility can be also traced back to ancient Indian philosophical treatises such as the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Arthashastra, and the Bhagavad Gita. According to the Vedas, every individual is born with various debts (rin) which are the Dev rin or the debt to the Gods, Risi rin or the debt to the sages, Pitri rin or the debt to one’s ancestors, Nri rin or debt to humanity, and finally Bhuta rin or the debt to the nature and the various non-human living beings (Chakraborty, 1995b; Garcia et al., 2017; Sharda, 1990). Though this Vedic conceptualization of debt (rin) is at an individual level, the fulfillment of these debt obligations can be considered in an organizational or business context as well since organizations and businesses are comprised of people and the organizations’ actions are manifestations of individuals’ (entrepreneurs, managers, employees, etc.) aspirations and purposes. These purposes could either be material, philosophical, or spiritual (Bhattacharjee & Singh, 2017). In fact, these four obligations are to different stakeholders, and they extend the spatial and temporal scope of the concept of stakeholders in an organization. These obligations have been covered in various contemporary writings of business ethics scholars. For example, Schwartz (2006) proposed the possibility of the existence of a theoretical as well as practical support for the notion of God as a stakeholder; and the potential implications of considering God (which is called Dev in Sanskrit) as a stakeholder is greater meaningfulness for all those involved in business, decisions which are more socially responsible, and enhanced ethical decision-making. All of this ultimately leads to healthier bottom lines and greater sustainability for businesses. The notion of God as a stakeholder has also appeared in the works of Mitroff and Denton (1999) and Jennings (1997). Further, the positive relation of such a religious

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belief to a broader view of corporate social responsibility has also been established in the Christian faith (Agle & Van Buren, 1999). Organizations are evolving toward more organic and flexible structures that facilitate learning through sharing of knowledge for transparency among the various stakeholders that constitute the business ecosystem. In fact, to facilitate such an organic design, we need to understand the corporate DNA which according to Baskin (2000) is a flexible database of an organization’s structures and procedures, aligned to its corporate identity. Now, this corporate identity is created by the Founder of the organization and the corporate history and legacy that they create through their actions and decisions (Balmer et al., 2006, 2009; Rodrigues & Child, 2008). The founder (entrepreneur) and people who are in supervisory positions have a leadership role to play, and the pattern of their actions and reactions (that constitute their karma) sets an example of individual and corporate values the various employees of the organization are expected to live each day. These enduring corporate values are the guiding principles which from time to time have to be reinforced through coaching and mentoring the subordinates by the managers in hierarchical organizations or team leaders in organic team-based organizations. The founders, the coaches, the mentors, and the corporate values constitute the “sage” aspect of the organizations. Carroll (1993) defined stakeholders as “those groups of individuals with whom the organization interacts or has interdependencies, and who can affect or is affected by the actions, decisions, policies, practices or goals of the organization.” In fact, stakeholders can be divided into two groups: the primary stakeholders who have a formal and contractual relationship with organizations and all others are secondary stakeholders (Carroll, 1993: 62). The Nri rin in the Vedic conception of debt relates to both the primary and secondary stakeholders of an organization. In fact, managers should consider the interests of the secondary stakeholders since they have the latent potential to significantly affect the organization (Gibson, 2000). Further, Donaldson and Preston (1995) argued that property rights are embedded in human rights and so the justification of stakeholder theory is found in its normative basis which will help in justifying the managerial obligations to non-owner stakeholders as well. Finally, organizations need to be environment friendly and many scholars have tried to re-establish the stakeholder status to the natural environment (Driscoll & Starik, 2004; Jacobs, 1997; Kujala et al., 2018; Phillips & Reichart, 2000; etc.). A focus on environment-friendly processes at various stages of the supply chain and creating an organizational purpose aligned to planetary sustainability fulfills the organizations’ debt obligation to the natural environment as a stakeholder, i.e., bhuta rin.

2 Revisiting the Lokasamgraha According to Radhakrishnan (1949), Lokasamgraha stands for the unity of the world, world-maintenance, and the interconnectedness of society. The ancient Indian treatise of Bhavagad Gita (BG) says:

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karmanai’va hi samsiddhim ashtitha janakadayah lokasamgraham eva’pi sampasyan kartum arhasi (BG, 3.20).

which means that “it was through his work and desireless actions (nishkama karma), King Janaka and others attained perfection. Thou shouldst do works also with a view to the maintenance of the world” (trans. Radhakrishnan, 1949). In the Bhagavad Gita (BG, 3.20–3.25), the idea of living a life for the welfare of the society is stated and leaders (just like kings) can pursue the path of nishkama karma despite the demands of the administration (Bhawuk, 2011). Lokasamgraha connotes “social harmony” and a “world of preservation” (Belwalkar & Vohra, 2017). It is usually translated as the well-being of all, but it also refers to the process of gathering—gathering or collecting of loka—people (Giri, 2020). It is a creative and critical gathering of people and the accompanying process of mutual care that leads to the well-being of the people (Giri, 2019). Lokasamgraha is a central concept along with karma yoga or nishkama karma, in the Bhagavad Gita. Chakraborty (2002) explained the concept in the context of non-violence and said— “do not be hypocritical with an outward show of non-violence due to cowardice or false mercy; better by far to transcend violent feelings and passions within and to fight without for a higher cause to support common good (lokasamgraha).” Lokasamgraha is a field of mutual care and responsibility, and it is a challenge at all levels of human gathering—from dyadic associations, institutions, and movements, to the triadic and beyond, such as family, community, nation, and the global order (Giri, 2019). The creation of responsible organizations requires leaders who are principlecentric. It requires leaders who lead by example through their actions and ethical decisions. Lokasamgraha is the key to such leadership. In Bhagavad Gita, Krishna emphasized the importance of nishkama karma and lokasamgraha when he said: yad-yad acharati shreshthas tad-tad eve’ taro janah sayat pramanam kurute lokas tad anuvartate (BG, 3.23).

It means that “Whatsoever a great man does, the same is done by others as well. Whatever standard he sets, the world follows.” And so, the idea of wise leadership with stakeholder orientation would not be complete without a discussion on Lokasamgraha. It is one of the central tenets of karma yoga, i.e., work as worship and also the core of every principle-centered leadership that exists in a responsible, stakeholder-centric organization. Rajarshi leader In the ancient treatise of political economics, Arthashastra, the ancient Indian political economist Kautilya (who is popularly known by the name of Chanakya) stated that a king should be Rajarshi. The term Rajarshi is made of two words: Raja (King) and Rishi (Sage). So, according to Kautilya, a king should be wise like a sage.

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Now, how can we determine whether a king is a rajarshi or not? How can we assess whether a king is “wise” or not? Chakraborty (1995a) revisited the Vedic conception of the universe based on rita (cosmic order) and satya (truth) and said— “wise conduct and enduring existence are generally synonymous.” Rita, in its moral aspects, has a wider meaning than truth; it includes justice and goodness, and is almost synonymous with dharma or righteousness as an ethical concept (Bose, 1960). Leaders have the unique quality to comprehend this rita (cosmic order) and understand how it influences the evolution of the social order and the relationship of the individual “self” to the universal “SELF”, which are all part of the same whole. This process of comprehension has been called the Rishi-process by Chakraborty (1995a). The ideal of society is to translate the order of the cosmos into the social order and in the Vedas, there is confident faith in man’s capacity to follow the rita in making order prevail against disorder, cosmos against chaos (Bose, 1960). Some of the important principles proposed by Chakraborty (2011) in this Rajarshi leadership process are (i) the capability of being haunted by deep existential questions, and (ii) the humility to learn from persons who do not run the affairs of the world. The hallmark of a moral leader is the existential practice where one engenders virtue in self, others, and society through example and virtuous conduct (Bass & Steidlmeir, 1999). Leadership qualities are translating and bridging between levels and units, handling conflicting values and justices, negotiating and communicating with stakeholders through dialogue, participative approach, and following principles of transparency (Bhattacharjee et al., 2019). Further, studies have shown that leaders should have practical wisdom, and they should foster a positive work climate to facilitate learning in the workplace and should be stakeholder-centric (Bhattacharjee et al., 2019; Gunnarsdóttir et al., 2018; Maak & Pless, 2006; McKenna et al., 2009). This constitutes the “wise conduct” of a wise leader (rajarshi). In Kautilya’s Arthashastra, a rajarshi is one who is ever active in promoting the yogakshema (welfare) of the people and who endears himself to his people by enriching them and doing good to them (KA: 1,7.1)’ (cite Rangarajan, 1992; Singh, 2016). And so, the orientation of a Rajarshi leader is lokasamgraha for the welfare of the people who constitute the subject of a leader’s decisions. In other words, we can say that the lokasamgraha is the essence of stakeholder-orientation in leaders, and a leader who is stakeholder-centric always keeping in mind the welfare of his/her stakeholders while making decisions is a rajarshi or wise leader. The Rig Veda also describes a king (leader) as “Savasa dakshinavan”, i.e., “graceful through power” (R. VI. 29.3; trans. Bose, 1960: 50). Also, a king (leader) is described as “the one who clothes all the naked”, “one who doctors all those who are diseased,” “through him the blind sees”, and “the crippled walks” (R. VIII. 79.2; trans. Bose, 1960: 50). In other words, a leader creates and communicates vision to help the people of an organization transcend the barriers, infuses energy and action in them, and gives them direction and purpose. Great leaders are ethical stewards who generate high levels of commitment from their followers whose motives have to be aligned to the objectives of the multiple stakeholders (Caldwell et al., 2008).

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3 LR Model of Wise Leadership We propose a model of Wise Leadership which we call the LR Model where “L” stands for Lokasamgraha and “R” stands for Rajarshi. The model is integrated with Friedman’s stakeholder theory through its focus on the Vedic conception of debt obligations (rin) that provides an Indian view of the stakeholder theory. This leadership model that we propose concurrently fulfills the conditions of wise leadership (rajarshi) as proposed by ancient Indian philosopher Kautilya and the modern leadership scholars who have proposed the importance of wisdom in leadership (Bhattacharjee & Singh, 2017; Chakraborty, 1997; Maak & Pless, 2006; Mckenna et al., 2009; Yang, 2011). Figure 1 illustrates the LR Model that we propose. The important rishi qualities of a wise leader which can be identified from the Indian Ethos to attain Lokasamgraha or “world maintenance” and maintain Rita (cosmic order and harmony) are as follows. Purposeful action. Leaders are driven by purpose and this purpose could be material, philosophical, or spiritual. In Indian ethos, the three kinds of purpose co-exist as the four basic values of human life (Purushartha), viz., dharma (righteousness), artha (wealth), kama (desires), and moksha (liberation). If they take purposeful actions, then the followers become purposeful. Bruch and Ghoshal (2004) suggest that effective execution lies at the heart of achieving superior business performance and purposeful action taken by managers is the key to such effective execution. But more importantly, it is about understanding the core existential meanings of everything that we do as an individual. It is about the existential-spiritual dimension rather than the techno-scientific view. Leaders need to address these questions, otherwise

Fig. 1 LR model of wise leadership for responsible business (L stands for Lokasamgraha; R stands for Rajarishi)

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words like vision, values, goals, and strategies will only have a shallow meaning (Ims et al., 2014). Focus on stakeholders’ welfare. Fulfillment of the debt obligations (rina) by the individual and the organization leads to social welfare and sustainability which is synonymous with world maintenance, i.e., the goal of Lokasamgraha. However, fulfilling these obligations (rina) is not easy considering the interconnectedness that exists between the various stakeholders in the business ecosystem, and as per a systems perspective, the fulfillment of one obligation may lead to the creation of more obligations. So, attaining rita, i.e., order requires rishi qualities in the managers and entrepreneurs who run the organizations. And that is why we need rajarshis. But the conceptualization of rajarshi would be incomplete if it is not driven by the purpose of lokasamgraha and if it is not integrated with Friedman’s stakeholder theory. In fact, the Rig Veda proposes to “Strengthen the power of knowledge (Brahman) and strengthen intellects; Strengthen the ruling power (Kshatra) and strengthen the heroes; Give strength to the milch-cow and strengthen the people” (R. VIII. 35. 16–18; trans. Bose, 1960). The leader has to lead with the power of his/her knowledge, and understanding; they have to facilitate a learning climate in the organization, and they have to play a pivotal role in the integration of perspectives from multiple stakeholders. Leadership is about empowering people and giving them courage and resilience to face uncertainties and adversities, to that they are confident in making responsible and ethical decisions. Finally, the “milch-cow” may be symbolic of the non-human stakeholders which means keeping in mind planetary sustainability while making decisions. It is about making organizations that implement environment-friendly business models and supply chains. Practical Wisdom. The Bhagavad Gita proposes lokasamgraha as the essence of everything that a leader does. A leader should lead his/her followers by example. The Rig Veda proposes that Pari chin marto dravinam mamanyad, Ritasya patha namasa vivaset. Uta svena kratuna sam vadet, Shreyansam daksham manasa jagribhyat. (R. X. 31.2)

That means to “let a man/woman think well on wealth, and strive to earn it by the path of law and with humility. And let him/her take counsel of his/her own inner wisdom (conscience), and heartily gain prosperity.” So, a leader should be self-aware and depict practical wisdom. A study by Eurich (2018) shows that though most people believe they are self-aware, only 10–15% of those studied actually were. In fact, self-awareness can be either internal which represents how clearly we see our own values, passions, aspirations, fit with our environment, reactions (including thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses), and impact on others (Eurich, 2018). Or it can be external where we try to assess how others view us. Hence, practical wisdom, in terms of Indian ethos, should be an integration of the external and internal self-awareness that drives us to make meaningful decisions and rightful actions that will set the right example for the managers at various levels of an organization. Great leaders pursue perfection in work through their practical wisdom and consider their actions (karma) as a means to attain unification (yoga) with the universal order (rita). Leaders’ pursuit of work excellence is captured in the phrase

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of Bhagavad Gita which says “Yogah karmasu kaushalam” (BG 2.50). According to Radhakrishnan (1949), this means that leaders strive for yoga (unification) and yoga is a skill in action. “Yogah karmasu kaushlam” is a concept which means that all work should be done with perfection and that has relevance in both leadership and management in contemporary times.

4 Conclusion The themes that emerged in the literature and our discussions above point us toward the importance of spiritual values because at some point of time in our organizational life, it is not much about skills but more about insights. Spiritual values are required to achieve perfection in leadership and management tasks. Skills are required to perform a task well whereas spiritual values bring out the true nature of human beings making them believe in harmonious co-existence with others and nature. In the absence of spiritual values, the same skills could be applied for wrong or selfish purposes resulting in detrimental consequences. For example, it requires skill to develop nuclear technology but if used for the wrong purpose it could create havoc. So, both skills and spiritual values are becoming a necessity in the new world order for leadership and sustainable management practices. Today, we find many skills rich but spiritual value deficit leaders and professionals. It is strongly realized now by the world that for effective leadership and sustainable management practices, a congruence of skill and spiritual dimensions is a must for bringing change in the world based on holistic development, connectedness, love, trust, and harmony so that peace and prosperity across the world can be achieved. We would like to conclude with a few verses of the ancient Indian treatise of Isha Upanishad, which says: Those who devote their time in knowing only material knowledge go into darkness. Those who devote their time in knowing only the spiritual knowledge go into deeper darkness. Knowledgeable is one who knows both material and spiritual knowledge as we have heard it from wise people. Those who have knowledge of both material and spiritual world come out of ignorance and achieve immortality. Isha Upanishad (Verse 9–11)

Material knowledge provides us skills, but spiritual values provide us insights and vision to transcend the barriers of ignorance to establish a responsible and caring organization. In today’s world, for a business to survive, it can no longer copy the evolutionary concept of survival of the fittest, but requires a transformational concept of survival of the wisest (Brahmachari, 2012).

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Upanishads and Transformational Leadership Venkat R. Krishnan

“Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth” (Burns, 1978: 2). The lack of understanding about leadership is possibly because of confusing it with power. Most people who claim to be leaders are actually powerholders only.

1 The Central Problem: Distinguishing Between Leadership and Power 1.1 Power Power over other persons is exercised when potential power wielders, motivated to achieve certain goals of their own, marshal resources that enable them to influence the behavior of respondents by activating motives of respondents relevant to those resources. “This is done in order to realize the purposes of the power wielders, whether or not these are also the goals of the respondents” (Burns, 1978: 18). Power is a relationship that seeks to address the goals of only the power-wielder.

1.2 Leadership Leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain motives and purposes mobilize resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of V. R. Krishnan (B) Center for Oneness and Transforming Leadership, Chennai, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_23

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followers. “This is done in order to realize goals mutually held by both leaders and followers” (Burns, 1978: 18). Leadership is a relationship that seeks to address the goals of both the leader and the follower. Like power, leadership is relational, collective, and purposeful. However, leaders do not obliterate followers’ motives, though they may arouse certain motives and ignore others. They lead other human beings, not things. “To control things—tools, mineral resources, money, energy—is an act of power, not leadership, for things have no motives. Power wielders may treat people as things. Leaders may not” (Burns, 1978: 18).

1.3 Two Types of Knowledge Knowledge consists of two parts. Studying the world as an object is the first half of knowledge. We use the word “thing” to refer to an object in this world. Chairs, tables, trees, plants, the sun, the moon, the stars, etc. are all things or physical objects. This is physical science or the knowledge of sensory data, objective data brought by the senses from the world outside. This is called materialism, or lower knowledge. However, this does not encompass the whole of experience (Ranganathananda, 2005: 12). It makes no sense to rush to the conclusion that there is nothing except what we see with our five senses. When we study objects in physical science, a question arises about the subject, the one that studies, the observer that observes. Turning our searchlight in that direction is the second half of knowledge. The idea is to ask what this human being is as the subject, as the knower. A new tool is needed to probe into this field, using subjective datum from subjective experience, since one cannot know the knower. This cannot be studied objectively like studying the world of objects. This is also a science, a study of that, which impinges upon us at the sensory level, coming from beyond that level. This is called self-inquiry, spirituality, or higher knowledge. Swami Ranganathananda (2005: 13–17) provides a compelling argument about how the latest scientific discoveries have made it grossly inadequate and unscientific to confine oneself to only the lower knowledge. Upanishads are the seminal texts for higher knowledge.

2 Upanishads as Foundation for Understanding Leadership Those who have limited themselves only to materialism can only be power-holders and can never understand leadership. They see human beings as nothing more than the body-mind complex, and their dealings with human beings are no different from their dealings with non-human beings. They treat human beings as things, and as objects to be used. They refuse to give any importance to the fact that human beings think and question. The table, the chairs, and the sun do not question. This is power,

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or sometimes called management as contrasted with leadership. Managers manage things, but leaders lead human beings. The body is not the real human being, neither is the mind, for the mind waxes and wanes. It is the spirit beyond, the atman, which alone can live forever. “The body and mind are continually changing, and are, in fact, only names of series of changeful phenomena, like rivers whose waters are in a constant state of flux, yet presenting the appearance of unbroken streams. Every particle in this body is continually changing; no one has the same body for many minutes together, and yet we think of it as the same body. So with the mind; one moment it is happy, another moment unhappy; one moment strong, another weak; an ever-changing whirlpool.” That cannot be the real human being, the atman, or the spirit, which is infinite (Vivekananda, 2016, Vol. 2, “The real nature of man,” p. 79). The atman never comes nor goes, is never born nor dies (Gambhirananda, 1988, Vol. 1, p. 151). “It is nature moving before the atman, and the reflection of this motion is on the atman; and the atman ignorantly thinks it is moving, and not nature. When the atman thinks that, it is in bondage; but when it comes to find it never moves, that it is omnipresent, then freedom comes. The atman in bondage is called Jiva… So the Jiva, the soul, comes to higher or lower states. This is the well-known law of reincarnation; and this law binds all creation” (Vivekananda, 2016: Vol. 2, “The Atman: Its bondage and freedom,” pp. 257–258). According to the Upanishads, self-inquiry or an attempt to realize the atman results immediately in solidarity with all beings. The atman in one person is not different from the atman in another person. The atman is infinite and one. Just as gold appears as various ornaments like bracelets and rings, just as mud appears as various pots, the one atman appears as various beings in the world. In addition, all of us are like branches of the same tree. Those who have acquired the second half of knowledge will see oneness among the diverse beings in this universe, just as intelligent people will first see gold in all the gold ornaments. Spirituality or the second half of knowledge is a prerequisite for understanding leadership. Human beings are not just physical and subtle bodies (body, mind, and intellect), which are objects that can be perceived or sensed. The real human being is the subject, the atman. Seeing others as something more than the body-mind complex is the foundation of leadership. It is not possible to understand leadership without an inquiry into the atman. Many leadership authors and practitioners are groping in the dark because of their total ignorance about the very existence of the atman. Chakraborty (1995) stressed the importance of striving for a subjective metanoia to counteract the objective paranoia of our times. David Bohm, the renowned physicist, had shown clearly the distinction between the measurable and the immeasurable. The West went overboard to establish measure as the king, thus creating fragmentation. To the Greek-derived Western ethos, the measurable alone became the reality.

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2.1 Transformational Leadership Burns (1978: 19) defined leadership as inducing followers to pursue common or at least joint purposes that represent the values and motivations of both leaders and followers. The problem of addressing the values of both leaders and followers could be handled in two ways. Burns termed the first one as transactional leadership and the second as transforming or transformational leadership. Transactional leadership, which involves an exchange of valued things, is based on current values and motivations of both leaders and followers. Transformational leadership, on the other hand, does not take the current values and motivations to be fixed, but rather seeks to change them. According to Burns (1978: 20), transformational leadership “occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality,” and results in a transforming effect on both leaders and followers. The purposes of leaders and followers that might have started out as separate but related, as in the case of transactional leadership, become fused. The transformational leader looks for potential motives in followers, seeks to satisfy higher needs, and engages the full person of the follower. Transformational leadership can be illustrated using the sheep-lion story, related by Swami Vivekananda (2016, Volume 2, page 86) in his lecture on “The real nature of man”: There is a story about a lioness, who was big with young, going about in search of prey; and seeing a flock of sheep, she jumped upon them. She died in the effort; and a little baby lion was born, motherless. It was taken care of by the sheep and the sheep brought it up, and it grew up with them, ate grass, and bleated like the sheep. And although in time it became a big, full-grown lion, it thought it was a sheep. One day another lion came in search of prey and was astonished to find that in the midst of this flock of sheep was a lion, fleeing like the sheep at the approach of danger. He tried to get near the sheep-lion, to tell it that it was not a sheep but a lion; but the poor animal fled at his approach. However, he watched his opportunity and one day found the sheep-lion sleeping. He approached it and said, ‘You are a lion.’ ‘I am a sheep,’ cried the other lion and could not believe the contrary but bleated. The lion dragged him towards a lake and said, ‘Look here, here is my reflection and yours.’ Then came the comparison. It looked at the lion and then at its own reflection, and in a moment came the idea that it was a lion. The lion roared, the bleating was gone.

Identifying ourselves with the physical and subtle body is the sheep state. Inquiry into our real nature as the atman is the lion state. Enabling others to realize that they are not just the body-mind complex, but that they are the atman, is transformational leadership. Transformational leadership requires taking followers to a higher level and not to a lower level. Followers are transformed irrespective of whether they are being taken upward or downward, but taking others downward cannot be really termed leadership. There is an implicit assumption that true leaders lead others to a better place, while taking others to a worse place, is a form of manipulation or treating others as objects to be used. We could thus distinguish between two types of transformational leadership—authentic transformational leadership or moral leadership that

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takes followers upward, and pseudo-transformational leadership that takes followers downward. Pseudo-transformational leadership is in reality no leadership at all, since it is a form of manipulation, and manipulation is at the opposite end of a continuum from leadership.

2.2 Moral Leadership According to Burns (1978: 4), “the result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents.” Transformational leaders throw themselves into a dynamic relationship with followers who will feel elevated by it and become more active themselves, thereby creating new cadres of leaders. Transformational leaders raise their followers up through levels of morality. The issue of moral leadership concerned Burns (1978) the most. He considered moral leadership as emerging from, and always returning to, the fundamental wants, needs, aspirations, and values of the followers. Satisfaction of followers’ authentic needs is the primary objective of moral leadership. Burns held that transformational leadership “ultimately becomes moral in that it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both” (page 20). The function of leadership is to engage followers, to commingle needs and aspirations and goals in a common enterprise, and in the process to make better citizens of both leaders and followers (Burns, 1978: 461). In real life, the most practical advice for leaders is not to treat pawns like pawns, nor princes like princes, but all persons like persons. Woodrow Wilson called for leaders who, by boldly interpreting the nation’s conscience, could lift people out of their everyday selves. That people can be lifted into their better selves is the secret of transforming leadership (Burns, 1978: 462). James MacGregor Burns tells a story about a student who made the case to her classmates that Hitler was a true leader. However, according to Burns, the student’s problem “was not confusion about Hitler, but about the true nature of leadership.” Yes, Hitler superficially addressed his followers’ basest wants. However, he did not address their fundamental needs. Yes, he changed German society, but not for the better in the long run. Hitler thus was not a true leader because his agenda was his own, his goals were his own, and the German nation and people were merely the means he used to pursue his personal agenda of power and megalomania (O’Toole, 1999: 171). Upanishads provide a concrete measure or test to check if followers have been lifted into their better or higher selves. Travel toward the state of oneness with all beings is going upward. Oneness with all beings is the test of truth and moral leadership, providing an easy way to distinguish between Gandhis and Hitlers. Those who pit one group of people against another group are like those instigating some branches of a tree to cut down other branches; they take people away from oneness with all

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beings and are not moral leaders. Those who try to unite diverse people at a common higher level are taking them closer to a state of oneness, and they are moral leaders. Built-in internal wholeness, fulfillment, and joy have to be grasped as the true foundation of human existence. Leaders and followers alike need to actively recognize that the essential nature of human development is to hasten and perfect one’s evolution for manifesting this involved wholeness (Chakraborty, 1995). Krishnan (2007) found that transformational leadership enhanced followers’ spirituality or oneness with all other beings.

2.3 Ethical Leadership Like immoral leadership, unethical leadership is in reality no leadership at all since it is a form of manipulation, and manipulation is at the opposite end of a continuum from leadership. “One idea stands out as the centre of all ethical systems, expressed in various forms, namely, doing good to others.” These are all various expressions of that eternal truth that “I am the universe; this universe is one.” There is no reason otherwise to do good to others. “It is sympathy, the feeling of sameness everywhere. The hardest hearts feel sympathy for other beings sometimes.” Even those who get frightened if they are told that their identification with the body-mind complex and this assumed individuality is really a delusion, that it is ignoble to try to cling to this apparent individuality, those very people will agree that extreme self-abnegation is the center of all morality. And perfect self-abnegation means the abnegation of this apparent self, the abnegation of all selfishness. This idea of “me and mine” is the result of past superstition, and the more this present self as body-mind complex passes away, the more the real Self or the atman becomes manifest. This is true self-abnegation, the center, the basis, the gist of all moral teaching; and whether one knows it or not the whole world is slowly going toward it, practicing it more or less. Only, the vast majority of human beings are doing it unconsciously (Vivekananda, 2016, Vol. 2, “The real nature of man,” pages 82–83). The question arises of whether this can be practiced in modern society, which takes us to the concept of Yoga. Derived from the root yuj (to bind together), Yoga means binding one’s psychic powers, balancing, and enhancing them. By yoking together and harnessing our energies, we force the passage from the narrow ego to the transcendent personality. The spirit tears itself away from its prison-house, stands out of it, and reaches its own innermost being. Yoga is a method or discipline that leads to the realization of the atman or subject and a new understanding of the unity of all beings (Radhakrishnan, 1971: 50). Karma-Yoga is one such path. Mulla and Krishnan (2010) found that Karma-Yoga was positively related to transformational leadership.

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3 Karma-Yoga: Path Toward Oneness According to Swami Vivekananda (2016, Vol. 1, “Freedom,” pp. 97–98), until we give up the strong attachment to our existence as the body-mind complex, we have no hope of catching even a glimpse of the atman or that infinite freedom beyond. There are two ways to give up our attachment to this little universe of the senses or of the mind. One is the negative way, and the other is the positive way. The negative way is only possible for people with gigantic wills who simply stand up and say, “No, I will not have this,” and the mind and body obey their will, and they come out successful. However, such people are very rare. “The vast majority of humankind choose the positive way, the way through the world, making use of all the bondages themselves to break those very bondages.” The former way of obtaining non-attachment is by reasoning, and the latter way is through work. The first is Jnana-Yoga (the way of knowledge) for people of contemplation, and is characterized by the refusal to do any work; the second is Karma-Yoga (the way of action) for people of action, in which there is no cessation from work. Karma-Yoga is the means for active people to realize their true nature, according to the Bhagavad Gita (Radhakrishnan, 1971: 132). The Bhagavad Gita is like a fine garland or a bouquet of the choicest flowers collected from the Upanishads, beautifully arranged together in their proper places (Vivekananda, 2016, Vol. 4, “Thoughts on the Gita,” p. 106).

3.1 Unselfishness or Self-Abnegation “Karma-Yoga is the attaining through unselfish work of that freedom which is the goal of all human nature.” Every selfish action retards our reaching the goal, and every unselfish action takes us toward the goal. Hence, the only definition that can be given of morality is this: That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral. “Karma-Yoga, therefore, is a system of ethics and religion intended to attain freedom through unselfishness, and by good works” (Vivekananda, 2016, Vol. 1, “The ideal of Karma-Yoga,” pp. 110–111). Human beings work with various motives. The motives may be self-centered or others-centered. “There are some who are really the salt of the earth in every country and who work for work’s sake, who do not care for name, or fame, or even to go to heaven. They work just because good will come of it.” If people work without any selfish motive in view, it may appear that they do not gain anything; but they gain the highest. “Unselfishness is more paying, only people have not the patience to practice it” (Vivekananda, 2016, Vol. 1, “Karma in its effect on character,” pp. 31–32).

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3.2 Non-Attachment Karma-Yoga is giving up all attachment to work while working incessantly. Nonattachment means not expecting returns for oneself. It requires not identifying oneself with anything. “Misery comes through attachment, not through work. As soon as we identify ourselves with the work we do, we feel miserable; but if we do not identify ourselves with it, we do not feel that misery.” If a beautiful picture belonging to another is burnt, people do not generally become miserable; but when their own picture is burnt, they feel very miserable. “Both were beautiful pictures, perhaps copies of the same original; but in one case very much more misery is felt than in the other.” It is because in one case they identify themselves with the picture, and not in the other. “This ‘I and mine’ causes the whole misery.” Every act or thought of selfishness makes us attached to something, and immediately we are made slaves. “Everything that is done under compulsion goes to build up attachment” (Vivekananda, 2016, Vol. 1, “Freedom,” pp. 100–104).

3.3 Duty-Orientation It is necessary in the practice of Karma-Yoga to know what duty is. Any action that makes us go upward is a good action and is our duty; any action that makes us go downward is evil, and is not our duty. “It is therefore our duty to do that work which will exalt and ennoble us in accordance with the ideals and activities of the society in which we are born.” It is work through the sense of duty that leads us gradually to work being done for its own sake. The objective of fulfilling duties is the attenuating of the lower self, so that the real higher Self or atman may shine forth—the lessening of the frittering away of energies on the lower plane of existence, so that the soul may manifest itself on the higher ones. By limiting selfishness, we open the way to an unlimited expansion of the real nature of man (Vivekananda, 2016, Vol. 1, “What is duty?” pp. 63–67). Bhajanananda (2006: 8–9) cautions against Karma-Yoga being confused with mere work. To work like a bullock, or to work in any way one likes, is not KarmaYoga. The work that most people do is nothing but an aimless rat race for name, fame, and sense of enjoyment, and to call it Karma-Yoga is a misnomer. Karma-Yoga is a spiritual discipline that aims at Mukti, freedom, or oneness with all beings. The concept of Gunas helps explain the role of work in Karma-Yoga.

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3.4 Gunas Knowledge-complexes that exist in living beings are certainly different from those that exist in external inanimate objects in that they are far subtler and have a preponderance of a special quality of plasticity and translucence (Sattva). The fundamental characteristic of external gross matter or an inanimate object is its mass (Tamas). Energy (Rajas) is common to both gross matter and the subtle thought-stuff that is unique to living beings. However, mass is at its lowest minimum in thoughtstuff, whereas the capacity of translucence or intelligence-stuff is at its highest in thought-stuff (Dasgupta, 1991: 241). Thus, both thought and gross matter are made up of three elements—a plasticity of intelligence-stuff (Sattva), energy-stuff (Rajas), and mass-stuff (Tamas) or the factor of obstruction. Of these, the last two are predominant in gross matter and the first two in thought (Dasgupta, 1991: 242). These three types of ultimate subtle entities are called Gunas. These three subtle Guna substances combine in different proportions to create different entities with different qualities (Dasgupta, 1991: 243–244). These three forces as manifested in the physical world are what we may call equilibrium, activity, and inertness. “Tamas is typified as darkness or inactivity; Rajas is activity, expressed as attraction or repulsion; and Sattva is the equilibrium of the two.” In every being, there are these three forces. “Sometimes Tamas prevails. We become lazy, we cannot move, we are inactive, bound down by certain ideas or by mere dullness. At other times activity prevails, and at still other times that calm balancing of both.” Again, in different people, one of these forces is generally predominant. The characteristic of one person is inactivity, dullness, and laziness; that of another, activity, power, and manifestation of energy; and in still another, we find sweetness, calmness, and gentleness, which are due to the balancing of both action and inaction (Vivekananda, 2016, Vol. 1, “Each is great in his own place,” p. 36). For those who are predominantly Tamasic (highest on Tamas and comparatively low on Rajas and Sattva), performing any action is difficult, let alone unattached action or Karma-Yoga. Once they increase their levels of Rajas, they will start doing some action. However, Karma-Yoga is possible only if they reduce their levels of Rajas and increase Sattva. Changing oneself from being Tamasic to being Rajasic to being Sattvic is the simplest way to become a Karma-Yogi and to realize our real nature as the atman. Changing others from being Tamasic to being Rajasic to being Sattvic and enabling them to realize their real nature as the atman is transformational leadership.

4 Conclusion There is widespread ignorance about leadership because most people have confined their education to only the knowledge of the objective world of objects. They have

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not endeavored to delve into the second half of knowledge, about the subject or the atman. So long as human beings are seen as the body-mind complex only, and are treated as objects, leadership is not possible. Most of those who claim to be leaders are only power-holders. Transformational leadership involves enabling followers to lift themselves to a higher level. What a higher level means can be known by studying the Upanishads. Traveling closer toward realizing the atman and understanding one’s oneness with all beings is going upward. Enabling followers to move closer toward understanding their oneness with all beings is transformational leadership. According to Swami Vivekananda (2016, Vol. 2, “The real nature of man,” pp. 83– 84), there is the highest utility in the higher knowledge, the inquiry into the atman or the real human being. Happiness is what everyone is seeking for, but the majority seek it in things which are evanescent and not real. “No happiness was ever found in the senses.” There never was a person who found happiness in the enjoyment of the senses. Happiness is only found in the atman, the Spirit. The next point is that ignorance is the great mother of all misery, and the fundamental ignorance is to think that the Infinite weeps and cries, that It is finite. “This is the basis of all ignorance that we, the immortal, the ever pure, the perfect Spirit, think that we are little minds, that we are little bodies; it is the mother of all selfishness.” As soon as I think that I am a little body, I want to preserve it, to protect it, to keep it nice, at the expense of other bodies; then each of us becomes separate from others. “As soon as this idea of separation comes, it opens the door to all mischief and leads to all misery. This is the utility that if a very small fractional part of human beings living today can put aside the idea of selfishness, narrowness, and littleness, this earth will become a paradise tomorrow; but with machines and improvements of material knowledge only, it will never be. These only increase misery, as oil poured on fire increases the flame all the more.” Without the knowledge of the Spirit, all material knowledge is only giving the selfish people one more instrument to take what belongs to others, to live upon the life of others, instead of giving up their lives for others. The Upanishads take us to a very high plane of thinking. We reach a new dimension of thought, which is simply fascinating and intellectually stimulating (Ranganathananda, 2005: 11). Studying the Upanishads provides an experiential learning of transformational leadership. It is not possible to understand leadership without an inquiry into the atman.

References Bhajanananda, S. (2006). Selfless work: Its basis, methods, and fulfilment. Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University Press. Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. Harper & Row. Chakraborty, S. K. (1995). Wisdom leadership: Leading self by the SELF. Journal of Human Values, 1(2), 205–220. Dasgupta, S. (1991). A history of Indian philosophy, Vol 1. Motilal Banarasidas. (Original work published 1922).

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Gambhirananda, S. (1988). Eight Upanisads, with the commentary of Sankaracarya (2 volumes). Advaita Ashrama. Krishnan, V. R. (2007). Effect of transformational leadership and leader’s power on follower’s duty-orientation and spirituality. Great Lakes Herald, 1(2), 48–70. Mulla, Z. R., & Krishnan, V. R. (2010). Do Karma-Yogis make better leaders?: Exploring the relationship between the leader’s Karma-Yoga and transformational leadership. Journal of Human Values, 15(2), 167–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/097168581001500207 O’Toole, J. (1999). Leadership A to Z: A guide for the appropriately ambitious. Jossey-Bass. Radhakrishnan, S. (1971). The Bhagavadgita. George Allen & Unwin. Ranganathananda, S. (2005). The message of the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad: An exposition of the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad in the light of modern thought and modern needs (8th ed.). Advaita Ashrama. Vivekananda, S. (2016). Complete works of Swami Vivekananda (9 volumes). Advaita Ashrama.

Leaders and Their World

Management: The “Sanatana” Approach Pradip Bhattacharya

Management training—in ever-new garbs—is big business, possibly the very biggest, in the training arena today, ever since it was started off in the early twentieth century in America. Its dernier cri is “Human Resource Development”, as if human beings were insentient “things” to be “developed” like a piece of real estate! In India, the business revolves round parroting theories and aping techniques spawned and practised in the West, trying to transplant alien concepts and practices into an ethos whose very basis and substance are radically different. The results of this wholesale importing have not only been discouraging, but on several occasions disastrous. The enthusiastic propagation of the “T-group”, hastily abandoned by Indian companies in the 1960s disconcerted with the sudden turnover of middle-management personnel that followed, is now attempting a come-back in the new guise of “Applied Behavioural Science Laboratory”. Once again the human being is brought down to the level of a guinea-pig. MBO [Management by Objectives] came and went with the euphoria of a Madura Coats case study as it failed to take into account the need for individual transformation. Theory X and Theory Y, the Hierarchy of Needs, the Hygiene and the Motivation Factors, Organisational Development—every western concept and its inevitable camp-follower, the techniques [e.g. the Management Grid, Firo-B, Johari Window, Thomas-Killman Conflict Resolution Mode, Transactional Analysis, Interactive Skills, Quality Circles, Sensitivity Training, a plethora of simulation games, Action Learning] were quickly picked up by Indian entrepreneurs intent on making a quick kill and marketed assiduously. Blooming like hot-house plants, they withered away as swiftly. Despite the existence of several national management institutes manned by Indians, the vision P. Bhattacharya (B) Retired Additional Chief Secretary to the Government of West Bengal, Kolkata, West Bengal, India e-mail: [email protected] Former Member, Board of Governors, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata, West Bengal, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_24

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remained obstinately blinkered and wholly Harvard/Tavistock/Manchester Business School oriented. The concept of evolving, from within the Indian matrix, a system of managing the self and of self-development peculiar to Indians appeared to be something so utterly alien to the intellectual equipment of the Management Schools that no organised attempt was made in this direction. The 1980s saw the glimmerings of a new light creeping over the murky training horizon shrouded in clouds of western fumes and the next decade heralded the dawn of a new birth: of a concept and a technique, which are our very own, which have existed over the millennia as sanatana, eternal as man’s very soul, which is not circumscribed by geographical and temporal boundaries but can span the continents to reach the innermost being of anyone who desires to evolve into a Manager, a human being who manages himself and thereby influences his environment. The watershed in MAN-agement development, which is in essence the growth of the individual human being, has come about through the tireless search of a professor of financial management and MBO who asked himself why this country, with one of the oldest living civilisations in the world, should not be able to provide the answers foxing management experts frenetically grafting foreign techniques onto Indian minds and finding them failing to fructify in their hearts. This delving into the heart of our heritage for a solution to the modern problems did not start in the gurukuls of the north or the ashrams of the south with their repository of traditional wisdom, but in Calcutta. Perhaps this was quite in the fitness of things. For it is in Bengal since the nineteenth century Renaissance that the questing soul has dived into the still oceanic depths of our sanatana heritage to come up with pearls beyond price in the work of Ram Mohun Roy, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya, Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. This attempt took the shape of Management Development Workshops on “Management Effectiveness and Values Systems: Indian Insights” by Sitangshu Kumar Chakraborty at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. The concept is based on the postulate that whereas the characteristic of management training curricula is obsolescence of topics and techniques, human values endure the flux of change. These are workshops focused on the mind and the individual, working with the mind for the mind on the mind. Over 8000 participants from nearly 40 private and public sector organisations located in different regions of the country have participated, and the results documented in books published by Tata McGraw Hill, Wiley Eastern, Himalaya Publishing, Wheeler, Rupa, Oxford University Press, Sage, ICFAI University. I was the first and, for quite some time, the only government bureaucrat to have attended these courses. The only government organisations to have gone for the workshop are also from West Bengal, namely, the Directorate of Industrial Training, the Administrative Training Institute and the Health Directorate. The National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, restricted itself to sending a couple of faculty to attend the annual international workshop at the Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV). The programme takes the shape of three modules. Module 1 runs for three successive forenoons, concentrating on establishing the “Pure Mind” through the practise of chitta shuddhi. It is based on Patanjali’s finding that there are five mindstates: inert (mudha), scattered (vikshipta), wild (kshipta), concentrated (ekagra) and

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beyond mind (niruddha), of which the first three are the usual mental conditions. This is a remarkable revelation of the decision-maker’s state of mind, which determines the degree of effectiveness of his functioning. Techniques and systems come much later in the process. Swami Vivekananda’s Raja yoga provides a picturesque description of the main instrument of managerial functioning. The mind, he says, is like a monkey (restless, fidgety) which is drunk (with ambition, greed), has been stung by a scorpion (jealousy, envy) and is possessed by a demon (pride, vanity). The problem, then, is how to produce effectiveness out of this frenzied situation. The first module is founded on an understanding of seven elements of Indian philosophy: • • • • • • •

rising from the Lower Self to the Higher Self; practicing dis-identification with the former and re-identification with the latter; the dynamics of the three gunas [sattva, rajas, tamas]; the doctrine of karma [cause and effect]; the concept of samskaras [residual impressions]; the theory and method of work; the giving model of motivation.

This module starts with the basic question: How to increase organisational effectiveness? It is followed by an input on the relationship between Values and Skills. Generally, skills are over-exercised and values are neglected. If values are not in good order, high order skills will be used in malicious, destructive ways. The original framework of this module was as follows:Through two experiential sessions daily, now called Quality Mind (Rishi) Process, early morning and before dinner on an empty stomach, the module culminates in the Mind-Stilling exercise through the following steps lasting about 40 minutes. For the exercises, participants are requested to wear white loose clothing to encourage harmony with the sattvik spirit sought to be developed within: • Mindful breathing concentrating only on slow, deep (fully filling the chest and stomach), silent breathing through alternate nostrils without holding the breath in or out, the exhalation and the inhalation being equally slow, for 10–15 cycles in a seated posture on a chair (in case sitting on the floor is uncomfortable), the spine kept erect, the feet planted firmly flat on the ground, eyes closed. This pranayama helps to centripetalise the centrifugal mind that is constantly dissipated outwards. • Imagine breathing in a sattvik quality and breathing out a rajasik or tamasik one. These two steps are drawn from Patanjali/Raja Yoga. • Imagine that the brain space is empty, a void, using the image of a clear blue sky, and experience a sense of peace, freedom. Thoughts that come are imagined as clouds floating across the sky, without paying attention to them. A helpful image is imagining the head as a tightly corked bottle and uncorking it to let out all the effervescent fizz, leaving behind a calm serenity. In the third step of this exercise one silently repeats “Let go” while exhaling to aid in bringing calm serenity to the mind.

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• Imagining opening up an entrance at the crown of the head, like the mouth of the body bottle being uncorked, with the aspiration for the Universal EnergyConsciousness-Bliss to descend into one’s being, using the image of a manypetalled lotus at the top of the head blooming in the morning sun’s rays and welcoming that radiance into itself. These two steps are taken from Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga. • Concentrating on the psychic centre in the middle of the chest, imagine a dark, cool cave there with a blue-golden sphere glowing within and try to identify with it, repeating five times the dis-identification and re-identification statements from Shankaracharya’s Atma-shatakam, which is recited at the beginning of every session, to act as a refrain inter-linking all the exercises: I have a body but I am not the body; I have senses but I am not the senses; I have a mind but I am not the mind; I have an intellect but I am not the intellect.

I am Eternal Consciousness, luminous, pure, complete and Blissful. This luminous sphere is the Higher Self with which identification is sought. The concept is taken from Jnana Yoga, aiming at replacing the hunger for having more by the idea of the self being innately complete and full. Concentrate on the luminous bluish-golden sphere within the heart-cave and bring into its effulgence all the good and the bad inside oneself, imagining that this radiance is suffusing every nook and cranny of the cave, cleaning it up. An alternative is to imagine one’s chosen deity seated here and offer up to it all that one is, in total surrender. This concept is taken from Raja Yoga and Bhakti Yoga. The afternoons are occupied with studying selected readings such as Sri Aurobindo and The Mother’s Right Attitude to Work, On Self Perfection, Living Within, Growing Within, Swami Vivekananda’s The Secret of Work, Rabindranath Tagore’s Sadhana, Personality, Shantiniketan. Participants are urged to maintain silence throughout to assist consolidation of experiences, introspection and internalisation of the concepts. For the next 3–4 months, the participants are requested to hold fortnightly meetings, with a rotatory leadership of each session, in which these exercises are repeated and the experiences written down individually, including problems that come up in applying the concepts in daily life at home and in the workplace. Each individual is also supposed to do the exercise every morning and night by himself. This module has now been renamed as “Workshop on human values and ethics – achieving holistic excellence”. A schematic representation of this revised module is as follows: Module 2 lasts for 2 forenoons on the theme of “Leadership and Teamwork” for bringing home the following concepts:

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Process Elements

Love

Discipline

Leader (impartial, embracing all, even antagonists) Team members (build trust, sharing, laterally)

Impersonal love (to all) Higher Self Sattva Guna Dharma-Moksha Maitri (friendly to the happy) Karuna (friendly to the unhappy) Mudita (joy in the virtuous)

Self-restraint Self-control Renunciation Charisma Hierarchy (familial not structural) Obedience Rituals, Symbols Danda-niti (punishment)

Both

De-egoization Surrender

Mind-stilling Meditation

The basic features of this leadership module are as follows: 1.

2.

The Indian concept of leadership is based on the “Rajarshi” model, which is a combination of “Raja” and “Rishi”. Rishi (seer, visionary) is the base and Raja (who ensures the happiness of the people) is the superstructure. Following are the characteristics of a Rishi: (a) (b)

(c)

Gives priority to “ROLE” over “SELF” (e.g. role of Raja in Sri Rama in the Ramayana while banishing Sita). Translates cosmic order into social order. Cosmic order has four components: wisdom, power, protection and work. These were translated into—Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Sudras. Has solitude, silence and sincerity in his character.

The seven-step exercise of Module 1 is supplemented by the following for experiencing a sense of unity: • Imagine radiating from the psychic centre waves of rays of peace, harmony and bliss to everyone, friend or foe; imagining sharing one’s inner serenity with all without exception, particularly those who are antagonistic (pratipaksha bhavana) without any expectation of any sort of return. This concept is taken from Buddhist psychology and linked to Karma Yoga. These uses of the dynamic imagination are S. K. Chakraborty’s own creation. Module 3 takes place after about 3 months for two successive forenoons, the theme being “Managing Stress, Communication and Counselling”. It emphasises that identifying the causes of stress is the most important factor for managing stress, and for this, he has emphasised the following points: External

Internal

Work pressure

Selfishness

Obsolescence of technology

Egotism

Unkind boss

Jealousy (continued)

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(continued) External

Internal

Family problem

Unethicality

Transfer

Consumerism

Fluctuation in the stock market

Competitive careerism

Natural disaster

Greed

All these are uncontrollable variables

All these are controllable variables

The Panchakosha tattva or the Five-Sheath Model (taken from the Taittiriya Upanishad). Panchakosha means five concentric outlines of the human frame: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Annamaya Kosha: The outermost material sheath. Pranamaya Kosha: The vital life force and protected by the Annamaya Kosha. Manomaya kosha: The mental sheath. Vijnanamaya kosha: The wisdom sheath. Anandamaya kosha: The sheath of bliss.

Stress belongs to the first three sheaths, i.e. from Annamaya to Manomaya kosha. The remaining two, i.e. the Vijnanamaya and the Anandamaya koshas are absolutely stress free. Our problem is that we jumble up these five sheaths and thereby stress is produced. The exercise involves concentrating on two sets of imagery for tackling stress after going through the steps described above: • Imagine praise being poured into one ear and abuse into the other, remaining unmoved in the midst of both, centred in the luminous heart centre to achieve steady inner poise. Prof. Chakraborty has given this final module an intricate conceptual design: Vikshepa (Stress) ––––

Samatva (Poise) ––––

Ananda (Bliss)

Duality

Equality

Unity

Torment

Equanimity

Bliss

Secular

Sacro-secular

Sacred

Executive self

Witness self

Divine self

Objective reality

Subjective reality

All is reality

Leela

Nitya

Leela—Nitya

These psycho-physical exercises aim to achieve the following goals: • • • •

strengthen will-power; increase the power of penetrating insight; develop the holistic, synthesising, expansive capability; acquire a tranquil inner world;

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• enable the mind to provide its own authentic feedback; • pursue ethico-moral fitness; • capture the awareness of unity. As for the principles of communication, these are derived from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother [On Self Perfection parts II, IV and On Work]: • “Never utter a word when you are angry”. • “Outburst of anger or temper means the tongue is projecting bad vibrations into the atmosphere. Nothing is more contagious than the vibration of sound”. • “Don’t allow the impulse of speech to assert itself too much or say anything without reflection—speak always with a conscious control”. • “If there is gossip about others and harsh criticism, don’t join—they only lower the consciousness from the higher level”. • “Cultivate the habit not to throw yourself out constantly into spoken words”. • “The less one speaks of other—even praise—the better it is. Already it is difficult to know exactly what happens in oneself, how to know then with certainty what is happening in others”. • “You must criticise nothing unless you have at the same time a conscious power and an active will in you to dissolve or transform the movements you criticise”. • “To discourage is wrong. But false or wrong encouragement is not right. Very often if an inner communication has been established, a silent pressure is more effective than anything else”. • "What is needed for success in the outward field is the power to transmit calmly a Force that can change men’s attitude and the circumstances and make any outward action at once the right thing to do and effective”. • “One must state only what one wishes to see realised”. The entire question of Effectiveness is seen as a combination of Values and Skills. The former is the process of Becoming in the inner world through which the Skills for Doing in the external world are processed. That is why honing Skills alone cannot possibly lead to effectiveness. Values themselves can be seen in a two-fold manner; as means (i.e. HOW to act) and ends (i.e. WHAT to aim for, the goals). The experience of management is that most organisations have personnel who are strong in skills and weak in values. Questionnaires administered to a wide spectrum of practising managers have elicited the same response time and again: they would prefer to have personnel less skilled but with a strong base in the right values because they realise that management devoid of values becomes mere manipulation, just as politics bereft of philosophy degenerates into opportunism. In graphical terms, the Value-Skills configuration can be represented as follows: Values + (Strong). Skill (Weak)

S − V + (Preferred State)

S + V + (Ideal State)

S−V−

S + V – (Majority of Personnel)

Skill + (Strong)

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Values − (Weak) The common factor in all the four quadrants is the differing nature of values. Therefore, the operative objective is to bridge the gap between weak and strong values, to increase sensitivity to and sustenance of values founded on interiorisation of discipline (the centripetal process) using mindful breathing and Mind Purification or chittashuddhi. These are opposed to the relentless exponential process of exteriorisation (the centrifugal tendency), which is the existential situation for mankind, egged on by increasingly higher standards of consumption imposed by the Consumer Society. The individual consciousness is being constantly plucked out of the centre of one’s being by relentless application of all the tricks of Consumerism. This leads to a harried life-style, which creates an environment hostile to the growth of sensitivity to values; hence, the need for a counter-balancing movement, a centripetal revolution. The management of breathing, our most existential activity, the conscious control of our breath, is the starting point of the management of self that is the secret of self-control. The question is, how does one build up the storehouse of wisdom of selfknowledge on the foundation of the mind, which is a collection of seventeen defilements such as greed, covetousness, malevolence, anger, malice, hypocrisy, spite, envy, stinginess, deceit, treachery, obstinacy, impetuosity, arrogance, pride, conceit, indolence? Hence, the need for chittashuddhi, purifying the foundation. “Mind” here is an inadequate translation of “Chitta” that embraces emotions, feelings, impulses as well as thoughts. The concentration has to be not on sharpening the intellect, the reason, but on purifying the vast emotional area that is infra-rational, underlying the veneer of rationality. Man is primarily driven by emotions that use the intellect as an instrument. As Sri Aurobindo pointed out, “human reason is a very convenient and accommodating instrument and works only in the circle set for it by interest, partiality and prejudice”. Bertrand Russell had warned, “Even more important than knowledge is the life of emotions.... given knowledge and competence combined with folly, there can be no certainty of survival (of the human race).... It follows that unless men increase wisdom as much as knowledge, increase of knowledge will be increase of sorrow”. Again, Einstein pointed out “The intellect has a sharp eye for methods, and tools, but it is blind to ends and values”. Education today is primarily emphasising the intellect, mass producing Shakunis and neglecting the culture of emotions that produces a Vidura. Both Shakuni and Vidura were counsellors in the royal court and equal in buddhi, intellect, but it is the quality of their emotions that made all the difference. Purity of heart spills out into purity of the intellect. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: Generally people are altogether blind to the ugliness of their own actions... and the smaller one is, the more natural appears the sacrifice offered to one’s smallness...One must be very much higher on the scale to see that what one does is ugly. One must already have at the core of himself a kind of fore-knowledge of what beauty, nobility, generosity are, to be able to suffer from the fact that one doesn’t carry them within oneself.

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The world of emotions, the subjective, is the cause and the objective its effect. It is obvious that the objectivity of a decision is a function of the purity of the subjective of the decision-maker, for all decisions are, in the ultimate analysis, subjective. Mahatma Gandhi wrote, The heart accepts a conclusion for which the intellect subsequently finds the reasoning. Argument follows conviction. Man often finds reason in support of whatever he does or wants to do.

Hence, the imperative need for cleansing the emotional sphere, as purity of heart will spill over into purity of the intellect. In the words of Swami Vivekananda, The intellect is only the street-cleaner, cleansing the path for us, a secondary worker, the policeman...It is an inactive, secondary help; the real help is feeling, love...Intellect is like limbs without the power of locomotion. It is only when feeling enters and gives them motion that they move and work on others...It is the heart that takes one to the highest place, which intellect never reaches.

Hence, the need to stress not just analytical abilities of reason but synthesising abilities in which the secret of creativity lies. Since the mind is an “arch-divider of the indivisible” (Sri Aurobindo), how can this defiled mind envisage wholeness? It is typical of it that it can only define wholeness through a negative: “That which is not fragmented”, a-khanda. The Mother says, “with intelligence come all the skill and cleverness and corruption, calculation...the moment his mind is active he tries to get some advantage out of his beauty and cleverness; he wants it to bring him something...this kind of wish to gain by what one has or does is truly one of the ugliest things in the world and it is one of the most widespread”. So much stress is laid on Creativity in management literature ignoring the fact that the individual spark of creativity is a part of the Creator himself. Yoga establishes that legitimate contact between the individual spark and its source. Hence the necessity for emphasizing the right-brain function which intuits supra-logically, as against the overwhelming left-brain approach of education which is only analytical. It is by quietening the left brain that we allow the right half to come up. In a conversation with Rene Weber, the physicist David Bohm stated that the mathematician’s creative perceptions take place when “The veil of the mind is parted. The mind is caught in things that it takes for granted. The ordinary low-energy mind just goes through things over and over and takes its old assumptions for granted, but this high-energy dissolves the veil so that the mind can function on a new level”. As Tagore wrote, “keep your flute empty so that the flute player can play his tune through it”. Brain-storming becomes most effective if preceded by brain-stilling. This is the flute of the heart and mind of the individual that Tagore speaks of, which has to be cleansed of impurities so that the music of the Creator can flow through it. This is the aim of the exercises described above. MAN-agerial Effectiveness is basically a function of the MAN behind the work. It is an indisputable verity that the ratio of pettiness : dignity is increasing at a swift pace despite the “better” education, salaries, perquisites etc. available to the individual. In 1995, the salary of Rs. 5 lakhs per annum, the highest ever in the country, was

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offered to the toppers from IIM Calcutta by a foreign consultancy company. The average annual salary for 215 IIM Calcutta MBA graduates in 2001 was Rs.18.28 lakhs against Rs.1 5 lakh in 1995, while the highest salary offered was $225,000. The obvious answer is to increase the denominator in order to reduce the ratio. The irony of the situation is that although the source of fulfilment is built into the individual, he searches futilely for it outside and perishes in vain frustration. In the words of that great savant Kabir, man is like the musk deer frenziedly seeking in the forest the source of the perfume that is secreted from within itself. Since scarcity is built into the material world, seeking fulfilment there is bound to lead to conflict and meanness. Hence, one has to identify the wholeness, purnatva, cultivate the intellectual knowing into an integral realisation, an anubhuti that alone can change affective behaviour. The risk is that living up to values demands some sacrifices of the lower self. The gain is that values are their own reward. To quote Sri Aurobindo: “Our confused and embarrassed, ego-centred, small-motived will and action must cease, and make room for the total working of a swiftly powerful, lucidly automatic, divinely moved and guided force”. This is where the Atma Shatakam of Shankaracharya speaks tellingly to us: I have a body but I am not the body. I have the senses but I am not the senses. I have a mind but I am not the mind. I have an intellect but I am not the intellect. I am the self, luminous, pure, consciousness — complete, perfect, Bliss.

These verses illustrate the progression from the grossest level of the Lower Self (the body and senses) through gradually more refined layers (the mind and intellect) to reach ultimately the Higher Self. What is necessary is a process of re-education. Not disowning what I have but not identifying with the lower self either which provides the instruments for action by the self. Self-mastery is the basis for selfdevelopment. Man has to be the master of the instruments and not their slave. We need to understand that the Self is not a combination of variables subject to flux which is the nature of the body, senses, mind and intellect. The Self is the Constant and the Perfect. The individual has to come to feel himself as a Perfect Constant with an overlay, a super-imposition of imperfections. The next step is to dis-identify from the imperfect variables and re-identify with the foundation, the Perfect Constant, which is the Self. This going within, the interiorisation, need not inevitably lead to passivity and an inability to function powerfully in the material world. On the other hand, it enhances the power of effective functioning. Romain Rolland pointed this out: “A great ‘Introvert’ will know at the same time how to be a great ‘Extrovert’ (Here the example of Vivekananda seems to be conclusive).

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Interiorization has never led in principle to diminution of action. Arguments drawn from the supposed social passivity of mystic India are entirely erroneous...her interiorization, where the fires of her threatened life have taken refuge, is the principle of her national resurrection.” If the human being is imaged as a lamp then Tamo Guna is the wick of the lamp, Rajo Guna the oil and Sattva Guna the flame. The combination of the three can be altered and the key to managerial effectiveness lies in increasing the proportion of Sattva, reducing the Rajas and Tamas. The keynotes of Sattva are illumination, clarity of understanding free from contamination, poise, serenity, compassion, charity, patience, forgiveness, altruism, transparency, delight; of Rajas movement, fluctuating moods, passion, anger, greed, crookedness, fear, envy, grief; of Tamas obstruction and darkness, confusion, indecision, procrastination, sloth. If Sattva is characterised by intensity, then Rajas is swiftness and Tamas is inertia. The strategy is to use the Rajas by consciously activating the Sattva. A good example of this Guna Dynamics is provided in the Ramayana, where both Rama and Ravana perform leadership functions of planning, allocating resources, making decisions. But, where Ravana’s is a blind dynamism, Rama’s is illuminated dynamism. Among the three brothers, Vibhishana represents Sattva, Ravana Rajas and Kumbhakarna Tamas. A planned cultivation of Sattva is essential for the change agent because thereby he achieves the correct perception and understanding that is the pre-requisite for planning the effective intervention strategy. Sattva also provides the psychological elasticity that helps to absorb shocks invariable in a change process. Sattva provides an effortless ease and passionlessness in action while Rajas’ is an effort full of struggle and passionate action that dissipates energy. Because of its integral nature, Sattva also provides the akhanda, holistic, perspective that the fragmented Rajasik mind cannot visualise because of its inability to rise above trivialities (like the pussycat that went to look at the queen and ended up catching a mouse under the chair instead). The practical method for this is to choose one sattvik quality to increase and one rajasik quality to reduce. During mindful breathing, one imagines breathing in air surcharged with that chosen sattvik quality pervading the whole being, and exhaling a willed expulsion of the chosen rajasik quality. Parts of the Ethico-Moral dimension of values are the theories of Karma and Samskara. Karma is actually the opposite of fatalism and has the following features: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

A cause or set of causes at present must have an effect or effects in future. An effect at present must have had a cause in the past. Like cause, like effect. The effect returns to the source of the cause. Each cause has its own effect, there is no mutual cancellation. This law is as valid at the global, national, organisational and family levels as it is for the individual.

The effective manager has to cultivate awareness of the fact that like cause leads to like effect. This will act both as a deterrent and as an incentive. No blow comes without the cause originating from oneself, whether one is aware of it or not. Awareness of

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this is like a psychological thermostat warning us at the brink of taking a wrong decision. The incentive is that wholesome causes produce wholesome effects. There is no fatalism because I am accountable for whatever happens to me. Fate is shaped by my decisions. It is only this moment’s cumulative effect of a series of choices and causes made by me in the past. As Sri Aurobindo pointed out, “We ourselves are our own fate through our actions, but the fate created by us binds us; for what we have sown we must reap in this life or another. Still we are creating our fate for the future even while undergoing old fate from the past in the present.”

Arnold Toynbee points out that karma “is a running account in the spiritual life of an individual human being...In a karma account, neither the debit nor the credit entries are cumulative; the debit or the credit balance changes at each fresh entry in the ledger. The ethical level of a society at a particular moment depends on the state of the karma account of each of the participants in the society and on the relative ethical influence—positive or negative—of each participant on his fellow participants...The most important objective for a human being, both for his own sake and for the sake of society, is to improve his karma. The only way to improve it is for him to increase his self-mastery.”

The Karma Theory helps one to be ethically right and be aware at a more holistic level and so not to react from a non-sattvic level leading to worse effects later. Each effect can be used as an opportunity to elevate myself spiritually. This is sadhana and the need today is for the union of the sacred and the secular, for the Manager-sadhak, the teacher-sadhak, the politician-sadhak. A sadhak is distinguished by the nonbargaining spirit of dedication, doing the task for its own sake, not for the calculations of the lower self. S.K. Chakraborty points out that Duryodhana’s admission to Krishna (in the “Pandava Gita”) that he knows what is right but is not inclined to do it, and he knows what is wrong but is not inclined to refrain from it, shows that between the intellect knowing something and the acceptance of it by the heart exists a chasm. Hence, right knowing is neither superior to right behaviour nor equal to it. The gap between them occurs because of Samskaras. Any conscious karma leaves a residue deep within, a karmashaya that goes on accumulating as in a receptacle. It is also built up through everything taken in by the senses from the environment. Thus Samskaras pile up daily unawares. Intellectual knowledge built on that foundation is a thin veneer through which the powerful stored karma breaks out in aberrant behaviour. Gunas determine Karma, which creates Samaskaras, all three being interconnected. The remedy lies in being aware of the undesirability of the negatives samskaras and adopting the pratipaksha bhavana, by stilling the mind, withdrawing within and arousing consciously the positive feeling. Work is sacrifice, which is the basis of all existence. Work done as yajna, sacrifice, not for personal selfish goals, does not bind the worker. The higher order freedoms are not possible till we give up the lower order freedoms. The basic idea is not self-aggrandisement but a whittling away of the ego. Why work? For lokasamgraha, for welfare of the world and mankind, not for the Self which is complete in itself. If the Creator works incessantly, despite being

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complete, each person as a spark of His, needs to work in harmony with that spirit of desiring the welfare of society at large. The principle of non-attachment characterises the Creator and therefore should be emulated. Pandering to the small ego can go against the good of the organisation, society and nation. Ego, when in the forefront, compares itself to others, creates anxiety that sucks out psychic energy. Samattva or equilibrium maintains effectiveness, unaffected by joy and grief, keeping the energy level equable, giving strength to the mind. The workplace can be used as a moral gymnasium and through the conscious cultivation of sattva guna it can be possible to practise acting detachedly, nishkama karma. This goes hand-in-hand with yogah karmasu kaushalam the true meaning of which is not “skill in works is yoga”, for then a pickpocket’s skill would be yogic, but rather that true skill in work is the capacity to remain linked, be in yoga, i.e. while acting in the external world keep the consciousness anchored to the Higher Self. This can be built up by regularly stepping back consciously while working to practise the re-identification with the Higher Self. This marries work ethic to ethics-in-work, karma sadhana to dharma sadhana. This linking to the Divine through work that is performed as an offering to Him automatically ensures proper networking with other people since everyone is a creation of that Creator. On the other hand, if ego remains the centre, networking with the Supreme cannot take place, and it also sets up a barrier to establishing networks with other persons. It is a subordination of selfinterest to larger interests that will produce a wholesome effect, a good samskara for the future. Regarding Work as Worship is to marry the secular and the sacred, attending carefully to quality because work is regarded as an offering to the Divine, ensuring that every detail is in right order, and right means are used with the right attitude. It brings in sincerity in performance, honesty in means and choosing the best constituents. This leads to the inference that improving quality of work depends on improving the quality of mind, on achieving the Pure Mind. Retaining the inner connection, working while remaining in yoga, is skilful working. The individual intelligence being error-prone improves right decision-making by keeping in touch with the Supreme Intelligence and carries on working. Five variables determine the results of which the individual is only one and therefore we should not arrogate to ourselves the credit. These are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Adhishtham, i.e. body and mind form the ground for the soul to function. Kartta: the doer. Karanam: the tools, techniques. Cheshta: efforts of different types. Daivam/adrishta: unseen forces.

Work done unselfishly becomes a wholesome cause and leads to a wholesome effect. Swami Vivekananda said, “Those who work without any consciousness of their lower ego are not affected with evil, for they work for the good of the world. To work without motive, to work unattached, brings the highest bliss and freedom”.

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Management has to meet the needs of man and elicit motivation. In India in the 1950s, a need-based approach was implanted in a socio-economic setup, which was that of the USA a century ago. But our own pioneers had built up the Giving Model long ago. If the Self is complete then the needing model is incorrect as it conceives of man as a bundle of needs. That model is also a luxury our country cannot afford. The Social Concept of Man: Five-fold debts exist, to liquidate which is the purpose of life and that is the model of proper education. From birth we go on accumulating inexorably five kinds of debts by virtue of being born on earth and being a member of society. Hence, the proper approach in life, the life-position, is that of being a debtor who must exit this world honourably after discharging these debts: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Deva-rin: To elements and forces supporting human life without man doing anything in return. Acknowledge them, relate to them through emotions, prayer, grateful remembrance of super-human forces. Hence, our obligation to take care of ecology. Rishi-rin: Indebtedness to spiritual legacy, svadhyaya, which is to be repaid by reverential study (svadhyaya) and practice (abhyasa) and absorbing it in our lives. Pitri-rin: To parents and ancestors whose heritage we bear, and we need to relate to them even in spirit by maintaining the noble tradition and taking care of one’s elders. Nri-rin: To humanity at large. The summation of contributions of humanity at large is what I am (for meeting my food, education and other needs). Hence let me work remembering that with gratitude. Bhuta-rin: To sub-human species who make my existence possible. Hence, there is to be no exploitation but treating them as co-partners of nature and protecting flora and fauna, i.e. environmental indebtedness.

Recalling all these before working brings a realisation that I am the supreme debtor and creates a duties-and-obligations approach to society vis-à-vis the rights approach. If duties are not done, rights cannot be met; duties are the cause, rights the effect. Duty motivates because I feel indebted from birth. Rewards become a secondary issue. The Giving Model of motivation is a sublimation of Maslow’s concept of self-actualisation that is based on the lower self and which is seen to be unsuccessful both in multinational corporations and public sector enterprises whose top and bottom levels both grouse about the same things, the difference being only difference of scale. The body is a mansion of nine doors (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, anus, penis) all opening outwards. The mind is like a pond. Stones fall through the nine doors creating ripples of constant agitation because of which the water cannot reflect reality as it is. Hence, truth cannot be comprehended. Self-restraint, points out Tagore in Sadhana, is a means to return to the centre of being, harmonising all warring elements, unifying the disparate elements so that the isolated impressions reduce themselves to wisdom. A freedom from not of impulses is needed, the precise opposite of the indulgence of the senses that the West encourages and is propagating in our country. This is achieved through discipline consisting of the following:

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• self-restraint to control the external senses (sam); and • self-control to control internal thoughts (dam). Together, these create the Constructive Charisma for the leader inspiring others to serve a higher cause that is self-exceeding by nature. The major leadership problem today is that of a credibility gap in the dimension of values and character, not in technology or skills. This has slapped us in the face with the numerous scams, where eminent public figures have been exposed as highly skilled manipulators of public funds for private benefit. Our social matrix is incredibly complicated because of the complex mix of caste, creed, region, language, to which the decision-makers are not sensitive. Everywhere the mess we see is a creation of polluted emotions at work behind sharp intellects leading to a widespread alienation in society. A credible leadership, on the other hand, is characterised by love and discipline, being transformational by nature, not transactional; believing in commitment, not bargaining. Its end exceeds original expectations and the strategy does not depend on wealth and desire. Transactional leadership, however, invariably produces results that are less than the goal and is dependent on bargaining and negotiation for acquiring wealth and desire. The Transformational Leader moves the team towards ekatmanubhuti, the spiritual emotion of oneness, unity and svarup, the homogeneity essential for working as a team as opposed to namarupa, differentiation that is stressed in competition. The leader seeks to cultivate four bhavanas (dispositions) within himself and the team that Patanjali mentions: • • • •

maitri (friendliness towards the happy) karuna (compassion for the unhappy) mudita (delight in the virtuous) upekhsa (indifference to those acting wickedly towards him).

The process of education needs to stress the sense of homogeneity and the basic unity of all human beings in the image of a mound of clay as the primary reality that can assume so many different forms of vessels as the second-order reality. As Tagore points out in Personality, the logic behind the commandment “Love thy neighbour as thyself” is that we are all basically the same. Among team members discipline is an essential component that is founded upon the traditional Hierarchical structure of the Indian family, such as the duty owed by younger members of a family to the father who responds by making sacrifices for them in turn—the agraj-anuj model like the Japanese sempai-kohai relationship, not a wielding of power by the leader in the Western structural system dependent on formal position of the leader; Obedience, Rituals/Symbols, Danda Niti (law of chastisement) [cf. the diagram of Module 2 above]. The leader must be aware that he is a symbol, like the rajarshi (king-priest) of old. The team is loyal to that symbol and a member does not stand aside if his view is not reflected in the decision but, considering himself part of the whole, implements it whole-heartedly. Our culturespecific attitude of respect for age and pride in and love for the brilliance of the younger members need to form the foundation. This is not anti-technology, as the

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Japanese experience proves. Hierarchism in this sense is not a separative status, but an emotional concern acting as a bond between seniors and juniors, constituting a dynamic flow between different levels in the hierarchy. In practical terms, a model of decision-making is available. In facing difficulties in reaching a goal, anxiety drives us to jump straight into implementation for somehow getting rid of the disturbing emotion without solving the problem. This is a typical lower self-solution. Instead, recollect the heart centre, rise to the Higher Self, gather intuitive wisdom, gain confidence thereby and, in the calm, choose the correct option to achieve satisfaction. Again, anxiety, the besetting problem of the manager, can be countered through cultivating trustful surrender to the Divine. Similarly, to tackle anger by accepting it and expressing it, as western psychiatrists suggest, is to legitimise it, create repeated samskaras and turn it into a habit. On the other hand, to deny it and reject it as an intruder into my domain is the performance of a karma that produces inevitably a good samskara and a good habit leading to developing the capacity to use anger where required in the correct proportion while retaining inner poise and tranquillity. Rituals and symbols affirm the collective identity through collective rituals since behaviour reinforces attitudes, which in turn reinforce values. For instance, the behaviour of saluting elders instills the attitude of respect to age and builds up the value of humility. The Japanese industry uses this concept actively. In Matsushita, the inductees are indoctrinated in seven spiritual values: humility, gratitude, adjustment, harmony, fairness, national service through industry and struggle for betterment. Through a series of disciplined steps, the ritual builds up a mental framework of values. Dandaniti is the social level of regulatory discipline paralleling the natural phenomena that perform their duties regularly actuated by a grand design. This rod of chastisement is wielded with compassion that comes only after the ruler has been disciplined in self-control, self-restraint and renunciation. The principle of your heart weeping as you smite requires that the self be purified before administering chastisement. Today the leader is devoid of credibility and therefore no dandaniti exists. Both the leader and the team members need to practise de-egoization as a technique for resolving conflicts that have their seeds in clash of egos. It is easier to surrender my ego before my own God within me, which is why such surrender to the Supreme through meditation works well. The individual mind-heart, vyakti-mana is linked to and is part of the universal mind-heart, vishva-mana that responds to the former’s prayers. Maintaining a centre of pure luminous consciousness within creates similar vibrations that envelop the individual. An example of this is Sita placing a blade of grass between herself and the demon-lord, her virtue acting as her sure protection while in Ravana’s custody. Humility is the cardinal virtue that prepares the ground of the mind to receive the seed. Conflict resolution should adopt the model of the mother who tells the elder to be large-hearted towards the younger and share his toys with him, while bidding the younger to beg pardon of the elder for insolence. One expands the individual consciousness, while the other teaches humility.

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This is a product of dvanda, duality. When challenge regresses to stress, the individual collapses, as Arjuna did at the beginning of the Mahabharata war. Krishna leads Arjuna back from demoralising stress to enthusing challenge so that he can respond and act by staying above dualities and beyond gunas. Life has both pain and pleasure and stress occurs out of worry regarding how to avoid pain and get only pleasure without increasing the stress of the existential situation of life having both. For this, the Purusha perception has to be developed, staying away from Prakriti’s government. Stress is in the prakriti layer of personality, especially where tamas and rajas are involved. Stress-less action is without desire, attachment and ego. The ideal worker can be intensely active, and yet intensely at rest within, as epitomised in Krishna of the Mahabharata. The nirdvanda (beyond dualities) state can be achieved through either jnana yoga or bhakti yoga. The former links through discrimination to the Higher Self, which is purna, complete, and thus rises above dualities by being independent of grief and joy, free of attachment and greed while guarding against relapsing into helpless stoicism. Bhakti yoga is devotional, with the attitude of samattva, equanimity, that all is from the Lord and therefore I accept both success and failure, praise and blame with an equable mind. Remembering the boy Nachiketa’s startling response to the Lord of Death, bhumaiva sukham na alpe sukhamasti (in the finite there is no Ananda; the Infinite alone is blissful) in the Katha Upanishad helps to reduce stress as one realises that it is best to approach the Infinite direct instead of through an accumulation of finites. Our motto can be Tagore’s words written in 1920: “The whole of human society has felt the gravitational pull of a giant planet of greed with its concentric rings of innumerable satellites”. With a stable inner poise, we are less likely to succumb to external stress, while an impure mind defiled by 17 impurities is bound to be stressful. Defining effectiveness as a function of processing [E= f (p)], Chakraborty points out that the strategy of self-management is to prevent challenge from degenerating into stress, and to restore stressful conditions to the state of challenge, for, challenge is energy-stimulating where stress is energy-dissipating. Chapter I of the Gita exemplifies how stress leads to paralysis, while subsequently we see the transformation from this to a condition of challenge, reviving Arjuna to act. The four ingredients of the inner world are the conscience, the reason, the will (which needs to be strengthened to support the conscience against the calculative reason and the vital impulses) and emotion (being the prime mover, this particularly needs to be purified). When they function harmoniously, supplementing and complementing one another, the personality is integrated. When they work at crosspurposes, the personality disintegrates. The Gita deals with I-ness in the first six chapters: with the transcendent in the next six; and identity of the individual and the Cosmic Self in the last six. In IX. 27, it offers a central organising principle of life: Yadkaroshi (all that one does), yadashnashi (all that one enjoys), Yajjhoshi (all that one sacrifices), dadasi yat (all that one gifts), yat tapsyasi (all penance performed, i.e. labour with self-denial) kaunteya, tat kurushva madarpanam (offer all that to Me), offering to the Divine as a transcendent focus all that one does. This provides integration as opposed to fragmented existence that concentrates on mundane, ephemeral

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goals like camels munching thorns over and over again although the mouth bleeds. The call is to be the perfect worker, only an instrument of the Divine: yad yad karma prakurvet tad tad Brahmani samarpayet. Management depends on values and values depend on perception. Man is the highest sampada, and not a resource that is used by others like material drawn from a reservoir to replenish wants. In that case, a source is necessary to keep the resource ready, filled. Giving up, tyaga, is never negative. Tyaga is a value shift from a lower impulse to what is higher and wholesome, identifying with that, attaching to that which has no first cause, will never decompose: Eternal Bliss. Selfcentredness is essential for existence while extended self-centredness is needed for self-actualisation. It is a pilgrimage from self-centredness to self-actualisation to self-transcendence, as from insanity to sanity and on to salvation. The search to know in the world of experience is what sets man aside from other creatures driven by biological need who need security, food and sex too. The seer cannot be seen. The eyes cannot be seen. The subject cannot be made an object of experience. The finger cannot be touched. Man seeks after the truth of external and internal. Man alone seeks to end the suffering of fellow humans, seeks the good of all. He loves beauty irrespective of economic status, which produces art. The human spirit is ever pushing ahead, not wanting to be bound and craving freedom. Kama, krodha, lobha, moha, mada, matsarya (desire, wrath, greed, delusion, arrogance, envy) are the dis-values driving action, paralysing us in tamas or showing off in rajas. They have to be contained. The intellect cannot transform them. Only the mind can. First find out what I value most by purifying the intellect, controlling emotion, so that dharma-karma flows, which in turn purifies further. Select the value and ask if you are willing to pay the price for it through transformation. If we remember the adage; “Sow a thought and reap an act; sow an act and reap a habit (samskara); sow a habit and reap a character; sow a character and reap a destiny”, it becomes clear that it is transformation of that thought and not the external scaffolding of behaviour that is the key requirement. One of the finest examples of this is seen in the concept of Rajarshi in ancient India, combining the sacred and the secular, taking care of the general weal by first piercing the veil of ignorance to see the eternal verity [cf. King Milinda: meditation is the spine uniting all values]. One cannot earn or spend properly without dharma. Kama cannot be gratified without discretion, for it will lead to death, hence discipline is needed. Only one thing does not fade away: the divinity within, contacting which is salvation, moksha. Karma is for dharma, hence pure awareness is needed, shuchita, purity. For this, it is essential to practise the satyam shivam sundaram values and achieve them through contemplation. Everything is in me, and I extend it to all; I am akhanda, whole. Once felt, it is not possible to exploit others, for they are myself. That sums up Chakraborty’s exposition. What is of interest is that among 40 odd senior managers drawn from private and public sector companies for one such course in IIM Calcutta, which had as its guiding principle a quotation from Sri Aurobindo, “In this calm the right knowledge comes”, there was profound ignorance regarding Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda. At the end of the programme, the majority of them voiced a desire to be told who

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Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo were! Thankfully, they had heard of Tagore and knew something of his claim to fame. This is a revealing commentary on the nature of the education being imparted in India to the elite of society. Patanjali and the Gita were regarded as highly esoteric stuff vis-à-vis Maslow, Herzberg, Drucker, Macgregor and such Western management experts who are now styled “gurus”. Obviously, the effects of colonisation have not yet worn off, and the roots struck by centuries of slavery are so deeply ingrained that what is native to India strikes its elite as esoteric, while it is at home with whatever is touted by the West as the panacea. The other side of the picture is that companies like Godrej & Boyce, Bhilwara Group, RBI, SBI, BPCL, MIDHANI, Power Grid Corporation, Telco, NTPC, Shri Ram Fibres, Bharat Electronics, Indian Oil Corporation, IFFCO, have been persisting with such workshops, exposing more and more of their managers and staff to them with positive results in enhancing effectiveness. A small yet striking example was provided in a seminar on these workshops held in the IIM in December 1992. The Deputy General Manager of Godrej and Boyce, a self-proclaimed atheist, declared that in order to get over the nervousness and anxiety he was experiencing before entering the conference hall to address the distinguished gathering, he turned to the chapter on Anxiety in Sri Aurobindo and The Mother’s Living Within. Reading this restored him to an ambient calm frame of being so that he could address the gathering. S. K. Chakraborty’s effort is extremely significant because it seeks to reverse the prevailing ethos of India management’s slavish worship of western concepts which the West itself is abandoning in search of the ancient wisdom of the East. The encouraging factor is that the annual workshop on Values held in the IIM Calcutta campus was the most heavily subscribed course offered by the Institute. A Values System Alumni Association came into being and in response to their demand an annual re-enforcement workshop was also started where case studies developed by participants on their application of these techniques were discussed and lessons drawn for shaping future conduct. In 1994 and 1995, a large number of civil servants were put through these concepts in the Administrative Training Institute of the Government of West Bengal. This was restarted in 2004, and a systematic follow-up was planned with these trainees. The corporate world came forward to fund the setting up of IIM Calcutta’s Management Centre for Human Values conceived by Dr. Chakraborty and supported by Dr. Subir Chowdhury, Director of the IIM Calcutta. Nearly 40 organisations and individuals donated a corpus of almost Rs. 4.25 crores within 3 years—such was the regard that the conviction of this modern crusader evoked among the business community. There was no institutional or government funding to propagate India’s ancient yet revolutionary system of human development further, fine-tuning it to suit the modern environment. It is a remarkable instance of a lone crusade. One only hopes that management institutes emulate this sterling effort and Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Ramakrishna Mission, Vishva Bharati and such others join hands to form a movement to infuse spirituality in public life, particularly in the world of business! An encouraging development is that in 2013 the Netaji Subhas Open University, West Bengal, started a Master of Arts degree programme on Values, Ethics and Indian Culture designed by Dr. Chakraborty.

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All quotations are taken from S.K. Chakraborty’s The Management and Ethics Omnibus, Oxford University Press India, New Delhi, 2001.

Inspired Leadership and Indian Wisdom in Managing Crisis Anil Sachdev and Vidya M. Iyer

1 Introduction The practice of leadership across time, cultures and contexts have been studied and theorized. The fundamental definition of Leadership is the ability to influence others towards accomplishing a shared goal (Stogdill, 1950). Various researchers have developed definitions of Leadership with focus on traits, behaviors and competencies of leadership. As a natural corollary to modern business expansion in the west, initial businesses leadership studies were based on western culture. Carlyle’s Trait theory (Carlyle, 2014) propounded that leadership behaviors are influenced by the traits inherited by individuals. Since most leadership effectiveness is noticed in crisis situations, the leadership behaviors that result in effective situational leadership have been identified in Fiedler’s Contingency leadership effectiveness model. With globalization and immersion of cultures, oriental culture and practices have been continuously integrated into Leadership studies. Self-leadership and spiritual leadership concepts and models have been extensively studied by Dr. S. K. Chakraborty. Spiritual leadership behaviors have been integrated into various organizational leadership and behavior and competencies in various leading organizations in India and across the world. Global organizations including TATAs and Mahindra and Mahindra have laid emphasis on Higher Purpose, innovative mindset, courage to dream big and extreme empathy besides other leadership competencies. ‘Higher Purpose’ was suggested by a highly respected CEO of the Indian Steel company who often quoted the Indian spiritual Master, Patanjali who said ‘When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts A. Sachdev (B) School of Inspired Leadership—SOIL, Gurugram, India e-mail: [email protected] V. M. Iyer Professor and Director, SOIL School of Business Design, Manesar, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_25

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break their bonds’. ‘Courage’ was added by a leading hospitality company who had faced a grave security threat and had realized that many leaders emerged in that unprecedented crisis who put their own lives to risk to serve others. Organizational leaders were found to be making crucial decisions based on ‘Purpose and Values’ and not success and performance based on financial goals alone. Leadership based on deeper transcendental consciousness and motivation for selfless service (Fry et al., 2005) were key dimensions in the evolution of spiritual leadership research. Indian scriptures, especially Bhagavad Geeta emphasize on aspects of self that are underlying antecedents to various human behaviors, specifically leadership behaviors. The modern-day leadership theories based on motivation have been put to test in the most recent pandemic times. A large number of organizations have claimed to be focusing on employee well-being rather than productivity and profitability. The call for conscious leadership has become stronger with organizations making choices impacting the stakeholders in an unprecedented manner. While compassion (Hess 2021), courage and integrity (Taskinsoy, 2020) have emerged as the pivotal leadership behaviors in the pandemic crisis, contingency and situational leadership models are seen to be practiced with modification to the context. The COVID pandemic has been the biggest challenge faced by our planet in living memory. Organizations face VUCA (Vulnerability, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) and leadership of organizations is being put to severe examination. Leadership development has been of great interest to researchers for a long time. The purpose of this paper is to present insights from research on leadership development in recent times and link this to the insights gained from research on the Indian wisdom traditions—especially the Bhagavad Geeta. The lead author of this paper has been fortunate to work with many large and complex organizations, and this paper also shares insights from that work. The objective is to present an approach on leadership development inspired by the knowledge of the Geeta that could serve the well-being of all.

2 Spiritual Leadership, Trait and Contingency Theory of Leadership Spirituality is a state of intimate relationship with the inner self of higher values and morality as well as recognition of the truth of the inner nature of people (Fairholm, 2001) and is believed to be the intangible, life-affirming force in self and all human beings (Anderson, 2000). LW Fry in his paper “Toward a theory of spiritual leadership” (Fry, 2003) has studied a causal relationship between elements of motivational leadership and spiritual leadership where he developed a connection with altruistic love and vision along with other variables. Zaini Jamaludin, Nik Mutasim Nik Ab. Rahman, Zafir Khan Muhammad Makhbul and Fazli Idris (2011) in their paper have attempted to distinguish between transactional, transformational and spiritual leadership. The study is important in the context of emerging models of leadership.

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Jonathan Gosling and Antonio Marturamo’s paper—‘A review of leadership theory and competency frameworks’, 2003 has a comprehensive summary of major frameworks used on leadership over the years. Gosling and Marturamo share how the theory of transformational leadership has enabled many organizations to stress on creating meaning, shared purpose and values and tapping into the real potential of people and combine with Servant Leadership espoused by Robert Greenleaf. Servant Leadership (Greenleaf, 1979) focuses on developing leaders who serve the organization and the people that they work with so that they in turn could serve the needs of stakeholders that they deal with. ‘Authentic Leadership’ (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999) focuses on character and how it enables leaders to create impact. The strength of such leaders is derived from their values, transparency, and integrity. He quotes the example of Jim Burke, the former CEO of Johnson and Johnson and how he stressed the importance of values being the ‘north star’ or the moral compass that prevents organizations from experiencing chaos. Avolio and Nohria (2010) in their book on authentic leadership emphasised on the need to inculcate values in young graduates. The research of Linda Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove and Kent Lineback presented in their book—‘Leading Innovation is the art of creating collective genius’ (HBR Press Jan 2014) gives examples of transformational leaders acting as social architects—‘inviting the right people around the right questions’ and empowering them to find the answers. The book shares the example of Vineet Nayar and his team at HCL describing the process of bringing in fresh thinking around ‘employee first’ and encouraging young people to co-create the kind of organization that would make them perform at their best. The lead author was fortunate to work with Mr Nayar and his team on an assignment for leadership development for their top 100 leaders and witnessed first-hand what this book describes in detail. The paper on ‘Leadership Development for organizational success—Aaron J Kraus and Chantale N Wilson—University of Akron-2012’ (Kraus & Wilson, 2012) shares how important it is to design the right process for leadership development—defining the right competencies, developing habits of regular practice around these behaviors and skills, setting up effective mentoring and developing leadership pipelines. Joel Goldberg’s paper in Graziadio Business Review 2017 (Goldberg, 2014), called ‘Trends in Leadership Development—the evolution of market needs’ talks about how effective leadership talent is a scarce resource and why the shortage of this critical aspect causes issues in employee engagement. The great man theory of leadership (Judge et al., 2002) found that the situation played a vital role in determining leader effectiveness. Leadership effectiveness depended on leaders’ behaviors in different situations (Stogdill, 1974). In the 1950s, research concluded that in Behavioral Leadership Theory, through directive and supportive leadership behaviors effective outcomes could be attained for teams (Michigan University Study), and a balance between task-oriented and social and emotional issues must be combined to produce effective group and organizational outcomes (Ohio State University). ‘Contingency theories’ developed in the 1960s stated that there must be an appropriate fit between the leader’s behavior and the conditions of the situation. Robert House’s Path-goal theory connects the leaders’

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behaviors with motivation of the team members. The contexts and situations affect the team members’ behaviors and thus the leadership style and effectiveness are affected in turn. The Path–goal theory addresses the effort—reward linkage, performance— reward linkage, and clarifies of followers’ need for rewards (House & Mitchell, 1974). The transition in leadership focus from individuals to groups to strategic dimensions (House, 1996) emphasized on vision, motivation and control through values, especially in oriental cultures. The rise of the Japanese led industries gave rise to influence of Japanese ideas, such as team leadership and total quality management, as alternatives to bureaucracy (Ouchi, 1981). In adaptive cultures where traditional bureaucratic control mechanisms like standardization, formalization and centralization are substituted by values and beliefs. The adaptability culture has strategic leaders that support values promoting autonomy, individual initiative and responsibility, creativity, risk-taking, learning, and entrepreneurship that allow the organization to interpret signals from the environment into new goals and strategies. Further studies showed that traditional leadership had combined management with leadership and did not distinguish the conceptual distinction between management as control and leadership as motivation (Conger & Kanungo, 1988). While management includes planning, organizing, staffing, directing and controlling and focuses on short-term results; Leadership includes motivating people to change. Management is primarily focused on short-term results and leadership prepares the organization for the long haul by mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations (Kouzes & Pozner, 1987). Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends report 2021 talks about the importance of the human ‘being’ as the core of all decision-making and leaders beginning to give the greatest importance to this aspect in response to COVID.

3 Self-leadership as Expounded in Bhagavad Geeta The five companies that were studied as case studies include large Indian Global organizations in steel, automobiles, healthcare and hospitality sectors. As part of the study, visionary interviews of board members and senior leaders were conducted to appreciate the expectations from the leadership teams. Competency frameworks were developed based on the inputs, for talent development. Based on Sharon Brownie’s approach (Brownie, 2012) in her paper, ‘Listening to our stakeholders: analysis of interviews regarding competency-based career education and training and competency-based career frameworks’—2012, ‘talent appreciation exercises’ were conducted to get data from past performance as well as potential. Psychometric tests, 360-degree feedback from seniors, juniors and peers, intense dialogue with specially trained senior appreciators to identify strengths and areas of development; simulations, in basket exercises and role plays were used to obtain comprehensive information about each leader (Garavan et al., 1997) in Journal of Management Development.

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The competencies that these organizations identified as important to them were: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Strategic perspective, decision-making and business acumen. Whole-brain thinking. Global mindset. Building excitement and inspiration around vision, promoting and championing change. People development. Coaching and mentoring, being a ‘multiplier’. Teamwork and collaboration, interpersonal effectiveness, building trust, leveraging diversity and inclusion. Transformation through innovation, ‘learning, innovation and excellence’. Execution excellence, passion for the business. Process leadership for customer advocacy and customer focus. Leadership through sustainability. ‘Courage to dream big and have extreme passion, ‘Tenacity and Perseverance’. Managing external environment. Mindfulness. Having higher purpose and contributing to institution building with ethical, human and moral values. Courage sourced from love for the organization and its people—managing fear and leveraging failure.

While Mindfulness was adopted as an enabler of all other competencies and leadership by an organization, the final two competencies were added by three companies as they realized that by not putting these two crucial aspects, they were not doing justice to defining the kind of leaders that they needed. The ‘Bhagavad Geeta’ and ‘Patanjali’s Panchkoshas’ share this deep knowledge that could transform the ways in which we think of leadership. These organizations were choosing leaders who were role models in the ways in which they led themselves, based on the message of Indian spiritual wisdom. When the talent reports of the leaders of these companies were presented to the Boards and the leadership teams as part of the ‘Talent Review Process’, each company chose to identify the next CEO and his/her direct reports by putting greater weightage on character of the leaders and their ability to inspire others. In other words, they were making crucial decisions based on ‘Purpose and Values’ and not just short-term thinking of choosing leaders who stood for quarterly results and financial success. Self-leadership was defined as the “comprehensive self-influence perspective that concerns leading oneself toward performance of naturally motivating tasks as well as managing oneself to do work that must be done but is not naturally motivating” (Manz, 1986). Few other studies have shown the significance of emotional intelligence and flexibility besides other characteristics. People may choose to walk along with a person because they may identify with what the person says, feels and does. The way we lead our emotional minds to source positive emotions like love and compassion and overcome negative emotions like guilt, regret, and disappointments—has a huge impact on our well-being. Our leadership of our intellectual minds to discern what matters, grasp complexity, source

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creativity by overcoming fears and using the whole mind to take quality decisions— creates intellectual well-being and has profound impact on the quality of lives that we lead. Self-leadership is about sourcing our true nature—the life-giving force and letting it lead all our actions, emotions and thoughts to enable us to become joyful leaders who make the world better and in the process find the secret of happiness in every situation. The Bhagavad Geeta states that leading our bodies to ensure balance is the key to Self-leadership. Chapter 6, verse 17 on leading the body: yuktaahaaravihaarasya yuktacheshtasya karmasu | yuktasvapnaavabodhasya yogo bhavati duhkhahaa || 17 || TRANSLATION One who has regulated his intake and movements, his conduct in action, his sleep and wakefulness, his sorrows are eliminated through yoga. In this shloka, Lord Krishna inspires us to lead a balanced life so that our bodies can enable our vision to become role model leaders. He says that one who has a balanced diet, does regular exercise, and has proper sleep is fit for a virtuous life. We have been gifted the capacities to smell and taste to source food and beverages that may provide us nourishment, enable physical well-being and build energy to act in the world in ways that are important for us to realize our potential and give our best in the multiple roles that all of us play. Our bodies have the intelligence to know what is good for us. For example, if have upset stomachs, we seek light food and drink that is easy on our digestion system. If we are feeling weak, we are attracted to eat more proteins. However, in pursuing pleasure, we allow our minds to ignore the feedback of our bodies and we begin to indulge by ingesting unhealthy and excessive amount of food and drink, leading to disease and low well-being. Important aspects of leadership of the body are habits related to exercise and sleep as the Lord shares in the shloka given above. When we choose ways of exercise to suit our nature and goals, we develop a habit that has the most beneficial impact. Yoga and Pranayama are ancient and extremely effective methods that benefit all aspects of well-being. Sleep is often an ignored dimension. We need 7–8 hours of sleep to enable all aspects of our lives to be healthy. The Japanese practice of Shinrin Yoku or forest bathing is an exercise of being one with Nature and similar to expression in Geeta for spending time outdoors in the nature. Experts have shown with research that blood pressure, blood sugar and many other ailments are significantly reduced as we spend time with nature and quality of sleep, and overall well-being is enhanced. Shloka number 29 in Chapter 4 of the Geeta that explains this: apane juhvati pranam prane ‘panam tathapare pranapana-gati ruddhva pranayama-parayanah apare niyataharah pranan pranesu juhvati.

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TRANSLATION And there are even others who are inclined to the process of breath restraint to remain in trance, and they practice stopping the movement of the outgoing breath into the incoming, and incoming breath into the outgoing, and thus at last remain in trance, stopping all breathing. Some of them, curtailing the eating process, offer the outgoing breath into itself, as a sacrifice. This practice of yoga for leading the breathing process is called pranayama and involves regulating the air within the body to enable simultaneous passage in opposite directions. The apana air goes downward, and the prana air goes up. The pranayama yogi practices breathing the opposite way until the currents are neutralized into puraka, equilibrium.

The breath is impacted by our desires emanating from our emotional minds. The more pleasure we get, the more we seek; and when we do not get it, our minds get agitated and we are not at peace. We notice this when we watch our “breaths” and see how our inhaling and exhaling gets shorter when we have this conflict! The layer of breath exists between our bodies and minds and is the pulsating force that can either bring quiet to our bodies or excite them to great misery! The practice of ‘Pranayama’ explained in the Geeta not only ensures good physical and emotional health but also enables us to respond to stimuli from the world without any biases, leading to greater understanding and effective communication. Vijaykumar BA, Sachin Gudge, Mahesh Patil and Satish Mudbi write in their paper—‘Effects of Practice of Pranayama on control of lifestyle disorders’ in July 2014—Journal of Evolution of medical and dental sciences (Vijaykumar et al., 2014) about their research on the positive impact on several aspects of well-being due to this practice.

4 Leadership of the Emotional Mind The emotional mind that is sometimes referred to as the heart is a fascinating equipment gifted to us by Nature. Leading this aspect is both extremely difficult and yet a critical aspect of Self-leadership to source well-being. Positive emotions such as loving kindness, compassion, generosity, service, caring all enable us to source peace and harmony. Boris Groysberg and Susan Seligson (Groysberg et al., 2020) studied the ways in which business leaders have responded during COVID. They write in Harvard Business School’s ‘Working Knowledge—Business research for business leaders’ November 2020, that kindness has emerged as the most appreciated quality in these leaders. The Bhagwad Geeta refers to this virtue in Chap. 16 and several other places. On the other hand, negative emotions like jealousy, anger, envy, greed, hatred, deceit make us agitated, restless, and not at peace with ourselves and the world. In addition, other undesirable emotions such as disappointments, guilt, regrets pull us down and may even lead to depression.

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Bjorne Grinde (Grinde, 2016) writes in his paper ‘Why negative feelings are important when assessing well-being?’ in the ‘Journal of Happiness—August 2015’ about how envy other negative emotions reduce the feeling of happiness. This is also explained in the Bhagwad Geeta Chap. 16 while referring to demonic traits in people. To lead our emotional minds, we receive guidance from Stanzas 5, 6 and 7 of Chap. 6 of the Bhagavad Geeta. Stanza 5: uddharedatmanatmananam natmanamavasadayet. Atmaiva hyatmano bandhuratmaiva ripuratmanah. TRANSLATION Let a man lift himself by his own Self alone, and let him not lower himself; for, this Self alone is the friend of oneself, and this Self is the enemy of oneself. Stanza 6: bandhuratmatmanastasya yenatmaivatmana jitah Anatmanastu satrutve vartetatmaiva satruvat. TRANSLATION The Self is the friend of the self for him who has conquered himself by the Self, but to the unconquered self, the Self stands in the position of an enemy like the (external) foe. Stanza 7: jitatmanah prasantasya paramatma samahitah Sitosnasukhadukhesu tatha manapamanayoh. TRANSLATION The Supreme Self of him who is self-controlled and peaceful is balanced in cold and heat, pleasure and pain, as also in honor and dishonor. When these exhortations of the Gita are pitted against the despondent mind’s restlessness, we realize that we must to lead our own minds and bring back the positive emotions of higher purpose and vision and consciously teach our minds to be happy by doing the positive actions of appreciating others, showing compassion and deriving joy in the quality of work that we are delivering! (atmaiva hyatmanao bandhuratmaiva). In the seminal paper in which he outlined his theory of therapy, personality, and interpersonal relationships, Rogers (1959) defined empathy as: ‘To perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy, and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto, as if one were the other person, but without ever losing the “as if” condition’. This was perceived to mean that once we learn to stepping into the other’s shoes, we can appreciate what the other person is feeling. The great Spiritual Master Swami Chinmayananda shared this pearl of wisdom: ‘First we must learn to get out of our own shoes before we try to step into the others’ shoes!!’. The reason why empathy is so difficult to practice is because we still have our own lenses through which we try and feel what the other is experiencing— leading to a distortion in receiving the essence of what the other is experiencing.

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Most of us practice ‘sympathy’ in which we relate to others in a manner that says we feel along with you. The Greek word ‘Syn’ means together and pathos means feelings. This is the construct behind sympathy. The word empathy is made of ‘En’ in Greek for ‘in’ and pathos for feelings. The Geeta also teaches us to practice ‘gratitude’ to create positive emotions. ‘Yadrccha-labha-santustoDvandvatitoVimatsarah’. It means that we must live the spirit of contentment with what we have instead of hankering for what we lack. There are specific reasons why gratitude has a positive effect on people as it increases happiness. Gratitude helps in the overall feeling of happiness. In many experiments done by people in several parts of the world, individuals who had a practice of expressing gratitude reported a significant amount of positive emotions arising in their hearts. Those of us who practice gratitude improve relationships with others. Studies have shown that by writing letters of gratitude and reading them to people who are important in our lives, we not only improve our relationships but also feel a sense of fulfillment in our own lives. It has also been reported that those of us who engaged in a regular practice of gratitude improve our own self-esteem and feel very good about ourselves for engaging in this activity. Research has also shown that by practicing gratitude, we develop our own capacity to cope with challenges and report higher amount of resilience. It is for this reason that many religions of the world emphasize the virtues of gratitude. Irrespective of geography, ethnicity and cultural differences, the practice of gratitude results in benefits to many people. There also has been ongoing research on how gratitude enables us to lead our emotional minds effectively. Several years back, Natkins Philip C, Woodward Kathrane, Stone Tamara and Kolt Russell L, wrote about the aspect of gratitude in their paper. This aspect in their paper, ‘Gratitude and Happiness: Development of measure of gratitude and relationships with subjective well-being’.

5 Leadership of the Intellectual Mind The intellectual mind or the brain governs the emotional mind. This tool helps us to make important choices and prevents the emotional mind to get carried away by jumping into actions that give pleasure in the short run but a lot of pain in the long term. However, between the layer of the intellect and the life-giving force lays the layer of the ‘ego’ that prevents us to seek the truth. This is the one that continuously makes us go back to the body or the mind or the intellect and gives us conflicting impulses and signals as to why we should choose a life of pleasure and feel and think that our identification is nothing but the fields of action (through the body), relationships (through the emotional mind) and decisions (through the intellect). Leadership of the intellectual mind requires that we have clarity of thought by defining the most important question that we seek to address while facing any difficult problem. We need to get reliable and meaningful information, source several

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creative and yet practical solutions, assess risk and reward of each option, take guidance from our values before making any tradeoffs and involve all concerned so that implementation is flawless (Spetzler et al., 2016). Shlokas 7 and 8 of Chapter XVI of the Bhagavad Geeta reveal: Pravrttim ca nivrttim ca jana vidurasurah Na saucam napi cacaro na satyan tesu vidyate. TRANSLATION The demoniac knows not what to do and what to refrain from; neither purity, nor right conduct, nor truth is found in them. Asatyamapratistham te jagadahuranisvaram Aparasparasambutam kimanyatkamahaitukam. TRANSLATION They say, ‘the universe is without truth, without (moral) basis, without a God; not brought about by any regular casual sequence, with lust for its cause; what else?’. The Geeta explains that the people whose intellect gets deluded, often rationalize their action by justifying how others were doing similar things! Another aspect that leads to poor decisions is the fear in our minds that prevents us to generate enough creative options. From an early age, we are exposed to schooling and upbringing that create fears of criticism, failure, ambiguity, lack of resources and loss of self-image. The ultimate fear is of course the fear of death. The Geeta teaches us that once we understand the ultimate fear, the one of death and appreciate its spiritual significance, we develop tremendous capacity to take on challenges. The following shlokas from the Geeta are precious pearls that explain this truth brilliantly: Chapter 2 verse 20: na j¯ayate mriyate v¯a kad¯achin n¯ayam ˙ bh¯utv¯a bhavit¯a v¯a na bh¯uyah.. ajo nityah. s´h¯as´hvato’yam ˙ pur¯an.o na hanyate hanyam¯ane s´har¯ıre. TRANSLATION The soul is not born, nor does it die; it did not spring from something, and nothing sprang from it. It is unborn, eternal, immortal, and ageless. It is not destroyed when the body is destroyed.

verse 22. TRANSLATION v¯as¯ansi j¯ırn.a¯ ni yath¯a vih¯aya nav¯ani gr.ihn.a¯ ti naro’par¯an.i tath¯a s´har¯ır¯an.i vih¯aya j¯ırn.a¯ nya ny¯ani sany¯ati nav¯ani deh¯ı. As a person sheds worn-out garments and wears new ones, likewise, at the time of death, the soul casts off its worn-out body and enters a new one.

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What holds us back is a false sense of self-preservation. But this knowledge of the Geeta is truly empowering and helps us to stay grounded and give off our best—no matter how difficult the challenges that come our way!! The ‘Ego’ prevents us to ‘realize’ our true potential—that is beyond all doing and feeling and knowing—that of pure ‘being’. The ego creates all attachments and fears that prevent us to access the ‘inner voice’. When we transcend the ‘ego’, we enter the source of pure joy and peace and when we learn to access this bliss at will, we realize that we can change the knowing, feeling and doing that can make us move towards our real ‘calling’ or ‘purpose’ and ‘values’” that truly matters to us. We can transform ourselves to choose a life that is meaningful and joyful in which we can choose to be in a state that we are truly inspired by. The spiritual values of doing ‘good’ and being ‘good’ are in every human being. They may be dormant in those of us who are full of doing, feeling, and thinking aspects that prevent us to realize our true potential. This is brought out powerfully by shloka 47 in Chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Geeta that is perhaps quoted the most all over the world: karman.y-ev¯adhik¯aras te m¯a phales.hu kad¯achana m¯a karma-phala-hetur bh¯ur m¯a te sa˙ngo’stvakarman.i karman.i—in prescribed duties; eva—only; adhik¯arah.—right; te—your; m¯a—not; phales.hu—in the fruits; kad¯achana—at any time; m¯a—never; karma-phala—results of the activities; hetuh.—cause; bh¯uh.—be; m¯a—not; te—your; sa˙ngah.—attachment; astu—must be; akarman.i—in inaction. TRANSLATION You have a right to perform your duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of the actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.

6 Self-Leadership and Patanjali This is depicted in the picture below that is adapted from the Indian wisdom traditions explained by the great teacher, Patanjali. It describes these sheaths within us and explains poignantly a framework that is deep and comprehensive. When the individual is truly inspired by “calling” to do good, all bodily layers are aligned—what we deeply care for—our values (revealed by our inner voices) is aligned to what we think and speak, what we feel and demonstrate in our body language and relationships and what we do through our actions. The ego gets aligned as the power of love overcomes the force of attachments and fear. So far, we have described how the Geeta guides us to lead our bodies and actions, our emotions and mind, our intellect and its decisions and our egos.

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Fig. 1 Panchakosha. Source Based on Chinmayananda’s talks and developed by the Authors

This is depicted in the picture below that is adapted from the Indian wisdom traditions explained by the great teacher, Patanjali. It describes these sheaths within us and explains poignantly a framework that is deep and comprehensive (Fig. 1). Anil Sachdev writes in the National HRD Network Journal of January 2012 in his paper, ‘Shared Value—the Inspiration from Indian Ethos’ and explains this.1 When we lead the ‘Annamaya Kosha’ by the effective leadership of the body to have ‘balance’, the ‘Pranamaya kosha’ through conscious breathing, the ‘Manomaya kosha’ through compassion and gratitude, ‘Vigyanmaya kosha’ through quality decisions devoid of fear and unlock the potential of ‘Manomaya’ kosha by serving higher purpose and values, we transform ourselves as virtuous leaders that serve the wellbeing of all. This Self Leadership requires alignment of all ‘koshas’—the essence of Yoga defined by Patanjali and Bhagwad Geeta. Business leaders who live this way create shared value for all stakeholders—organizations and their shareholders, employees, customers, business partners, community and mother earth. Organizations are living entities and like human beings have their own koshas. Snehal Shah and Anil Sachdev (Shah & Sachdev, 2014) write on this subject in the Journal of Management Development, September 2014 in their paper, ‘How to develop spiritual awareness in the organization-lessons from Indian Yogic Philosophy’. They compared the five layers of an individual to those of an organization: • The ‘annamaya kosha’—Representation of values through Pictures, Images, Symbols, Logo, Vision. • The ‘pranamaya kosha’—Importance given to values through communication channels such as email, website, intranet, and other formal and informal channels. • The ‘manomaya kosha’—Organization’s plan to focus on values in its systems, processes and procedures. • The ‘vigyanmaya kosha’—Living and implementing the values through organization’s policies, procedures and structures. 1

Shared Value- the inspiration from Indian Ethos- Anil Sachdev, Founder and CEO, School Of Inspired Leadership- SOIL As published in the NHRD Network Journal.

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• The ‘anandnaya kosha’—Holistic engagement of the employee. ‘Harness the true potential’. The authors studied four different organizations by getting 259 employees of these organizations to respond to a specially designed instrument. This study brought out as to how important it is to work on each kosha and align all the five koshas to leverage the power of values and vision. Organizations who choose ‘Higher Purpose and Values’ co-create its power by involving all their stakeholders. They design strategy, structures, systems and processes based on this foundation. They define roles and goals, choose dashboards, do enabling reviews and recognize and reward all in line with this philosophy. They select employees based on these intangibles and build capability in all to live these behaviors to leverage their full power. At the same time, at the larger society level, we need to avoid attributing the erosion of values to systems failures and find intellectual reasons for corruption in countries such as India. Instead, we need to shine the light of consciousness on understanding of ethics and values. Sk Chakraborty writes in October 1997 in his paper, ‘Business Ethics in India’ in the Journal of Business Ethics, the importance of this aspect. Many organizations are leveraging the desire of their people to serve society at the core of their businesses. This is the reason for the birth of ‘Conscious Capitalism’. Raj Sisodia writes in Journal of Indian Business Research, June 2009 in his paper, ‘Doing business in the age of conscious capitalism’ about this idea. At the same time, we need to avoid attributing the erosion of values to systems failures and find intellectual reasons for corruption in countries such as India. Instead, we need to shine the light of consciousness on understanding of ethics and values. Sk Chakraborty writes in October 1997 in his paper, ‘Business Ethics in India’ in the Journal of Business Ethics, the importance of this aspect. The Pandemic of 2019–2020 shall go down in history as a milestone in management and leadership. Companies large and small have had illustrations of leaders with courage, commitment and conviction, but simultaneously there have been leaders who have shown insufficient courage and commitment to stakeholders. Leaders have resorted to job losses, over communicating and excessive reporting to compensate for lack of trust have been rampant in COVID times. While organizations have attempted to maintain communication and sustain employee well-being, employees have complained of excessive online controls. These testing times call for spiritual leadership where leaders have been trained on trust and compassion besides adopting the Koshas and behaviors ascribed in the Bhagavad Geeta. A the same time, we need to remember that the psychological impact of crisis like the COVID one on human minds is one of mounting insecurity and threat. Fortunately, many organizations are increasingly bringing the urge to ‘do good’ at the core of their businesses. This is leading to movements such as ‘Conscious Capitalism’. When organizations make the world better by their endeavors, they truly create ‘shared value’ for all stakeholders. Such entities become long-lasting, attractive, trustworthy, and true role models. The time has come to create a network

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of the ‘good’ who practice Self-leadership articulated by the Bhagavad Geeta and Patanjali, so that they overcome their humility and come out and aggressively spread their goodness to others and help the ‘fence sitters’ to move away from the selfish who achieve success through questionable means. President Abdul Kalam’s message on spiritual leadership emphasized on leadership taking responsibility for failure, servant leadership and altruistic leadership. To deal with trying situations, where human life and well-being are paramount it is important that a human outlook would place man before money, spirituality could follow (Korten, 1998) (Fig. 2). The authors, based on decades of consulting experience with leading Indian and Global multinationals, have observed that leadership is specific to contexts and culture, but the fundamental success factors of leadership effectiveness are related to influencing others for transformational outcomes. Their work has led them to conclude that Self-leadership is the essence of this leadership. In order to develop this kind of leadership in organization, they recommend that organizations focus on building leaders with strong character who learn from the following qualities of virtuous leaders described in the Bhagwad Geeta, Chapter 16: • • • •

Fearlessness, Purity of mind, Steadfastness in spiritual knowledge, Charity,

Fig. 2 Conceptual holistic leadership model for unprecedented crisis. Source Based on organizational information and proposed by authors

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Control of the senses, Performance of sacrifice (to serve the well-being of all), Study of the sacred books, Austerity, Straight forwardness, Non-violence, Truthfulness, Absence of anger, Renunciation (of selfish and ego-centric desires), Peacefulness, Restraint from fault-finding, Compassion toward all living beings, Absence of covetousness, Gentleness, Modesty, And lack of fickleness, Vigor, Forgiveness, Fortitude, Cleanliness, Bearing enmity toward none, And absence of vanity.

At the same time, they need to be vigilant and stay away from the negative influence of leaders with the following qualities: • • • • • • • • •

Hypocrisy, Arrogance, Conceit, Anger, Ignorance (of what is right and wrong), Harboring insatiable lust, Clinging to their false tenets, Attracted to the impermanent, Working with impure resolve.

To practice these values, they need to imbibe Self Leadership related to the five ‘koshas’: • Leadership of the body and senses—‘Annamaya Kosha’—the practice of balance or Sustainability. • Leadership of the breath—‘Pranamaya kosha’—the practice of communication without biases and honoring the uniqueness of each person—Diversity. • Leadership of the emotional mind—‘Manomaya kosha’—practice of compassion. • Leadership of the intellectual mind—‘Vigyanmaya kosha’—practice of decision making based on creating value of all stakeholders—Ethics.

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• Sourcing the potential of the consciousness—the spiritual energy deep within ourselves—practice of Self-awareness and being fully present—whole person leadership—Mindfulness. Below are a set of questions that we have developed in a 360-degree feedback instrument to enable leaders to reflect on each of these five core pillars: • Sustainability – I contribute to the environment and sustainability by participating in community work, networks, and appropriate forums. – I can balance short-term needs with the long term while taking decisions. – I commit resources to those options that are eco-friendly and socially beneficial. – I lead a lifestyle with personal habits that use the earth’s resources such as water, paper, energy etc. in a responsible manner. • Diversity – I am comfortable while working with people from different cultures and backgrounds; I adapt easily to different styles and approaches. – I value my own spiritual, cultural traditions and am open to learning from other people’s traditions and cultures. – I think I can leverage the uniqueness of everyone in my team to facilitate innovation and high performance. – I recognize and appreciate the uniqueness of people in terms of age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, etc. • Compassion – – – –

I invest my time and resources in working towards the development of people. I encourage people to speak without hesitation and without fear of reprisal. I am passionate about the social advancement of people. I believe that I can connect to the true feelings of people.

• Ethics – – – –

I walk the talk in demonstrating congruence between thought and action. I believe I stand up for organizational values and their practice. I introspect often to check whether I am acting according to my own values. I design processes and systems that reflect my inherent beliefs and values.

• Mindfulness – I feel that I am fully aware of how my actions, behavior, emotions and thoughts impact others. – I feel that I give ‘my personal best’ and am ‘fully present’ in the work that I do at most times. – I can look at the ‘whole picture’ and connect the dots to get a comprehensive view of the system.

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– I do not allow disappointments, challenges, obstacles, and negative thoughts to upset my deriving meaning and joy at work. This instrument has been used by us to develop leaders in many organizations. The five companies that we referred to earlier in this paper also leveraged this framework to expand their practices over time. While the outcomes sought by these organizations are paramount, the process of practicing leadership of this kind leaves a deep impact on stakeholders. Over time, a comprehensive leadership model will emerge that would include focus on the spirit of leadership with awareness of the Self, the context or environment and the characteristics and behaviors as defined in the Contingency and Trait models used so far. As a further study, it would be empirically studied to assess the moderating influence of the variables such as Courage, Higher Purpose, extreme empathy and commitment to self—less action in the relationship between the various Leadership Types and Leadership in Unprecedented Crisis. This will help us to get evidence to recommend that the Self-leadership model of the Bhagwad Geeta and Patanjali is not only good for serving well-being of all but has benefits that can be measured and experienced for every stakeholder.

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Times May Change, What Is Right Does Not S. Padmanabhan

1 Ethos of the Tata Group We do not claim to be more unselfish, more generous, or more philanthropic than other people. But, we think, we started on sound and straightforward business principles, considering the interests of our shareholders our own, and the health and welfare of our employees the sure foundation of our prosperity. (Jamsetji Tata—Founder of the Tata group, Chairman (1868–1904))

The dynamics of change over the ages have put to the test the role values play in our lives. Their influence has been prominent in either weathering the storms of life, or not, as chosen consciously in various circumstantial situations by leaders, across all walks of life. The Tata group is an institution in the making for over 150 years, on values-based decision-making in business, while sustaining the spirit of human endeavor in industrial progress. Let’s examine some footprints in the sands of time which exemplify this context. Excerpts from a Speech by Jamsetji Tata at the opening of the new extension of the Empress Mills at Nagpur, on April 5, 1895, by the Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces. [Credits: Tata Central Archives]: We began with a daily productive capacity of about 8000 Ibs. of yarn and found employment for about 600 hands. Our production has gone on increasing till it has now reached 30,000 Ibs. The number of hands employed at present in the mills amounts to about 3100. It may be an interesting fact to learn that during this period the rate of wages has more than doubled itself. When the extension you, sir, are now opening will be fully at work, there will be employment for no less than 4000 hands. In this number, I do not include the operatives working for us by contract or at our several small factories and agencies. When we began, our property was worth 15 lacs. It will be worth 371 lacs when this new shed is completed. This is the intrinsic S. Padmanabhan (B) Tata Business Excellence Group, Mumbai, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_26

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value, or the real cost of the property. But the esteem in which it is held can be best gauged by the market value of the shares, the present quotation of which runs it up to nearly a crore of rupees. We set our face against the system of charging a quarter anna commission on production a system which has been so much stigmatized and proved so harmful to the mill industry of Bombay. In fact, we charged no commission of any kind whatever, thus making the interests of our shareholders the same as our own. We dealt directly as far as possible, with sellers and buyers, allowed no discounts or commissions, drew no handfuls or samples, or made unwarranted deductions; but brought and sold at fair fixed prices. Even a child could buy from, or sell to us on the same terms as any wide-awake expert. Thus, full confidence has been established between us and our constituents.

Let’s reflect on what it takes to build a good company. One that operates within the framework of law, or one that operates within a moral framework? The moral framework captures the spirit of goodness and goodwill, founded upon a bedrock of values and principles which form the very foundation of a legal framework. The moral dimension is the true essence of the letter of the law within a legal framework, for within it resides one’s North Star, driven by one’s inner voice or conscience.

1.1 Trail Blazers of People-Centric Practices in Business (Values in Action) Early in the twentieth century, India continued to struggle in more ways than one, under the yoke of rule by a foreign power. Over these years, and after, Tata companies have consciously chosen to remain guided by the spirit of innate values, in the absence of a formal Code. This characteristic trait is evidenced by several people-centered practices in business, long before they were recognized as part of laws governing the functioning of industry, in India, and other parts of the world. A few examples are elucidated here. In 1912, an ‘eight-hour work day’ was adopted for the workforce operating its manufacturing set up at Jamshedpur, in the northern part of India. This practice was enforced by the law in 1948, barely a year after India was declared an independent nation. Similarly, the benefit of ‘retiring gratuity’ for workmen became a Tata practice in 1937. This matter was enforced by the law in 1972.

1.2 The Pursuit of Values Over the past 150 years, Tatas have attracted millions, drawn to them as a beacon of light, an allure of the righteous way, transiting from an oasis of hope, into a river of realizing dreams, of people across the world.

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We are an outcome of what we learn, how we learn, and eventually what we do with the learning. In 1991, when Mr. Ratan N Tata (Chairman emeritus of the group) was nominated by Mr. JRD Tata to take over the reins of the group, one of his first initiatives was to assign a research study on values in an organization—it’s nature, evolution, and need for nurturing. This research project entailed a deep-dive into a fundamental question concerning how values influence organizations, and how one should be aware of this core ingredient in governing, operating, and communicating the purpose of a business. How values flow into the right kind of behaviors and being aware of the impact these behaviors have upon people in the business ecosystem are required to be implemented and measured, particularly in services of the communities where Tata businesses operated. What great leaders do is propel their minds into uncharted territory. They are unafraid of experimenting, exploring roads not yet traversed. One leads from the front in the domain of thought-leadership and when one leaps over mental minefields, successes and failures are at stake. One falls, pulls oneself up, and starts all over again.

1.3 A Meeting of Minds In the mid-nineties, Mr. Ratan N Tata directed a senior executive to meet S. K. Chakraborty, the founder of the Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV), an entity operating under the aegis of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta, India. (Kolkata, as the cosmopolitan city is named today). The Tata executive attended a 10-day program led by Chakraborty. His conversation with the eminent Professor brought to him the realization that an organization’s values are an imprint of the supreme leader. He reflected that sustaining values is a fragile part of any business. It dawned on him that the values a leader embodies could cast a shadow upon the organization, and could alter its trajectory. Chakraborty extolled Mr. RN Tata as one who practices the Raj-Rishi model. • The Raj-Rishi model is drawn from the premise of ‘service before self’. As an emperor (Raja/King), though he has immense power, he restrains the self from benefitting materialistically in personal terms. And as a Saint or sage (Rishi), the priority of Care is given to others, always and first. This approach enables the leader to remain objectively balanced in decision-making and the sharing of wealth. • When one is driven to work in a manner committed majorly to benefit the welfare of others, the selfless-self overshadows the selfish-self, working for a purpose larger than oneself, without the trappings of materialistic expectations in return. The title of the article reflects the very spirit of the Tata group, which has been guiding it since its inception in 1868. The Group’s eternal ethos of Leadership with Trust, its core values, and the Tata Code of Conduct (articulated in 1998) serve as cornerstones for this relentless journey.

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A few years later, the group embarked on putting together a framework for business excellence, to commemorate JRD Tata, the values he stood for, and to establish leadership criteria in business, in terms of processes, measures, outcomes, and results. Thus was conceived the group motto of ‘Leadership with Trust’. In the late nineties, the journey to build the narrative on thought-leadership in terms of values which best described the group’s cultural DNA propelled the conversation beyond good governance to one of brand equity. Integrated with creating guidelines for a Brand Equity, Business Promotion (BE-BP) framework, the movement grew to craft a BE-BP agreement between Tata Sons, the holding company, and each operating company. A key condition in this BE-BP agreement mandated each operating business entity to commit to adherence to the Tata Code of Conduct (TCoC) and the Tata Business Excellence Model (TBEM). Business Ethics and related compliance was integrated and baked into the TBEM framework which strove to assess the climate and culture for business excellence in a Tata operating entity. To spur an environment for global competitiveness among group companies, in honor of Mr. JRD Tata’s persistent pursuit for excellence in anything he put his mind and hands to, an award-winning process termed the JRD-QV (JRD-Quality Value) came to be the pinnacle of accomplishment as a culmination of a business entity’s efforts and results, viewed from the multiple lenses of the TBEM framework.

1.4 Leadership with Trust This motto epitomizes the manner in which operating entities govern and operate their businesses, within the Tata group of companies. Leadership: This vital attribute is afforded equal priority from a strategic and tactical level, in governing and operating a business. Since the late nineties, the Tata group has instituted a business excellence model to support the operations across businesses such as Materials, Automotive, Communication and IT, Retail and FMCG, Aviation, Financial Services, Hospitality, and Manufacturing. The Tata Business Excellence Model (TBEM) has been a model for assessing the levels of competence, the culture of engagement, and the results of Tata companies. Tata Quality Management Services (TQMS) was the entity conceptualized in the nineties to promote the engagement of Tata companies with the TBEM approach to assessing the standard of business excellence in their respective operational footprints. Year on year, the TBEM model is re-calibrated in a manner aligned to the Malcolm Baldrige model, in keeping pace with the dynamics of change, with the business excellence landscape across the world. The domain of Leadership in Business Ethics (LBE) is embedded into the TBEM model. Trust: This fragile yet vital ingredient is at the core of every sustainable relationship and in order to sustain it, a system exists within the group.

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Core Values: The five core values of Integrity, Responsibility, Pioneering, Unity, and Excellence underpin the group’s culture. Each operating company retains the freedom to choose its set of values as relevant to its business environment. These values could differ from the five core values named above, yet each business entity in principle is expected to retain a close connect to these values in their respective culture.

2 From the Abstract to the Finite—The Striving for Excellence Continues To make the five core values more explicit, in the context of the movement which commenced in the early nineties, the motto of leadership with trust is described briefly in a few milestones of the business ethics and compliance journey.

2.1 Framework for Leadership in Business Ethics (LBE) The group’s core values are at the heart of a four-pillar framework for the domain of LBE. This framework for LBE anchors the governance and operations of each Tata company. The four pillars which constitute the framework are (a) (b) (c) (d)

Role of Leadership. Compliance Structure and Mechanisms. Communication and Training. Measurement of Effectiveness.

2.2 Tata Code of Conduct (TCoC—1998) In 1998, the Tata Code of Conduct was articulated in the letter for the first time, launched by Mr. Ratan N Tata, the Chairman of the Tata group. This document was aligned to the spirit in the ethos of the group, intended to guide the culture for compliance in the governance of all Tata companies, with the five core values implicitly embedded. The 25 clauses in this document ranged from topics, such as ‘National Interest’ to ‘Cooperation among companies’, to the ‘Reporting of Concerns’. Currently, a 2015 version of the Tata Code of Conduct is in force.

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2.3 Management of Business Ethics (MBE) Assurance Survey (2003 Onward) Early this millennium, TQMS instituted a survey to assess the extent of implementation of values in the culture of an operating company, relative to five perspectives. The perspectives assessed were (a) Leadership Engagement, (b) Environment for Ethics, (c) Awareness and Training, (d) Systems and Processes, and (e) Ethics Counsellor’s Role. This survey was designed as an assurance to the top management and the board on the climate for ethical conduct in the course of operating a business. This instrument has been sustained over the last two decades. Every operating company is currently expected to subscribe to this instrument, once every 24 months.

2.4 MBE Reference Manual (2006) In 2006, TQMS released a document that outlined the role and responsibility of the board and top management in promoting the cascade of the Code, to assist its implementation in operating businesses. This descriptive document was designed to facilitate companies to communicate, and engage with the various stakeholder segments, in their comprehension of the Code. This document amplified each of the 25 clauses from the Code, to relate more clearly to the application of Code guidance, through a set of scenarios and question-response inputs.

2.5 The TQMS—MCHV Project in Business Ethics Assessment In 2006, the Tata Quality Management Services (TQMS), in collaboration with the Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV), developed a diagnostic approach to assess the ethical tenets of business corporations. TQMS, currently known as Tata Business Excellence Group (TBExG), is a division of Tata Sons Pvt Ltd. Genesis of the project: During 2005–06, Tata Quality Management Services (TQMS), as part of its annual event calendar, commenced regional Ethics and Compliance conclaves with the Ethics Counsellor community across the Tata group. At these Regional Forum meetings, guest speakers from business and academia spoke and interacted with MDs, CEOs, and senior leadership, from operating companies in the region. Topics of conversation pivoted around compliance and ethics and related leadership behaviors aligned to the culture the group aspired toward sustaining. These conclaves were held periodically across regions in the North, East, West, and South of the country.

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It was at one such event in Kolkata for the Eastern region, on invitation by TQMS, Prof. Sanjoy Mukherjee from the MCHV spoke on the matter of human values. The idea to spur a deeper partnership with MCHV was sparked at this event. TQMS sought to assess the extent to which values were implemented or deployed in the culture of an operating business entity. TQMS joined efforts with MCHV to build a program to assess the ethical tenets in the Culture of business corporations. The two entities jointly developed an assessment model to serve this objective.

2.6 TCoC Refresh (2008) In 2008, the original version of the 1998 Code was refreshed to keep pace with the growing global footprint of operating companies across the Tata group. Voices of senior business leaders and Company Ethics Counsellors (CECs) were aggregated to realign Code guidance commensurate to the different cultures and jurisdictions where Tata companies operated, within and outside India. Key changes from the earlier Code included the dropping of the clause on ‘National Interest’, and using a genderneutral language. Further, the clause on Reporting of Concerns was comprehensively amplified.

2.7 MBE Implementation Booklet (2008) In 2008, TQMS released a document which described each of the four pillars of the MBE framework in detail, to enable the implementation of business ethics and compliance, across group companies. This document attempted to convert thoughtleadership on business ethics to calibrated and measurable action orientation, in business. For each of the perspectives, three levels of process effectiveness measures in terms of High/Medium/Low for process and result implementation were charted. This document incorporated a ‘self-assessment grid’ to map focus points for action, with the key stakeholders responsible for integrating the spirit and letter of the Code, in all business transactions, while retaining connect to the ethos of the Tata brand. The key stakeholder segments spotlighted were (a) MD/CEO and senior leaders, (b) Employees, and (c) Third parties. The grid also incorporated metrics for lessons learnt and benchmarking (internal and external).

2.8 Group Ethics Office (2013) In 2013, the Group Ethics Office was instituted. The group ethics officer reports to and is part of the Chairman’s office.

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2.9 Annual Compliance Report (2014) In 2014, a formal automated mechanism was put in place as an agency to monitor the degree of compliance and ethics across group companies. Annually, each operating company subscribes to this process of reporting to the group ethics office. An analysis of the aggregated findings informs the Chairman’s office on the status of implementation of business ethics and compliance measures, integrated with the business. One of the key outcomes of this resulted in a sharing of best practices across companies. Year on year, based upon the process and results maturity for implementation of business ethics and compliance, the group ethics office informs each company board and the MD/CEO, of the strengths and areas deserving improvement. This is an ongoing annual compliance practice.

2.10 Tata Code of Conduct (TCoC—2015) The Tata Code of Conduct was refreshed again in 2015, to make it simpler to comprehend and apply more universally in practice, across countries, cultures, and jurisdictions. The current version of the Code is overhauled to be more in keeping with the times, contemporary, and comprises scenarios, FAQs, and check-step guidance. The five core values are explicitly mentioned in the Code, in addition to the 13 principles of good business conduct. Each of these principles finds expression in one or more sections of the Code. In terms of Compliance with the Code, a declaration statement is included at the end page of the Code, as a tear-away portion. For queries and suggestions regarding the Code, an employee is encouraged to reach out to the group ethics office via [email protected]. Some excerpts from the Code Leadership that Inspires: For over 100 years, the Tata group has been led by visionaries who have stayed true to the vision of the founder, Jamsetji Tata. A vision that placed the greater good of society at par with business growth. A vision that put into practice pioneering social initiatives that changed the way responsible business was run. And a vision that brought into the group a strong social conscience.

Foreword by Chairman of the Tata group, Mr. N. Chandrasekaran. The Tata Code of Conduct outlines our commitment to each of our stakeholders, including the communities in which we operate, and is our guiding light when we are sometimes faced with business dilemmas that leave us at ethical crossroads. The Code is also dynamic in that it has been periodically refreshed in order to remain contemporary and contextual to the changes in law and regulations.

However, it remains unaltered at its core. Accountability: The Code is more than a set of prescriptive guidelines issued solely for the purpose of formal complaints. It represents our collective commitment to our value system and to our core principles. Every person employed by us, directly or indirectly, should expect to be held accountable for his/her behavior. Should such behavior violate this Code, they may

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be subject to action according to their employment terms and relevant company policies. When followed in letter and spirit, this Code is ‘lived’ by our employees as well as those who work with us. It represents our shared responsibility to all our stakeholders, and our mutual commitment to each other. Roles and Responsibilities: Level 1—Chairman’s Office: Group Ethics Officer (GEO): From a governance and regulatory standpoint, three levels of accountability exist. At the group Chairman’s level, a group ethics officer (GEO) oversees the culture for ethics and compliance across the business operations of group companies. The group ethics office works under the aegis of the Chairman’s office. Level 2—Board of each operating company: Principal Ethics officer (PEO): The MD/CEO of each operating company is designated as the Principal Ethics Officer (PEO), or Chief Ethics Officer (CEO). The board reviews the culture for ethics and compliance in the operations of the company. The PEO, is responsible to execute, monitor and integrate the implementation of LBE in the culture of operations in the business/es. Level 3—Company Ethics Counsellor (CEC): For each Tata company, a member of the senior leadership team, is nominated by the PEO to perform the role of the Company Ethics Counsellor (CEC). The CEC retains a dotted line reporting relationship, with the chairperson of the Audit committee, in the board. Location Ethics Counsellor (LEC): Further down the leadership pipeline in a company, Location Ethics Counsellors (LECs) are nominated from middle and senior management, across different business functions. LECs play a significant role in assisting the CEC and are responsible to catalyze LBE implementation within the business as well as across different stakeholder segments, for the various business functions in a company, at each location. In large companies, where associated business needs are catered to, divisions/strategic business units (SBUs) are in place. In these divisions/SBUs, Division Ethics Coordinators (DECs), perform the role of LECs.

3 The Times We Live In The Group Ethics Office, the custodian of the TCOC for the Tata Group of companies, incorporates data and insights from two separate yet integrated sources. These are 1. 2.

A comprehensive business ethics compliance map, referred to earlier as the ‘Annual Compliance Report’. This process commenced in 2014. The Leadership in Business Ethics (LBE) Assurance Survey (sustained every 24 months since 2003).

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4 Conclusion In business, stakeholders prefer to associate with corporations who espouse ethical practices, driven by a spirit of values and principles of good business conduct. Such corporations are expected to respect and adopt a democratic, transparent, and meritocratic interdependent approach—which is the foundation of Trust. While there is a need to preserve values and enhance good practices as unique differentiators of one’s corporate identity, there is a need running parallel to recognize change, and adapt to the changing times. Under normal conditions, a structured and planned approach which is contemporary, transparent, and result-oriented is the order of the day. At times of disruption and crisis though, it is the true character/mettle of a corporation’s character that emerges and is put to the test. It is, therefore, at such times that a corporation is seen to stand up to, or not, for its values, and this is because—Times may change, what is Right does not!

Nurturing Conscious Organizations and Individuals Yazdi Jehangir Bankwala

Bengt Gustavsson of University of Stockholm, Sweden wrote in 1995 that S. K. Chakraborty’s “insights in value systems and managerial effectiveness are of great importance in restoring the wisdom of the unseen layers of consciousness guiding the destiny of the manager and the organization” and “The basis of management development is found in the consciousness of managers and their collective consciousness of the organization” (Chakraborty, 1995: 223). Based on my experience, I will reflect on some basic questions: (1)

(2)

(3)

How can organizations and individuals seek to deepen their own purpose and meaning? Whilst management a science of efficient allocation of resources, will it transcend itself to incorporate invisible resources? (Aspirations, passion, expressions, fulfilment, the spirit). How can a balance between the moral and the material be achieved? How can organizations and individuals be net contributors to society/community/others rather than be extracting them? “When you give more than what you receive, then you have a moral profit” (Thiss, 1995). Can an approach with emphasis on inner process and in destruction of the self-identity be enabling or disempowering? Can a value-based approach be an important starting position on this journey?

My journey to glimpses on nurturing consciousness in organizations and individuals was an accidental experiment that unfolded by personal circumstances. I was greatly inspired by S. K. Chakraborty as I attended his International Workshops on Human Values at IIMC in 1997 and visited IIMC over a number of years later. During Y. J. Bankwala (B) Arpitha Associates, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] Arpitha Associates, Singapore, Singapore Sejahtera Leadership Initiative Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_27

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his visits to Singapore and Malaysia I had a rare opportunity to spend quality time with him. This gave me deeper insights into the importance of our beingness. My experience in nurturing conscious organizations and individuals continued under the mentorship of J. M. Sampath, a thought leader, consultant and author, who is a pioneer on a process of Values Clarification, which starts with greater awareness of the importance of one’s behaviours. I educated, worked and lived for two decades in the UK and then for over two decades in Malaysia, Singapore (a confluence of the cultures of Malay, India and China) with its tradition and religions. My professional experience of 40 years has focused on working with diverse cultures in both corporate and community-based initiatives. Bankwala (2003) The synthesis of experience and exposure to beingness and behaviour forms the perspective of my worldview and my underlying assumptions.

1 Is There a Need for Consciousness Organizations or Individuals? History may record that, in 2020, most nations were faced with lockdowns that continue to affect people and economies for some time to come. This is a historic period for new approaches or a lost opportunity in wanting to return to our “normal” models. As economies are projected to decline and the possibility of mass unemployment shows that our models of GDP may not be an adequate measure of our success. Could Gross National Happiness (GNH) evolving in Bhutan over the last 50 years offer alternative approaches? The global pandemic of Coronavirus in 2020/21 is perhaps teaches us that “you and I are connected, if I am well you are well, if I am affected you are affected”. This message continues to knock on our doors, yet we seem to be deaf, our organizations, governments and leaders seem confused and still promote a paradigm of separation of nations, ethnicities, politics, race and gender. The pandemic is asking us to unite but the leaders are stuck in the paradigm of division and separation. The Galileo Commission (2021) is named after Galileo because just as Galileo’s critics refused to look through his telescope, modern scientists refuse to look at evidence suggesting that consciousness is fundamental. However, as consciousness enhances so does our perspectives. It is fundamentally an enquiry or search for purpose and meaning. Deeper enquiry can result in more confusion than clarity if one is lacking in a reference point.

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2 Current Global Contexts, Paradigms and Approaches The UN currently lists 22 global issues and has many policy committees to solve them. Number 1 is hunger. Food security and hunger occur not because there’s a shortage of food but because many people do not have money to purchase food or cannot grow their own food. This is happening whilst about 39% of adult population are overweight. Looking at global health or education it seems inequitable access remains the core issues. Yet we have the benefit of complex management systems, data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other techniques available to solve our issues. The solutions we seek seem to be based on an economic model that seems not to deliver outcomes, yet in which we seem to be trapped. The UN Sustainable Development Goals were designed to partly seek these solutions yet can they deliver what is needed? A report published by The Institute for Policy Studies (2020) highlights benefits for system profiteers. Highlights include: • As of 17 November 2020, the combined wealth of 657, US billionaires increase by about US dollars 960 billion. • Since mid-March, the beginning of the pandemic lockdown an increase of nearly US dollars 1 trillion in less than a year. • Since March there are 33 new billionaires in the US. • 10 billionaire owners have a combined worth of US$433 billion. • Since March 2020, their combined personal wealth has ballooned by US$127.5 billion a 42% increase. • Their business model of extreme cost-cutting and debt loading to squeeze extra profits is fundamentally incompatible with protecting workers and communities during a pandemic. The Club of Rome addresses the multiple crises facing humanity and the planet, it fundamentally confronted the unchallenged paradigm of continuous material growth and the pursuit of endless economic expansion. There is no doubt that the ecological footprint of humanity substantially exceeds its natural limits every year. About 40 years ago, Bhutan took the courage to declare that GDP is not what they believe in but GNH (Gross National Happiness) is important. Today the GNH model experiment makes Bhutan a carbon positive country from whom advanced countries are now looking to learn. Today we are on the cusp of many technical breakthroughs such as AI (artificial intelligence) based on data. It allows us to diagnose, analyse, prescribe and predict solutions. These are built on complex algorithms coded by brilliant engineers. Embedded in these algorithms one wonders if the fundamental logic is based on a reductionist rather than a holistic worldview. If we continue to develop solutions and technology in this way can we really expect sustainable solutions? Is a spiritual approach only a luxury we can consider once we have gained material success? Whilst management was focused on developing executors (Human Doings) now we need to transcend this to also build contributors (Human Beings).

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Ancient Indian Literature continually explains some key principles also embodied in other indigenous traditions. This is the shift we require. Sai (2020) highlights the Vedic approach: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Don’t take what doesn’t belong to you from others or creation. Don’t consume more than what you need. Don’t hoard even if you have the power. All belong to creation including the ants, insects, animals, the environment they all have equal share in creation. The Mighty and strong also have a greater responsibility toward this, we have to provide for all. Protect the Right of all creation to live and sustain.

A key principle to establish this is Tuaktena bhunjithah—“Through giving, support yourself”. Vedanta philosophy further explains that there are four types of individuals (perhaps even organizations as a collective of individuals) on a scale of evolution. 1 2 3 4

Roga Jivis, those who keep taking and don’t give anything. Bhoga Jivis, those who only give as much as to take. Tyaga Jivis those who give more than what they take. Yoga Jivis, those who don’t take anything but give everything for the sake of others.

In the animal kingdom, e.g., cows give its production of milk for others, in the plant kingdom trees and crops bear fruit for others without any preconditions on who will consume. They seem to believe that their nature is “giving”. Yet it seems today that as humanity we seem stuck with a model of “taking”, believing that it leads to success.

3 Some Possible Approaches for Enhancing Consciousness 3.1 Organizational Culture Most models of organizational development are based on a segmented approach to organizations. Perhaps just as in allopathic medicine practice where we have highly trained specializations (e.g., cardiology or neurology) but they may lack insight into the whole human system. Hence, the system may require a patient to be subjected to a variety of specialists and expensive diagnostics procedures before any solution can be initiated. However, a traditional medicine practitioner, e.g., in the Ayurveda tradition is trained to look at the whole person and seek a holistic solution for him or her. In the past, founders or owners of organizations had great clarity on the purpose of their organization and articulated a clear vision to inspire their stakeholders. The

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TATA Group founded some 130 year ago is a noteworthy example. “The Creation of Wealth for a Nation” by RM Tata is an inspiring case on vision and clarity. As long as the culture is only profit-driven then its ability to make an impact or sustainable difference will remain restricted. Laying a solid foundation for building an organization becomes critical. Some critical reflection is needed on what is it that we value?

3.2 Self-development and Transcending the Self S. K. Chakraborty’s research and teaching on values has also been an influencer to evolve a more reflective and deeper approach based on Indian Wisdom and Insights. How we use our competencies depends on our capabilities that are determined by our values elaborated J. M. Sampath who developed a process of nurturing values/capabilities through his work on Values Clarification methodology. He states that: “The bridge between thought and action is consciousness. To integrate what you want to live by you need to be mindful about your actions” (Sampath, 2007) (has focused on behaviours as a cause and effect approach for individuals to gain a better understanding of themselves by the multiple consequences of their behaviours and hence make higher quality choices). Former Head of Values at the World Bank, Richard Barrett, started working on defining the metrics of human consciousness around 1995. In trying to bring together the ideas of Vedic philosophy regarding the higher levels (Thiss, 1995) of consciousness and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, “It struck me the different graduations of higher levels of consciousness, as expressed in the Vedic tradition corresponded to the varying degrees of self-actualization expressed by Maslow. From this research came the idea for the seven levels of consciousness model” (Barrett, 2015). The Principles of Real Management is attributed to The Wizard of IS (Thiss, 1995), founder of an international financial institution that became the cultural foundation of an organization operating in 73 countries with 14,000 employees. Real Management grappled with some real issues including “How do we get moral progress to keep pace with material progress?”, “More emphasis on inner progress as there was adequate on the outer world progress?” and “The outer world develops faster than the inner—the need to slow down to catch up.” To address such issues, four principles of Real Management were identified: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Totality—All parts are interrelated and dependent. Flow—Evolution we live on this earth we are of the earth. Existence/non-existence—A recognition of the Intangible aspects of life. Moral and material balance (inner and outer).

To support such principles, staff from a diverse range of cultures and traditions were constantly reminded of these principles. Some of the institution policies were created to support individual shifts from self to Others, Material to Moral. One such policy was an institutional practice of GIVING where each individual was given

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opportunities to serve unconditionally, to experience the JOY OF GIVING. From this, one may experience: • When you give more than what you receive that one makes a moral profit. • Self-development means transcending the self. Over the years perhaps such opportunities shifted consciousness for some from only serving self to a greater focus on serving others without expectations, collectively enhancing consciousness of the individuals and perhaps the community. Nearly 50 years ago, Edgar Mitchell became the sixth person to walk on the moon. As a member of the Apollo 14 mission, as his spaceship travelled back from the moon amidst the vast darkness of the cosmos, Mitchell’s eyes became fixed on the blue sphere we call home. As he neared Earth, he was enveloped by a profound sense of universal connectedness. “I realized that the story of ourselves as told by science—our cosmology, our religion—was incomplete and likely flawed. I recognized that the Newtonian idea of separate, independent, discrete things in the universe wasn’t a fully accurate description. What was needed was a new story of who we are and what we are capable of becoming” (Mitchell, 1996). Mitchell’s transformative experience led him to establish the Institute of Noetic Sciences in 1973. He understood that by applying the scientific rigour used in his explorations of outer space, we could better understand the mysteries of inner space— the space in which he felt an undeniable sense of interconnection and oneness. IONS has since spent decades of research on such enquiry. 1991 Doc Childre founded the Institute of HeartMath to help individuals into a balanced alignment so that they can demonstrate compassionate care for themselves and others. With their tools and practices, one can lead to a balanced and more conscious approach to life. Their approaches are also widely used in education, business and also with security forces. In Malaysia, about a decade ago, Tan Sri Dato’ Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, who is currently Rector of the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) and past President of the International Association of Universities, believed strongly that as Malaysia is at the confluence of ancient traditions and faith systems namely: Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Indigenous systems with influences from the Malay, Chinese and Indian civilizations have been exploring ways to go beyond UN Sustainable Development Goals. His focus has been looking at ways to humanizing work, humanizing education, humanizing society by promoting a Sejahtera Philosophy. “Sejahtera” in Malay is a concept that refers to abundance, prosperity, peace and tranquillity. This dialogue on Sejahtera is becoming a fresh worldview. Malaysia also initiated a Sejahtera Leadership Imitative (SLI) with a vision of nurturing a holistic, human centric and balanced well-being leadership towards living in a harmoniously peaceful society (Razak et al., 2018). Recently, an MBA Specialization in Sejahtera Leadership was conducted at International Islamic University Malaysia.

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4 Conclusion and Future Suggestions Razak et al. (2018) share a perspective that we are at a point where we have adopted a WEIRD worldview, which needs to become WISER. WEIRD stands for: W E I R D

Westernized Economic-centric Industry led Reputation obsessed Dehumanizing A shift suggested is WISER where

W I S E R

Wholesome Inclusive Sejahtera Equitable Resilient

Sage Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutras (around 500BCE) as a roadmap to one’s own higher self, with detailed techniques. On a commentary on this by a dedicated and disciplined Yoga teacher in his book “Making Patanjali Palatable”, the author Manoj Kaimal explains (Kaimal 2008). There are five grounds or states of mind that are conducive for consciousness, of these the top three may restrict one’s progress the last two being most conducive. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Kshipta—agitated, restless or state of restlessness. Mudha—sate of dullness and lethargy. Vikshipta—Wandering and staying mind which oscillates. Ekagra—stabilized state of concentrated absorption. Niruddha—collected, calm state a state of dissolution.

The journey of consciousness can become more meaningful once we are more aware of our state in 4 and 5 above. This can only happen upon setting an intention and set a plan to practice. This too is the prescription offered to his patients by Dr Ramkumar an Ayurveda physician, a co-founder of Vaidyagrama Ayurveda Healing Village/Hospital near Coimbatore in India. To maintain our health and progress, he recommends the way to being conscious is: “By constantly reminding oneself of the need for abhyasa or a set of practices for the body and mind on a daily basis, can we proceed”. There seems no shortcut to being and aware of oneself on this journey. Can we choose to become leaders with such fresh attitudes towards the world of work in a way that management can alleviate the global sufferings being faced today? To serve one needs to overcome fear, it needs courage. What will others say? What will happen to me? Then how can you serve anybody?

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When you become fearless then become a servant of society. Selflessness is the gift of spirituality. As 50% of the world population are youths, their attitude of service can transform the world, our efforts should be on the youth. The world has been blessed by many leaders who inspired with their selfless actions. Many scriptural texts have sought to guide humanity towards our upliftment and bringing happiness and prosperity to all. A large percentage of us are involved in the world of work, which consumes a considerable part of our lives, our attention and our resources, the tools and strategies of Management have been designed to help us alleviate complex situations with new solutions. As work consumes a large percentage of Our Lives how do we spiritualize the world of work? Sathya Sai Baba, constantly reminded us that “work is worship”. Can we approach the world of work with the attitude and qualities of mind similar to when we begin our prayer, worship in any tradition? We realize the quality of our worship depends on the quality of our devotion, dedication, determination, discipline, focus, concentration, sacrifice, gratitude, submission, selflessness. Can we bring these same qualities to the world of work and make work as worship? Do we have the courage for this? Can we choose to become leaders with such fresh attitudes towards the world of work in a way that management can alleviate the global sufferings in challenges that we are faced with today? Dharmic Management 2020 Spirituality in action is serving others without any expectation or reward. Leadership is spirituality in action, selfless service to others. This resonates with Chakraborty’s emphasis on a Raja Rishi model of Leadership.

References Bankwala, Y. J. (2003). Organizational transformation through human values. In L. Zsolnai (Ed.), Spirituality and ethics in management (pp. 171–179). Kluwer. Barrett, R. (2015). The metrics of the Human consciousness. http://lulu.com/. Chakraborty, S. K. (1995). Human values for managers. Wheeler Publishing. Dharmic Management. (2020). Online course of the institute for human values (www.iohv.org). Galileo Commission. (2021). www.galileocommission.org. Kaimal, M. (2008). Making Patanjali palatable. Self published. Mitchell. (1996). Institute of Noetic Sceinnces IONS website https://noetic.org/blog/. Razak, D. A., Khaw, N. R., Baharoom, Z., & Salleh, M. A. M. H. (2018). Decolonising the paradigm of sustainable development. In L. Galkute, K. Chhokar, & Z. Fadeeva (Eds.), Academia and communities: Engaging for change. UNU, Institute for Advances Study of Sustainability. Sai, S. M. (2020). Master the mind. Talk Series delivered in July 2020. Sampath, J. M. (2007). Developing agile leaders 1 & 2. Cutter Consortium. The Institute for Policy Studies. (2020). Great divide. (Inequality.org. https://inequality.org/greatdivide/billionaire-wealth-community-health/) Thiss, T. (1995). The wizard of IS. Fairview Press.

Education, Spirituality, and Society

India’s Svaraj Parampara: Nation and Modernity in India Makarand R. Paranjape

1 Still Seeking Svaraj1 From Mahatma Gandhi to present times, Indian democracy, despite its various drawbacks and failures, is somewhat of a political marvel. Here is where the notion of svaraj may serve as a useful lens through which we can measure its achievements. We can start by asking whether Indian democracy really embodies the ideal of svaraj, so eloquently enunciated by several leaders of the freedom struggle including Lokmanya Tilak, Dadabhai Naoroji, Sri Aurobindo, and Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, svaraj is not a contemporary, but age-old Vedic idea, going back to ancient times. Though we have completed 72 years of independence, it is obvious that the struggle for svaraj is far from over. To me, the central purpose of understanding our svaraj parampara or tradition of autonomy is to bring us closer to understanding what freedom, independence, and democracy really mean. That is because svaraj is more than political independence; it is the reassessment and reassertion of our civilizational genius. To achieve this, we must try to overhaul our entire intellectual infrastructure, for which we need nothing less than a new vocabulary of self-understanding. Such

1 I deliberately spell the word as svaraj not only because that is closer to its pronunciation in Sanskrit and other Indian languages but also because I think we must all reflect on its meaning and make it our own. Swaraj, the older spelling and form of the word in English, is used while quoting other writers. Portions of this essay have appeared in my earlier writings.

Portions of this chapter have appeared in the author’s earlier periodical publications/columns including https://satyameva.org/category/itihasa/. M. R. Paranjape (B) Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] Former Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_28

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an overhauling would mean, at the least, the realignment of our intellectual enterprise with what we have truly sought and valued for millennia—the pursuit of selfknowledge, truth, virtue, beauty, and, of course, happiness—and the organization of our material resources in such a way that our daily life conduces to these aims. In the previous sections we saw how this orientation was provided by our pursharthas, the cardinal aims of life—Dharma, Artha, Kama, and, ultimately, Moksha.2 But in our attempts to regain our parampara, merely substituting Western ideas by half-understood Indian ones will not do. These languages of Indian selfhood are almost as colonized as Indian English is. Therefore, sprinkling some Indian words into our thinking process will not suffice. Just as language chauvinism is not the answer to our language problems, conceptual chauvinism will not serve to liberate us either. We need to change our minds. This fundamental transformation is far more crucial than the superficial changes that are usually advocated by language, religion, or cultural nationalists. Once we understand that svaraj is the issue, we see parampara not in dialectical opposition with its Other, adhunikata (modernity), nor is Bharatiyata (Indianness) a mere opposition to Pashyatikarana (Westernization). Parampara, instead, is whole, integral, not just fragmentary or antithetical. Not a knee-jerk reaction to the domination of Western categories over Indian ones, but a deep understanding of the difference will take us forward. This can be done, as we have seen, by opening a dialogue between Bharatiya parampara and Western modernity so as to create new spaces of knowledge and svaraj.

2 What is Svaraj? Svaraj is a very old Vedic word but comes into the vocabulary of modern India in the nineteenth century. Some say Dayanand Saraswati’s Satyarth Prakash (1875) contains its first modern usage, but I have not been able to find it. Dayanand quotes the Vedic ‘ राजते स ’ but does not apply it to political independence from Britain. The earliest modern use is probably in Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar’s pamphlet “Shivajir Mahattva” (1902), republished 2 years later as “Shivajir Diksha.” Deuskar was a friend of Sri Aurobindo, who also began to use the word. In a few years, with the struggle for freedom acquiring momentum especially because of Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal in 1905, it became the most evocative and popular of indigenous words for political freedom, whether purna or total, or partial within the British Empire.

2

See K. J. Shah’s “Philosophy, Religion, Morality, Spirituality: Some Issues”. Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 7 (1990): 1–12 and “Purushartha and Gandhi,” in R. Roy. Ed. Gandhi and the Present Global Crisis (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1996).

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Several important political leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Dadabhai Naoroji, and Aurobindo used the word, as did Gandhi, who also adopted the word, making it a household mantra in Hind Swaraj (1909). The latter is not only one of his most important books but also a comprehensive statement of the aims and methods of nonviolent revolution. In the discourse of the freedom movement, though svaraj mostly signifies political autonomy, Gandhi meant much more by it. Perhaps, he and others were intuitively aware with its etymology, though they did not explicitly explain it. Actually svaraj is an adaptation and shortening of the Sanskrit word svarajya, which is an abstract noun.3 The word is a compound of sva + raj; sva means self and raj, means to shine (the etymology being raj deepnoti). Hence, the word means both the shining of the self and the self that shines. The root raj gives us many words associated with power including Raja, Rex and Regina. The symbology of light is very important in the Vedas because it suggests the sun of higher consciousness—tat savitur verenyam, as in the Gayatri mantra. It is to that sun, savitur, that Aurobindo refers in his great poem, Savitri. So svarat is a self-luminous person, and svarajya is a state of being svarat or enlightened. We might actually say that svaraj is a very ancient word for enlightenment, the power and illumination that come from the mastery of the self. When applied to a single individual, its form is svarat, an adjective. It is a word that occurs many times in the Rg, Sama, and Yajur Vedas, as it does later in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. In the Upanishads, it can be found in the Chandogya, Taittiriya, and Maitri. It is in India that political independence came to be expressed even in modern times in so radically spiritual a manner in terms of enlightenment and self-illumination, not merely political power or independence. Opposing the colonizers and imperialists was thus the external aspect of svarajya; the internal aspect was to have a good, just, and beautiful state, an enlightened social order. Svarajya is therefore the principle that aspires for better self-management, more effective inner governmentality, because illumination comes from internal order, not oppression. Originally, svrajya referred to the inner management of a person’s powers and capacities, of the senses, organs and of all the different constituents of the person. When these were well governed, the person too would be all-powerful. For Gandhi, the homology between the individual body and the body politic was a useful metaphor if not a self-evident truth. Synonymous with liberty, freedom and independence, svaraj, thus, suggests a host of possibilities for inner illumination and self-realization. The word svaraj is preferable to decolonization because svaraj is not anti—anyone else. One’s own svaraj can only help others and contribute to the svaraj of others. In svaraj the personal and the political merge, one leading to the other, the other leading back to the one. I cannot be free unless all my brothers and sisters are free, and they cannot be free unless I am free. Svaraj allows us to resist oppression without hatred and violent opposition. To fight for svaraj, Gandhi developed the praxis of satyagraha or insistence on truth or truth-force for the rights of the disarmed and impoverished people of India. Svaraj, thus, means self-restraint, forbearance, refusal to rule over others. One of the clichés about India is that no matter how powerful the country was, it did not 3

See C. Mackenzie Brown’s ‘Svaraj, the Indian Ideal of Freedom: A Political or Religious Concept?’

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send expeditions of conquerors to countries outside the peninsula, huge armies to conquer, colonize, and bring back pelf from overseas expeditions. This is how the Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Persians, Afghans, Portuguese, British, Dutch, French and the others behaved, coming to India to conquer or plunder, but there is no record of Indian armies doing the same in other lands. The historical record of India does not show a desire to go and rule other people, to enforce its will on them, to trample them, to exploit them economically, to oppress them, to crush them—that is not, it would seem, the Indian way. But, by the same token, to be ruled by others is also unacceptable to the Indian spirit; Indians, too, like other self-respecting peoples, have fought against it. Throughout Indian history, the struggle for svaraj has gone on, often unrecorded. We have innumerable instances of villagers protesting against emperors, blocking roads, refusing to pay taxes, fasting, and so on. The Vijayanagara Empire fought for svaraj, as did Chattrapati Shivaji. In the 150 years of British rule, there was a revolt practically every single year in India. Some part or the other was always up in arms against British rule. So Pax Brittanica was a great illusion. How could there be lasting peace without svaraj? While svaraj has an inbuilt anti-imperialistic orientation, it also evokes a culturalist-nationalist position in which one’s civilizational heritage is owned up, even embraced, rather than discarded. In that sense, it suggests not a Western type of universalism, but a colourful cosmopolitanism, rooted in a radically different notion of “self.” But there is nothing “communal” or fanatical about this project. That is why I believe that Gandhi took great pains to emphasize that svaraj is not a form of narrow nationalism or jingoism. Instead, it is a special, cooperative and pluralistic way of being in the world. If debates on globalization, sovereignty and culture, are ultimately debates about which way we want India to go, it is clear that both modernity and post-modernity represent paths which we should not fully accept. At best, they provide convenient points of entry to the real questions that shape our lives. Because these paths have made inroads into our own life and consciousness, they must be examined, understood, possibly appreciated from a distance, but ultimately negated or incorporated into the broader quest for svaraj.

3 Sri Aurobindo’s Idea of Svaraj On 24 January 1908, almost 2 years before Gandhiji wrote his seminal treatise Hind Swaraj on his way back from England to South Africa aboard S. S. Kildonan Castle, Sri Aurobindo made a speech in Nashik, Maharashtra. It is not one of his famous or well-known orations because it is not available in its original English. It was translated into Marathi and published the following morning in a Marathi paper, Nasik Vritta. We know of it because the Bombay Presidency Police retranslated it into English in their Intelligence Abstract. It was first published by Archives and Research, a biannual journal published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram, in the first number of its first

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volume (April 1977) and subsequently included as Part 5 of Sri Aurobindo’s Political Speeches and Writing, 1890–1908, in his Collected Works. Sri Aurodindo elaborates on the meaning of svaraj in this speech. Interestingly, he spends the first minutes disclaiming any oratorical skills as well as having anything to say for himself or on his own: “whatever I do is not done by me of my own accord. My actions are dictated by God. … I have hitherto been a writer and not an orator, but circumstances forced me to try my hand at oratory.” He next defines the goal of the national struggle, which hitherto had been somewhat vague, but suddenly, “either by a stroke of fortune or by divine inspiration,” has acquired new clarity and urgency. The goal was defined by “the old patriot” in his Presidential Address at the Calcutta Congress in 1906: “We do not ask any favours. We want only justice. Instead of going into any further divisions or details of our rights as British citizens, the whole matter can be comprised in one word— ‘Self-government’ or Swaraj like that of the United Kingdom or the Colonies.”4 Sri Aurobindo quotes the same speech from memory in a slightly different way, “We must have Swaraj on the lines granted to Canada and Australia, which is our sole aim.” According to Sri Aurobindo, if Indians forget about svaraj, they will go extinct: “If we do not acquaint ourselves with the object in view, viz., Swaraj, I am afraid we, thirty crores of people, will become extinct.” He reminds his listeners that it is the people of Maharashtra that kept the torch of svaraj burning even during the darkest night. It is after this that Sri Aurobindo’s speech rises to a new level, not only of eloquence but of spiritual inspiration, “Swaraj is life, it is nectar and salvation. Swaraj in a nation is the breath of life. Without breath of life a man is dead. So also without Swaraj a nation is dead. Swaraj being the life of a nation it is essential for it.” Those nations, not matter how great and glorious they may have been in the past, come to grief when they forget svaraj. Sri Aurobindo refers to the ancient Roman empire, comparing it with the British empire: “In ancient times the Romans had extended their sovereignty over many countries as England has done at present …. Their lives and properties were all secure as ours are, but in spite of all this, it was said that the people under the sway of the Roman Empire came to grief with its downfall and were harassed by savage people. The reason is, they had no Swaraj. After a lapse of centuries, they stood on their own legs and established for themselves Swaraj and became happy.” But those who aspire for it must realize that svaraj is to be “gained by our own exertions. If it is gained otherwise, which is impossible, it cannot last long for want of strength in us.” Imploring the sovereign won’t do because “he won’t give it.” Sri Aurobindo sarcastically refers to the moderates who think that prayer, petition, and protest will win us svaraj. “Unfortunately there still exists a party of men who still cling to the idea that we shall obtain Swaraj by asking for it, which is to be regretted. This party thinks that we are not capable of managing our own affairs, that we are being trained in that direction and that our benign English Government will extend 4

Dadabhai Naoroji’s Speeches and Writings (Madras: Natesan, 1917), p. 76.

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Swaraj to us by degrees.” Sri Aurobindo argues to the contrary, “The English value the importance of India. Its possession gives them status. If they once allow India to slip from their grasp, they will become a nonentity. Under such circumstances, it is silly to say that the English will train us and entrust us with Swaraj. By reposing confidence in the English people we are already reduced to a miserable condition and in the end will become extinct.” Then he considers a second way to attain svaraj: “Another way of obtaining Swaraj is to seek aid from a neighbouring nation. But this means jumping from the fryingpan into the fire. No matter from whom we seek assistance their own interests will first be considered.” Later, when Subhas Chandra Bose wanted the help, first of Germany, then of Japan to win India’s independence, Sri Aurobindo opposed this method. Many members of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, which in those days not only had admirers of Bose but also several others who sympathized with Germany because it was fighting Britain, were disappointed. Sri Aurobindo even asked them to leave the ashram if they didn’t agree with his view that Hitler had to be opposed at all costs, even if it meant temporary siding with the Allies. Now, Sri Aurobindo comes to the third way, one which Gandhiji also advocated: “We should, therefore, acquire it by our own efforts.” No other way would work; we had to fight for our own svaraj. But the question remained: “how we should do it. We do not possess Swaraj nor have we the power to retain it. The answer is, we cannot master the art of swimming unless we struggle in the water. We should, therefore, be prepared to undergo hardships in the struggle for Swaraj, as there is no other alternative.” Here, all ways seem to be open, whether non-violent, violent, or some combination of them. Sri Aurobindo does not spell this out in this speech, but this is what we can glean from his other writings. Here, he speaks of faith in God; “God created us independent” therefore “we should be full of inspirations. With full faith in God we should preach independence through the length and breadth of the country and a beginning should be made to impart national education.” The importance he places on “national education” is unmistakable. If in addition to education, Indians can “take into their own hands judicial and executive work … we shall have more than half of Swaraj in our hands.” Sri Aurobindo believes that the Bengalis who struggled for svaraj by defying British colonial authority, “do not fear fine, incarceration, deportation or the extreme penalty of the law …. If a Bengali lad is punished in connection with the Swadeshi movement, he smiles and says it does not matter much.” He urges Maharashtrians to follow suit: “O inhabitants of Maharashtra, since you and Bengalis are stirring to attain one end and as we are all sons of Aryabhumi, let us all jointly set ourselves to the task of bringing about a state of things in accordance with the commandment of God. We, Bengalis, depend upon you because the sons of Maharashtra were brave soldiers a short while ago. You enjoyed Swaraj when you were harassed by Mahomedans.” He reminds his audience of Tukaram, Ramdas, and of Shivaji, the warrior king who established svaraj in Maharashtra. Under Shivaji, “The poor were rescued from molestation by the wicked and the country prospered.” In the present state, he urges all to heed to the “divine inspiration,” to the “the commandment of God.” He wants Indians to unify “from the Himalayas to Kanyakumari.” He

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concludes by proclaiming, “If we, imbued with this idea, become united with a firm resolution to obey the commandment of God, I feel sure we shall gain our Swaraj in twenty years. It won’t take centuries ….” In retrieving and reconsidering this little-known speech of Sri Aurobindo, our attempt has been to place him in his rightful place at the heart of India’s svaraj parampara.

4 Svaraj in Today’s Context India’s intellectual and cultural history, if seen in svaraj-ist terms, often shows it coming into contact or conflict with alternative perspectives. These latter I shall term co-Sanatani, non-Sanatani, and anti-Sanatani. The co-Sanatani shares basic assumptions and premises with the Sanatani: for example, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism. There have been perennial exchanges, debates, and crossovers between the Sanatani and the co-Sanatani. Then there is the non-Sanatani, which refers to those world views, which are radically different from the Sanatani. The Abrahamic faiths may be cited as examples. These have a point of origin and closure, are monotheistic and dogmatic, and ultimately based on a community that is formed by a special covenant with God, who is the sovereign of the universe and the ultimate arbiter. Secular modernity, communism, capitalism, imperialism, to name just a few historical movements and forces of more recent provenance, are also non-Sanatani. There is every possibility of a peaceful coexistence, conversion, or limited syncretism between the Sanatani and the non-Sanatani. But under certain circumstances, the non-Sanatani can also turn into the anti-Sanatani. When that happens, the Sanatani is called upon to produce a response. These responses are often multi-dimensional, more or less vigorous or successful. Like all resilient traditions, the Sanatani may be considered to be endowed with self-correcting and self-renewing mechanisms. So its growth and development in history need to be seen not so as much as unbroken and continuous but as marked by losses and recoveries, ruptures and sutures. This moment of recovery, restoration, and recuperation may be termed the “neo”-Sanatani. The “neo” is not a negative, pejorative, or reactionary; it cannot be dismissed as fundamentalist or revivalist. The “neo” to be genuinely so, must be both new and old at the same time. It has to show a new way of being Sanatani thereby rendering it simultaneously both unprecedented and recognizably the same as what is already known. One might borrow an idea from Kashmir Saivism to explain this familiar newness: pratyabhijna—the sort of self-recognition that is in fact predicated upon the self-being already realized, but somehow forgotten by none other than itself in anticipation of the camatkara (miraculous wonder) of remembering as in Acharya Utpaladeva’s Isvaraprtyabhijnakarika. There is an epochal dimension to these acts of recovery and suturing, of recognition and remembering. The tradition produces its own cultural heroes and heroines to do the job. The process of mending is also one of minding, like searching for and

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splicing together the scattered threads of a cloth that has been torn or rent. Similarly, a tradition that has undergone a traumatic, even catastrophic blow finds ways of healing by rediscovering lost continuities and new bridges from the past to the future. The present, so potent with possibilities, is not some essence from the past or even that which passes before the uncertain future, but a gift, a joyous flow that liberates the beleaguered self of its false identification. As Gandhi said, the moment Indians know fearlessness, virtue, and dignity, they are already free; no prison or imperial government can bind them then. It is only the free who can demand or attain freedom. Freedom is the prerequisite not the result of satyagraha. Svaraj is the fruit. Such praxis involves the invention of new methods and materials with which to effect the restoration of the flow of the parampara. Sruti, or non-contingent gnosis incarnates as human agency to heal the wounds in Smriti or the collective cultural memory. Unlike the Hebraic, which emphasizes re-membering, the Sanatani often encourages forgetting. One must forget, as much as possible, rather than reiterate the compulsive remembrance of the holocaust of the Hindus, their defeat and humiliation, their oppression and trauma, their scattering, conversion, enslavement, transportation, and so on. But, of course, such deliberate “forgetting” should not result in ignorance or denialism. The realization of present power is not contingent upon the denial of past tribulations, nor is it forever denied or unavailable to a conquered people; the memory of being crushed can be overcome by the immediacy of svaraj. Forget that you are crushed but rise up anew to an altogether different kind of battle, fought with altogether different kinds of weapons. Gandhi and Aurobindo, preaching the politics and praxis of svaraj, taught us how thus to turn our disadvantages to our advantages. Today svaraj means the augmentation of India’s hard power through military prowess, economic empowerment, and determined diplomacy on the one hand, combined with Soumya Shakti, the soft power of culture, spirituality, yoga, cuisine, couture, and so on, on the other hand. Together they add up to nothing less than India’s rejuvenation, renewal, and rise. This may sound hyperbolic or over enthusiastic. But the mood of the nation is certainly upbeat.

Is the Bhagavad Gita Modern? Gautam Mukerjee

1 Is the Bhagavad Gita Modern? What do Leo Tolstoy, T. S, Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Aldous Huxley, Robert Oppenheimer and Mahatma Gandhi have in common? It would be a love for the Bhagavad Gita and how it shaped their thoughts; sometimes to an extreme such as Thoreau carrying it to Walden Pond and Oppenheimer to the moment of the first mushroom explosion of the Manhattan Project where he uttered the description of Krishna’s universal form in Sanskrit, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one” (Bird & Sherwin 2006). The Bhagavad Gita from India’s greatest epic the Mahabharata is more than 2000 years old. It has influenced many Western philosophers, poets, scientists, naturalists, social thinkers, scholars and statesmen. This paper explores the Gita from a metaphysical perspective and links its three main aspects to recent scientific discoveries. What are the correlations with today’s thoughts? Are the Gita’s prescriptive ideas relevant for better living now and in every age of humankind? Is it exclusively Indian or does the message have the potential to bridge cross-border cultures? This cross-cultural dimension is best described by Aldous Huxley in his Introduction to the Bhagavad Gita (translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood). The Bhagavad-Gita is perhaps the most systematic scriptural statement of the Perennial Philosophy, to a world at war, a world that, because it lacks the intellectual and spiritual prerequisites to peace, can only hope to patch up some kind of precarious armed truce, it stands pointing, clearly and unmistakably, to the only road of escape from the self-imposed necessity of self-destruction (Huxley, 1951).

The world is truly at war but not in the earlier conventional sense. We are at war with ourselves and more in Huxley’s “self-destruction” mode than ever before. Can G. Mukerjee (B) Anandini Foundation, Jamshedpur, Kolkata, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_29

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the Gita tilt the balance? Does it have the wisdom to guide us to the enlightenment needed to overcome the challenges of climate change, population increase, and social media borne mediocrity? Is it still Huxley’s “Perennial Philosophy” that can life-boat us to safety? This paper will take a look at the Gita’s origins, its fluid contextual framework, the protagonists and process adopted with each of the three major lessons measured against twenty-first-century scientific discoveries for the evolution of the human potential.

2 The Bhagavad Gita’s Platform—The Mahabharata Several years ago, I was with some friends at a bungalow deep in a jungle. Late at night we took an adventurous walk in the forest. Suddenly an apparition jumped out from the bushes blocking our path. He was very old, smelt of the local brew and introduced himself as a Chhau dancer. With a little prodding, he agreed to perform. Ten electrifying minutes of action followed with lightning moves depicting many characters in battle. It was “Abhimanyu badh”, the cruel unfair killing of Arjuna’s 16-year-old son by seven warriors of the Kauravas from the Mahabharata. Coincidentally around the same time a friend went to listen to a lecture on “Understanding Yudhishtira’s Actions—Recasting Karma-Yoga in a Wittgensteinian Model” at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (Mitra, 2015). Two unrelated happenings help to put the Mahabharata in perspective. Fagu the tribal Chhau dancer in the forest and Enakshi Mitra, the philosophy professor were keeping the Mahabharata alive after 2000 years. Geographically high in the Himalayas at Gangotri is the Pandava’s exile cave and at Mamallipuram sea beach the Pallavas sculpted Arjuna’s penance on a rock face in the seventh century CE. The epic mentions 363 ethnic communities who today retain hundreds of folk/tribal dances, music and art forms that carry the heritage (Singh 1993). In the early twentieth century, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) at Pune created a huge academic project to bring the “real” Mahabharata to life from hundreds of versions drawn from nearly a thousand year writing (400 BCE to 400 CE). The team leader was V. S. Sukhtankar, a polymath from Cambridge, Edinburgh and Berlin. His four lectures on “The Meaning of the Mahabharata” are critical to understanding the epic’s journey as a poem, its purpose, style and planes of existence. Sukhtankar identifies three planes—physical, ethical, and most importantly the metaphysical. For the uninitiated, the story is about two arms of a family locked in conflict—Kauravas and Pandavas. The supporting actors like the great grandfather and the Guru are partial to the Pandavas but must support the Crown. The Pandavas have a maternal cousin Krishna who is the embodiment of the Divine. The first two planes are critical in understanding life through governance, bravery, cowardice, lust, sexuality, chastity, ascetics, greed, sacrifice, conquest, surrender, penance, indulgence and every other human experience. It leads to the metaphysical plane with two actors telling the story. (Sukhtankar 2016) It is said the Mahabharata represents the

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body and mind of the human experience with “What is found in the Mahabharata is everywhere but what is not found is nowhere”. This accurate portrayal of humankind is essential for one reason alone. The meticulous detailing of the body and mind readies us for the spirit and the portal to the highest level of existence.

3 The Bhagavad Gita’s Setting—The Actors, Problem, Process 3.1 The Actors—Prince Arjuna Arjuna had a few imperfections but saw perfection as a lifelong journey. His focus was self-improvement. He asked the “why” before the “how” and graduated as his Guru’s best pupil. He could pick himself up from disaster and move on. Mercy was an integral part of his warrior self. Vyasa, the sage who created the character of Arjuna, is said to have lived 2500 years before V. S. Ramachandran (Director, Centre of Brain and Cognition UC San Diego) found heightened activity in the temporal lobe for certain spiritual thoughts and experiences. Zohar and Marshall (2001) have built their theory of spiritual intelligence (SQ) mainly from Ramachandran, Richard Davidson and recent discoveries in quantum physics and neuroscience. SQ is about unitary thinking with acceptance of both IQ and EQ and becoming more. The tests for SQ are: • • • • • • • • •

Capacity to be flexible Degree of self-awareness Capacity to face suffering Capacity to transcend pain Vision and values Reluctance to cause unnecessary harm Being holistic Tendency to ask “Why?”/seek fundamental answers Being “Field-independent”.

By matching the SQ traits with Vyasa’s Arjuna, we have the “why” on the Mahabharata’s choice of the symbol for all humankind for the Bhagavad Gita. Prince Arjuna is really the Perfect Man ready to reach out to his Higher Self and transcend to unification with pure consciousness.

3.2 The Actors—Lord Krishna There are three stages of Krishna’s life before the Bhagavad Gita with displays of Divinity in the first two and intelligence in the third. Baby Krishna with foster

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mother Yashoda in Vrindavan creates Divinity from mother–child bonding. The poet is stating that the pure love from mother to child is by itself Divine. It is spelt out in an amusing situation where Yashoda, fed up with baby Krishna’s naughtiness, ties him to a post and does her household chores. Rishi Narada who knows the real persona of Krishna sees this and shakes his head in wonder, telling Yashoda she must have done unbelievable amount of good in her previous birth to have acquired the right to discipline the Divine. The second stage is also at Vrinadavan with Krishna and Radha’s love. The poet says we may touch the Divine through an experience of ecstasy. Radha is the feminine without which the male is incomplete. Their unification and all it represent is pure consciousness. The twelfth century poet Jayadeva composed his poem “Geet Govinda” on this theme with erotic descriptions of Radha-Krishna love making. He visualised Radha planting her foot on Krishna’s head as a symbol of that love Divine, but fear made him hesitate to write it. Jayadeva left the unfinished manuscript but legend claims he later found the verse written. Divinity bows to Love (Miller 1977). Radha-Krishna are worshipped in temples and homes across India, and it is always Radha first with a friendly greeting of “Radhey Radhey” as one of my teachers used to say with a loving smile. Krishna’s third stage began with his return to Mathura and release of his parents from prison after killing the evil Kansa. This act of freeing the citizens of Mathura from a tyrant got him embroiled in two long conflicts. One was internecine and connected to the oligarchy that governed the Vrishni-Yadava clans. Simultaneously, there was the external threat of Kansa’s father-in-law Jarasandha of Magadh, the most powerful ruler in India with allies stretching across the country. Realizing that Mathura had poor defense capabilities, Krishna moved his clan to the sea shore of Gujarat and built the city of Dwarka. Krishna’s connection with the Bhagavad Gita begins at Dwarka. The Pandavas have fulfilled the terms of their loss to the Kauravas in the crooked dice game by completing 13 years in exile with the last spent incognito. They want their empire back but Duryodhana the Kaurava prince refuses. It is now war with states across the country allying themselves based on politics. Duryodhana, whose daughter is married to one of Krishna’s sons, comes to Dwarka, finds Krishna asleep and waits. Arjuna arrives and waits near Krishna’s feet and is seen first on waking. A delighted Krishna asks what he wants but Duryadhana protests, stating that his early arrival gives him the prerogative to be addressed first. Krishna smiles and offers two options with Arjuna being younger getting to choose first. The choices are (i) Krishna’s entire army with full commitment to fight even against him or (ii) Krishna by himself, unarmed and not participating in the battle. Without hesitation Arjuna says “I choose you”. Duryodhana cannot believe his luck. He re-checks with Krishna that he will not fight, and the army will be fully committed to the Kauravas. He chooses the army and thanks Krishna profusely before leaving. Krishna wistfully asks Arjuna why he chose him, unarmed and a non-participant in the coming battle. Arjuna explains how he is confident of his and the Pandavas’ fighting prowess. “I need your counsel. Will you drive my chariot?” Krishna laughs and nods assent. The Bhagavad Gita now has its two actors in place. Krishna and Arjuna are first cousins, best friends, same age,

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married to the other’s sister and about to embark on a unique journey. But who are they really? How many other connections do they have?

3.3 The Problem: Confusion The two armies are lined up facing each other with the Kauravas having the greater numbers. Just as the battle is about to begin Arjuna requests Krishna to drive his chariot close to the enemy. The lone chariot moves into the gap between the opposing forces and Arjuna looks his opponents in the eye and what he sees destroys him. He drops his bow and sits down. There is no strength in his arms, no purpose ahead and it all seems so pointless. A very concerned Krishna enquires what the problem is to which Arjuna replies that he cannot fight. He looks at his relatives and friends on the other side and feels the emotional flow with an accompanying thought that mere pursuit of property is not enough reason to kill them. To put Arjuna’s change of mind in perspective it is necessary to see what he saw. When the five Pandavas with their widowed mother Kunti came from the Himalayas to Hastinapur, the Kauravas were not very welcoming. Yudhistira and Bhima were old enough to move around independently. Kunti held on to the youngsters Nakula and Sahadeva. Arjuna was in the care of Bhisma, the great grandfather. He took him everywhere including the court where Arjuna sat on his lap. It was Bhishma who lovingly taught him things that no one else did. It was Bhishma who took care of him when he was hurt. For Bhishma, Arjuna was the child he never had. For Arjuna, Bhishma was the father he never had. Bhishma now stood on the opposite side releasing tumultuous feelings of love in Arjuna. And then there was Drona. The closest human relationship in those days was the Guru-Shishya (Teacher–Pupil) connect. For the Guru, the best reward was getting the perfect student to pass on all knowledge with love. Drona experienced that with Arjuna. Thoughts, emotions and feelings were of one, not two individuals. Their bonding was stronger than Drona’s with his son, Ashwathama. Arjuna looked at Drona and felt a surge of devotion flow. He began picking out faces that had given him affection and care. The response from his heart was gratitude and a complete loss of purpose for battle and the killing that must follow. Let us examine Arjuna’s state of mind from a modern perspective. Bohm, the famous quantum physicist, spent 20 years in dialogue with Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurthy discussing consciousness and the nature of thought. For Bohm (2004) “Self-sustaining Confusion occurs when the mind is trying to escape the awareness of conflict … a reflexive state of dullness in which the natural ability of the mind is replaced with torpor …”. He explains that the mind is then fragmented where one part refuses to act overriding another, which may think otherwise. Bohm adds “… the disharmony that inevitably arises from trying to impose or follow such a pattern can come to an end only through the creative response of the mind, from moment to moment, which alone can give rise to a harmoniously ordered totality in the psyche rather than to a structure of conflicting fragments. But

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because the conflict is very painful, the mind tends to try to escape awareness of what is happening before it has the opportunity to respond in this way. This it does by initiating a state of Confusion”. For the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna’s state of Confusion is also the result of his higher consciousness. This too is in line with Bohm’s analysis as he clarifies that “normal” confusion from sorting out a series of facts is not what this is about. His Self-sustaining Confusion is when a person’s “deep intention is to avoid perceiving the fact rather than to sort it out and make it clear” (Bohm, 2004). For Bohm this is a state of the mind in Disorder. He clarifies by pointing out that while the thoughts are clearly directed and moving in one direction, the totality of the mind has been fragmented and does not function as a harmonious whole. For him, the first stage of progress is Awareness, which may help lead the person to a Harmoniously Ordered Totality. With Arjuna’s Bohmian confusion and a fragmented mind, Vyasa has now created the reason for Krishna-speak in the Bhagavad Gita.

3.4 The Process: Dialogue Bohm spent considerable time developing the concept of dialogue as a process for mental change from fragmentation to wholeness (Peat 1996). Bohm relied on his extensive research with Karl Pribram on the functioning of the brain to state, “When a change of meaning is profound, it brings about ontological transformations in the individual, specifically a subtle but permanent restructuring of the brain. Such transformations can actually take place as a result of Dialogue” (Bohm, 2004). The Bhagavad Gita is not a lecture. It is a Dialogue to remove Arjuna’s Selfsustaining Confusion and bring him to a state of Awareness and eventually to something even greater than Bohm’s Harmoniously Ordered Totality.

4 The Bhagavad Gita’s Messages—Karma Yoga, Gyana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga For two millennia, the Bhagavad Gita has been interpreted by thousands in India and abroad. They have given us many new insights as well as common planes of analysis. I am adopting the analysis of Aurobindo (1997) from his “Essays on the Gita” because his Supra-Consciousness is seen as a possible answer to the connected Universe and the higher Intelligence that governs everything. Aurobindo’s theory was embraced formally by physicist–philosopher Ken Wilber using a term “holon” borrowed from Arthur Koestler. Earlier Bohm (2004) called the brain holographic and stated his holographic brain theory that accepts quantum consciousness as reality. I will be quoting the Gita

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from the translation of Miller (2004). The word Yoga is used by Aurobindo and all sages in the deepest sense, which is to connect through body, mind and spirit with a complete surrender and merger of the self to the higher. Aurobindo’s Bhagavad Gita is a prescription for connecting with the Divine in us through three pathways of Self-evolution. What it is certainly not is a direction for doing one’s duty regardless of events. Had that been the case then (Aurobindo says) we would have to send the Buddha back to his wife and son, make Sri Ramakrishna teach in the primary school he left and ensure that Swami Vivekananda looked after his family.

4.1 The Bhagavad Gita’s Messages—Karma Yoga Krishna is saying that Action is always better than Inaction, but it must be done without desire for the fruits of the action. The Action must be bound by strict discipline that comes from understanding of the self. (The Second Chapter) Be intent on action; Not on the fruits of action; Avoid attraction to the fruits; And attachment to inaction (47). Perform actions firm in discipline; relinquishing attachments; be impartial to failure and success -- this equanimity is called discipline (48) (Miller 2004).

Before we analyze these stanzas, let us look at an incident from the highest level of sport. 1992 World Billiard Amateur Championship—Geet Sethi was far behind in the quarter finals. At the mid-way interval, his wife asked him to forget everything and just enjoy the game. Geet did that, unconcerned about winning or losing, and made the world record break of 1276. He won the match and later the title. This is what he felt. “This was one kind of a sublime moment and I was blowing everything away …. You’re on auto-mode, your cue is an extension of your arm …. I just remember that it was just Flow, the word that I think depicts my large break is Flow … uninterrupted Flow where the body, mind and soul, everything comes together” (Magotra, 2019). Csikszentmihalyi (1990) has worked on these aspects in his seminal book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”. He identifies nine dimensions of flow calling it “autotelic experience”, which is the complete focus on the job at hand and no thought on the eventual result. He quotes Edwin Moses the greatest 400 M hurdler “Your mind has to be absolutely clear … all personal problems have to be erased from the consciousness as if they didn’t exist.” Csikszentmihalyi emphasizes that for the Autotelic person becoming immersed in the activity and paying full attention to what is happening requires “determination and discipline … and transforming the entirety of life into a single Flow of activity, with unified goals that provide constant purpose”. If we read the relevant stanzas from the Bhagavad Gita, we relive the Flow concept of today’s Mindfulness and the studies done by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Krishna’s advice on Karma Yoga is today’s Mindfulness with complete focus on the task at hand without allowing the mind to wander towards the fruits of the action, because that would

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detract from the purity of the effort. Enabling oneself to achieve this requires the highest discipline because the indiscipline is in the constantly wandering mind. To enter a job interview thinking what will happen on success/failure is the preamble for a poor performance. Krishna and the Mindfulness scientists will advise “When he controls his senses; with his mind and engages the discipline; of action with his faculties of action; detachment sets him apart (The Third Chapter, 7)” (Miller 2004). The awareness of the self is followed by an understanding of how the mind should be disciplined with detachment. This takes us to the second message.

4.2 The Messages of the Bhagavad Gita—Gyana Yoga (The Second Chapter) Arjun: Krishna what defines a man; deep in contemplation whose insight; and thought are sure? How would he speak? How would he sit? How would he move? (54) Krishna—When he gives up desires in his mind; is content with the self within himself, then he is said to be a man; whose insight is sure Arjuna (55) …. When he shows no preference; in fortune or misfortune; and neither exults nor hates; his insight is sure (57) …. Without discipline; he has no understanding or inner power; without inner power he has no peace; and without peace where is joy (60) (Miller 2004)

Krishna is asking Arjuna to discipline his mind because it can be the greatest enemy to being in the Flow, by wandering and taking away the intensity of focus. The advice goes beyond a single task to life in totality. But how can we live without desires? The American psychologist Maslow (1971) in his “The Farther Reaches of Human Nature” describes the perfect state of self-actualization as “Transcendence and the Psychology of Being”. He identifies many areas of life that we must transcend or surpass to reach a state of Being where life fulfils its highest potential. Maslow mentions transcending fortune/misfortune, basic needs, culture, social approval, ego self, taking or needing control and the past. The first step of this journey is to become Aware of the Self as only then can one go beyond. Krishna says, “When ignorance is destroyed; by knowledge of the Self; then like the sun, knowledge; illumines ultimate reality (The Fifth Chapter, 16)” (Miller 2004). Maslow describes the evolved state as “Transcending also means to become Divine or Godlike, to go beyond the merely human …. Self-actualizing individuals by definition already suitably gratified in their basic needs, are now motivated in other higher ways, to be called Metamotivations” (Maslow, 1971). He provides numerous examples of Nobel laureates, musicians, writers, poets, industrialists, scientists, teachers, statesmen who have achieved greatness by following the metamotivation path. For Maslow, the ultimate goal for the metamotivated Self-actualized person is to touch the Divine within. This is precisely what Sri Aurobindo’s Gyana Yoga analysis is about and exactly where Krishna is taking Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Sukhtankar in his fourth Mahabharata lecture text (he died the day of the presentation) explains who Arjuna and Krishna really are. They were two Rishis Narottama and Narayana in an earlier era. Arjuna is Narottama, which means the Perfect Man. Krishna is Narayana—the Ultimate Reality or the Supreme Being. Arjuna and

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Krishna represent Man (Jeevatma) and the Divine (Paramatma) that is in himself. The journey is to connect and be a part of that Divine in oneself. Sukhtankar calls it “the Dual Soul—the Empirical and the Transcendental Self subsisting in one tabernacle” (Sukhtankar 2016). Krishna says “I exist in all creatures; so the disciplined man devoted to me; grasps the oneness of life; wherever he is, he is in me (The Sixth Chapter, 31)” (Miller 2004). The Gyana Yoga is telling us to reach out to the highest part of ourselves, where the material world falls away, where the need is to live the Divine, fulfilling our unlimited potential. However, to achieve this we need two steps—discipline which Krishna mentions time and again and Self-awareness. The process yields the greatest benefits to our Karma Yoga, the work-life that we lead. Visualize the great achievers in any field and you will see Maslow’s Self-actualization at play. More importantly, you will see Krishna’s advice being implemented.

4.3 The Messages of the Gita—Bhakti Yoga While the first two Yogas are important for living to our true potential, Krishna indicates they are only a part of the whole. Three aspects of what follows need our attention. Universal form: Krishna responds to Arjuna’s childlike curiosity of what the Divine looks like by showing his universal form. It is terrifying, beautiful and humbling. The Tenth Chapter: Arjuna—Lord of Discipline; how can I know you as I meditate; on you— in what diverse aspects; can I think of you Krishna? (17) Krishna—I am the beginning, the middle; and the end of creations Arjuna; of the sciences, I am the science of the self; I am the dispute of orators (32) Arjuna, I am the seed; of all creatures; nothing animate or inanimate; could exist without me (39) I am time grown old; creating world destruction; set in motion; to annihilate the worlds (Eleventh Chapter, 32) (Miller 2004).

Primordial origins: The Bhagavad Gita is also called the 13th Upanishad. Krishna is taking Arjuna to the realm of Brahmana, an universe of energy. Krishna explains the fundamental aspect of Consciousness as an essential part of primordial Nature and the fact that it rests in each of us. Know that both Nature; and man’s spirit have no beginning; that qualities and changes; have their origin in Nature (The Thirteenth Chapter, 19). A fragment of me in the living world; is the timeless essence of life; it draws on the senses; and the mind inherent in Nature (The Fifteenth Chapter, 7). I dwell deep; in the heart of everyone; memory, knowledge; and reasoning come from me; I am the object to be known; through all sacred lore; and I am it’s knower; the creator of its final truth (The Fifteenth Chapter, 15) (Miller 2004).

Biologist Margulis (1998) says all living beings have metabolic pathways that lead back to the origins of evolution 3.5 billion years ago with molecular biology acting as the bridge between physics and history. Our genome has the primordial. The seed from the origin of the Universe is carried by each of us.

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The Connecting mechanism: How can this beautiful aspect of Nature be of use to us? Krishna repeatedly emphasizes the power and benefits of meditation with an implicit understanding that we connect with the universal intelligence through meditation. “Krishna—Disciplined through practice; his reason never straying, Meditating, one reaches, the supreme divine spirit of man (The Eighth Chapter, 8)” (Miller 2004). He states three kinds of penance that are more valuable than all ritual sacrifices—integrity, kindness and compassion performed without any expectation of reward (The Seventeenth Chapter 14, 15, 16).

5 Modern Science and the Gita Let us examine the modernity of the Gita by some results of the twenty-first century’s cutting edge science. As recent as the 1970s meditation was not allowed entry in neuroscience. 2002 changed that dramatically through an experiment at the Neurophysiology Laboratory of the University of Wisconsin at Madison done under supervision of Richard Davidson with support from the East. The Dalai Lama sent Myungur Rinpoche, one of his yogis with 62,000 hours of meditation. The gamma results through 256 sensors on Myungur’s skull cap created a sensation that is still reverberating through the scientific community. Today we have new subjects such as neuroplasticity and epigenetics that admit thought can create ‘Altered Traits’ and change our brain cells and genes (Spoon 2020) Rudolph Tanzi, (Chair Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Vice Chair Neurology Research, Massachusetts General Hospital) has partnered Deepak Chopra in writing on the Brain, Genes and Self-healing. They support Donald Hoffman’s (UC Irvine) belief that “consciousness creates the brain” as against the earlier Cartesian dogma of “brain creates consciousness”. Koch (2012) admits “Consciousness as a fundamental feature of the universe” may not yet be a final theory but a step in the right direction. Zohar (1991) declares “The Quantum Self is by the very mechanics of its Consciousness, a natural self—a free and responsive self—and its world ultimately will reflect the world of Nature”. In “Super Brain” Chopra and Tanzi (2013) state seven neurological aspects of the enlightened person who has “connected”. These are “(i) Inner calm and detachment increase (ii) Feeling connected grows (iii) Empathy deepens (iv) Clarity dawns (v) Awareness becomes more acute (vi) Truth reveals itself (vii) Bliss grows in your life— you love more deeply”. Krishna acquaints Arjuna with the beauty of the Enlightened Sattvic soul who has touched the Divine with Meditation. His joys are through a harmonious wholeness of spirit. The Rajasic pursues all materialistic desires and public acclamation which yield pleasures at the outset but turn to poison eventually. The worst is the Tamasic who through obstinacy and stubbornness sinks into conceit, sloth, fear and grief.

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Chopra and Tanzi’s book ends with a quote from the Mandukya Upanishad: “Like two birds perched in the same tree, who are intimate friends, the ego and the selfdwell in the same body. The first bird eats the sweet and sour fruits of life, while the other bird silently looks on”. Chopra and Tanzi call this fusion “The True Self”. Aurobindo uses the same Upanishadic two birds analogy but goes a step further, adding what he calls the multiplicity of the Divine—the Purushottam. The two birds are Nara and Narayana, Arjuna and Krishna, Self and the Higher Self, Jeevatma and Paramatma. Krishna’s Sattvic enlightened soul is in Bhakti Yoga, connected to the Divine in surrender mode. It is also an extension of the Gyana Yoga state, which is an extension of the Karma Yoga state. The three are connected to each other and to pure Consciousness for a person who Meditates, follows his passion, transcending elements that distract from perfection. An example? Novak Djokovic’s rise in tennis began with his regimen of meditation and yoga. He clarifies that it’s a mind, body, spirit movement that has removed fear, anxiety, depression and other negative emotions from his mind. He does not worry too much about winning or losing but to enjoy the sport he loves. He practices 14 hours a day in Dubai with temperatures above 100 F. During Wimbledon he meditates daily at the serene campus of the Buddhapadipa temple half a mile from the All England Club. The monks are quite used to Novak going to a corner of the 5-acre site and doing his daily meditation. Being the world number one is not easy, however, Djokovic emphasises that to be truly happy and enjoy bliss is more difficult but he’s getting there. Krishna and Arjuna wish him well (Hodgkinson 2015) Colin Wilson’s “The Outsider” brought to me the personalities, thoughts and lives of Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Sartre, Kafka, Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Van Gogh, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard and many others. In his last book “Super Consciousness” Wilson (2009) describes an experience during his poverty-stricken intolerable school days with a part-time job in the physics lab. One day I found my answer. It lay in a small book called The Bhagavad Gita, to which I had been led by a reference in a T. S. Eliot essay. Its basic assertion was that the individual soul, the Atman, is identical to the ultimate reality, God or Brahmana. All I had to do was to sit on the floor of my bedroom every morning and Meditate on this, while focusing my mind intently on the identity of Atman with Brahmana. And to my delight, it worked. After half an hour of focused attention I left home early and walked to school, a mile or so away, feeling curiously buoyant and optimistic. Walking through the slum streets where my father had grown up, I would pause to look with fascination at a cracked windowsill or a battered front door. At work, if I felt bored, I would find a corner where I could sit with my mind focused on the identity of Atman and Brahmana. And within moments I had a marvellous sense of being in control of my life. It seemed clear to me that as long as I remembered this basic insight, I had an infallible method of renewing my sense of direction and purpose …. Above all, I now knew that states of power consciousness were possible. I merely had to focus my mind and keep it focused (Wilson, 2009).

The Bhagavad Gita is alive and well. It is not just modern, it is beyond time. It remains and will continue to be Aldous Huxley’s “Perennial Philosophy”.

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References Aurobindo, S. (1997). Essays on the Gita. Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Bird, K., & Sherwin, M. J. (2006). American Prometheus: The triumph and tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer. Vintage. Bhaduri, N. P. (2013). Katha Amritsaman (Vol. 1–4). Dey’s Publishing. Bohm, D. (2004). On creativity. Routledge. Campbell, J. (2019). Revitalize your tennis game the Djokovic way with yoga and meditation. Tennis World. Chopra, D., & Tanzi, R. (2013). Super brain. Rider. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Penguin. Hodgkinson, M. (2015). Novak Djokovic and the power of meditation. https://www.espn.com/tennis/ story/_/id/13166973/wimbledon-novak-djokovic-power-meditation. Accessed on 22 Feb 2021. Huxley, A. (1951). Introduction. In The Bhagvad Gita. (S. Prabhavananda & C. Isherwood, Trans.). American Library. Koch, C. (2012). Consciousness. MIT Press. Magotra, A. (2019). Know your legend—Geet Sethi. Scroll. Margulis, L. (1998). Symbiotic planet—A new view of evolution. Basic Books. Maslow, A. (1971). The farther reaches of human nature. Penguin Arkana. Miller, B. S. (2004). Translation of the Bhagavad Gita. Bantam Books. Miller, B. S. (1977). The Gitagovinda of Jayadeva—Love song of the dark lord. Columbia University Press. Reprint Delhi (2007) Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. Mitra, E. (2015). Understanding Yudhisthira’s actions—Recasting Karma-yoga in a Wittgensteinian mould. In A. Chakrabarti & S. Bandopadhyay (Eds.), Mahabharata now—Narration, aesthetics, ethics. Routledge. Peat, D. (1996). Infinite potential—The life and times of David Bohm. Helix Books. Singh, K. S. (Ed.). (1993). The Mahabharata in the tribal and folk traditions of India. Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Spoon, M., et al. (2020). Brain scans link meditation to slower “brain-aging” in advanced meditator. Canter for Healthy Minds University of Wisconsin, Madison. https://centerhealthyminds.org/ news/brain-scans-link-meditation-to-slower-brain-aging-in-advanced-meditator. Accessed on 22 Feb 2021. Sukhtankar, V. S. (2016). The meaning of the Mahabharata. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. Wilson, C. (2009). Super consciousness—The quest for the peak experience. Watkins. Zohar, D. (1991). The quantum self . William Morrow. Zohar, D., & Marshall, I. (2001). Spiritual intelligence—The ultimate intelligence. Bloomsbury.

Love in the Classroom? The Relevance of Erich Fromm’s Concept of Love for Business Students Knut Ims

1 The Central Problem The central assumption of this essay is that stimulating the students’ moral sensitivity is of high importance in business education. This task is difficult for several reasons. The students may see that sensitivity toward others is in conflicting with their role of being an efficient manager, and within the context of a business school, the guiding star is to maximize the profit for the shareholders. Another challenge is the role of the teacher. In the Western tradition, there has been a dominant cognitive perspective on learning and development. In the perspective of Paulo Freire (1972), this way of teaching is framed as the banking concept of education. The teachers “banker-role” is to regulate the way the world “enters into” the students. The teacher “cognizes a cognizable object” while preparing the lessons. Thereafter, the teacher “expounds to his students on that object.” The task of the students is to memorize the contents narrated by the teacher. More recently, such an approach has been criticized for its one-sidedness, focusing on the individual and the mental side of learning. The danger of a one-sided emphasis on the development of cognitive abilities may lead to an under-development of the emotional side. Accordingly, more recently, the cognitivists have put more emphasis on the social and cultural contexts of learning. For example, Geir Kaufmann (1996, 197– 200) mentions that social cognitive learning is important, but at the same time, it is one of the most complex ways of learning, and the importance of learning through observing others is paramount. A third problem with the view of the teacher as sole agent of transferring knowledge, is the belief that students have the same goals as the teacher, and that they ultimately will be illuminated by the teacher. Another assumption is the homogeneity

K. Ims (B) NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_30

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of modes of learning, without taking individual differences into consideration: how experiences, information, and ideas are absorbed and transformed by each student. A fourth problem in business school is the “scenery” or “set” effect. A business school’s curriculum includes major economic topics, and key parts of the literature is based upon the rational individual, Homo Economicus, denoted as a “rational fool” by Amartya Sen. The topics are typically presented via abstract mathematical models plus the basic motif of the “agents” denoted as self-interests (Ghoshal, 2005). We should not underestimate the effect of this setting on the attitudes of business school students, and ultimately in the belief of the normative expectation of selfish actors in business. The “lost letter experiment” illustrates that students of economics learn to become more selfish than students from other fields. James March has maintained that one of the most important tasks for the social sciences is to undermine the strongly held doctrine of the importance of actors’ selfishness (Zsolnai, 2014, 2018). One of the problems with the above-mentioned approaches is that they either ignore or underestimate the importance of the moral self. According to Zygmunt Bauman (1993), morality has moral impulse as the ground on which it stands, and this is an elusive foundation. The moral self as moral impulses are not popular, because moral impulses are frequently seen as “subjective, elusive, erratic”. Danish philosopher Knut Løgstrup (1991) holds that the ethical demand is vague and confused, barely audible. He points to the danger of conventions and rules because they make life comfortable. In fact, they safeguard life lived in the pursuit of selfishness because conventions are used as a means for keeping aloof from one another and insulating ourselves. The so-called “the Ethics Management Paradox” is related to this avoidance of genuine moral feelings and genuine moral commitment. By reducing ethics to a functional and instrumental management concept, we lose the vitality and core of ethics through crowding out genuine moral feelings. The problem is to attempt to temper opportunistic behavior in and among organizations by introducing economic incentives for those who respect regulations. By doing this, we are in fact substituting economic calculations for moral feelings. The paradox points to the problems with a rational and technocratic conception of ethics and the case that more business ethics does not guarantee more ethical behavior (Bouckaert, 2006a, b). Buber (1964) expresses that our self-concept depends upon how we look and treat other human beings. Buber’s famous distinction between “I-Thou” and “I-It” is essential. In I–It, the other does not appear as a moral subject, but is reduced to an object that can be manipulated. On the other hand, I–Thou is a relationship, it is a living relationship with the other. This I–Thou relationship is expressed in a dialogue. The basic challenge is that the context of business schools does not foster dialogue and the sense of community in the classroom. The philosopher Vetlesen (1994) argues that there is a logical sequence prior to moral action, namely—empathy—perception—judgment—action. Thus, it is primordial to be sensitive and to identify a situation that affects the weal and woe of others before assessing and choosing how to act. It implies that the first door into morality is empathy. However, one must continue to walk into the three other doors

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to create the change needed to act on the perceived problem. One of the main challenges in society and in business schools is that the social emotional bond of empathy is severely weakened because the phenomenon of numbing and “desensitizing” is taking place. The constant stream of data about pseudo-events as well as horrifying and terrible events globally via Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms, leads to an “information overload” that may result in ethical numbness and paralysis of action. In addition, the force and power of modern technology makes it imperative to stop, reflect, and reason before Frankenstein’s monster is realized. Accordingly, the danger of harm that can be brought about on people, nature, and future generations have no limits, and the need for business students to take responsibility for more than the bottom line of business have never been more critical.

2 State-of-the-Art of the Literature There are alternatives to teachers “banker-role vis a vis the students”, making deposits on the students bank accounts with appropriate dozes of knowledge so that the students can withdraw appropriate “packages” of knowledge when needed. Freire (1972) promotes a more liberating education which he terms “problem-posing education”. The teachers are no longer the only one-who-teaches, but are themselves taught in dialogue with the students, who in their turn also teach. “They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” (Freire, 1972: 53). One result is that arguments based on formal authority are no longer valid, because the essence is to create dialogical relations. One requisite condition of a fruitful dialog on ethics is addressed by Bird (1991: 45) who states the need of good conversations in order to ground ethics in the ordinary language and “overcome the pervasive prejudice that links ethics far too much exclusively to formal discourse…” Bird’s purpose is to avoid that ordinary people feel ethical illiterate and emphasizes the importance of working on a number of skills that help people in practical interaction in their daily life and performing their job. According to Bird, good conversations are “vocal, reciprocating, issues oriented, rational, imaginative, and honest” (Bird, 1991: 35). Another approach to learning that fits well into the purpose of increasing the students’ ethical awareness is David Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle. Kolb’s emphasis is given to the whole learning process and provides a model to develop a set of solutions with the requisite complexity to adequately address the uncertainty posed by many ethical problems. It does this by promoting the integration of four stages in the learning cycle. Experiential learning encompasses two primary dimensions of the learning process: taking in ideas, information and experience through either feeling or thinking, and processing or transforming the input through action, or reflection. This approach to learning gives the legitimacy of a variety of perspectives on ethical issues, thereby eliminating the need for a singular, absolutist position while developing norms for generative and innovative learning (Senge, 1990).

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The four-stage model of Kolb facilitates the development of ethical reasoning and ethical sensitivity because it contains the valuing of all aspects of experience. The theory proposes that learning, and growth are facilitated by an integrated process that begins with (1) concrete experiences followed by (2) collection of data, reflection and observation about experience. In the next stage (3), the data are analyzed and conceptualized, and then the conclusion of the analysis is used in the (4) active experimentation stage. Looking closer at stage (1), the relevance of Kolb’s theory for ethics is revealed. Concrete “here and now experiences” involve valuing. It means to engage fully in the present moment with sense experiences, interpersonal interaction, and emotions. One aspect of this is feeling, which can be transitory or long-lasting, positive, negative, or neutral and range in intensity from mild to intense. At the root of many negative feelings is fear from loss, pain, helplessness, and vulnerability. The question then is what kind of learning “tools” exist to cultivate the emotions. In 1993, an unusual book was published representing Harvard Business School (Piper et al., 1993). The book tried to place leadership, ethics, and corporate responsibility at the center of Harvard Business School’s ethos and mission. “It is a call to rebalance the educational trilogy of values, knowledge, and skills. Each is important, each is insufficient in isolation” (Piper et al., 1993: 10). It was stated that our fundamental responsibility is “to educate professional women and men who possess not only certain skills and knowledge, and a broad managerial perspective, but also a heightened sense of the moral and social responsibility their education and future positions of power require” (Piper et al., 1993: 11). It was argued that a more emphatic imagination was an important part of ethical formation. The driving energy was seen as a capacity for empathy, “the ground of compassion—the ability to suffer with” (Piper et al., 1993: 53). By empathy they did not mean sentimental or romantic feelings to be handled by therapists, but as a strength enabling decision-makers to see things from multiple perspectives, be affected by them and take them into account. (Piper et al., 1993: 53). However, in our highly rationalized culture, the emotional vocabulary is limited to a few “stock feeling words”. However, there are examples of applying emotional concepts in business and management. Zsolnai (2018) criticizes the stakeholder management paradigm because it ignores primordial stakeholders of organizations such as nature, society, and future generations. To support his arguments, Zsolnai refers to the ancient moral law, “Love your neighbor as yourself” and reinterprets it as “Love Nature, Society and Future Generations as your own organizations” (Zsolnai, 2018: 60). Love is a concept that has been feared by ancient philosophers. Why has famous philosophers been afraid of love? The main argument is that love may make people irrational, and that love is a kind of insanity. For example, Epicure compares love with sickness, and objects it because it cannot be satisfied. Buddhists do not appreciate attachment and think that love may lead to dependency. According to Berg Eriksen (2000: 289–299), love is an appropriate point of departure for philosophy because it so manifolded. In Plato’s view, eros is a kind of desire towards the perfect, but the Christian love—agape, may be interpreted as “merci vis

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a vis the pusillanimous”, love towards the vulnerable. Augustin’s concept of caritas includes both eros and agape and in addition something quite new. Augustin makes an essential distinction between the love of God, which is good, and the bodily desire (carnal, lust/craving) which is the root to all evil. For Augustin, love is the essence force in philosophy. And caritas is the love that loves what is valuable. This means to love people, not material objects. Caritas is a kind of love that must be active (Berg Eriksen, 2000). Augustin’s view is that all love is desire which are a kind of striving (motus quidam), and what it is directed towards is decisive. Most people pursue happiness, but the problem according to Augustin is that they search for it in the wrong place. According to Augustin, the right will is good love and the perverse will is evil love. Passions, virtues, and vices have its origins in different forms of love. Lust, craving, or desire is due to a lack of something. Only union is love in its highest meaning (Berg Eriksen, 2000). Love is a concept seldom found in the literature of business ethics. For example, Tang and Chen (2008) analyzes the phenomenon of love of money among young people. They define this kind of love as consisting of three components of one’s attitudes towards money (1) affective (“I want to be rich”), (2) behavioral (money is a motivator), and (3) cognitive (money is important). One of the arguments is that the love of money is more strongly related to unethical behavior than one’s pursuit of the good life through consumption or possessions. An exceptional essay on the importance of love in leadership development is written by Koznes & Posner (1992). One example is their interview of a General promoted to commanding officer of the Military Traffic Management Command. When asked about his approach to develop leaders in business as well as in the military, he replied: I have the secret to success in life. The secret is to stay in love. Staying in love gives you the fire to really ignite other people, to see inside other people, to have a greater desire to get things done than other people. A person who is not in love doesn’t really feel the kind of excitement that helps them to get ahead and lead others and to achieve. I don’t know any other fire, any other thing in life that is more exhilarating and is more positive a feeling than love is (Kaouzes & Posner, 1992: 479–480).

Kouzes and Posner did not expect the findings about the emphasis on love. “But after numerous interviews and case analyses, we have continued to find that “love” is a word that leaders use freely when talking about their own motivations to lead. Love is the magnetic north on the leader’s ethical compass”. (Kouzes & Posner 1992: 480). According to Kouzes and Posner (1992) love is a feeling, “a warm personal attachment of deep affection.” They refer to Ferris (1988) who in an organizational context defines love as “a feeling of caring or deep respect for yourself and others, of valuing and believing in yourself and others, and of helping to achieve the best of which everyone is capable. It means finding a sense of purpose, fulfillment, and fun in your work, and helping others to find these qualities in their work as well.” Without these feelings, leaders fundamentally are taking advantage of their constituents (Kouzes and Posner 1992: 480).

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Kouzes and Posner (1992) conclude that “Ethical leadership accesses the healing and energizing powers of love, recognizing foremost that leadership is a reciprocal relationship with constituents.” Furthermore, they assume that the leader’s passion comes from compassion and finally that leaders in this view are servants and supporters of their collaborators. According to the findings of Kouzes and Posner (1992) and Zsolnai (2018), we may wonder why love is so seldom used in the management literature and in teaching in business schools. One reason may be that the history of love concepts is characterized by a diversity of concepts. From the ancient time Eros and philia have played a prominent role, and later within the Christian tradition, agape and koinonia are fundamental to understand Christian love (see also Mele, 2011). Being a keen reader of a number of Eric Fromm’s books in the late 1960s, one cannot avoid being fascinated by his rich and fruitful concept of ‘productive love’. It deserves to be explored as a framework for an alternative approach to learning ethics in business schools. Love is discussed as an analytical concept in The Art of Loving (Fromm, 1956), consisting of four highly interdependent components—respect, care, responsibility, and knowledge. The core of Fromm’s conception is that love is not a sentiment, an affection, but a productive orientation towards others and the world. Fromm states that, “If I truly love one person, I love all persons, I love the world, I love life.” (Fromm, 1956: 46). He states that love is not a quick fix and can only be achieved if one actively develops one’s total personality. Individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love one’s neighbor, and needs true humility, courage, faith, and discipline.

3 My Approach and Solutions Love as an approach to the challenges of human existence Eric Fromm argues that we need a theory of human being in order to understand the challenges of human existence. In an evolutional perspective, human being was once one with nature but via development of the human consciousness become separated from nature. This separation creates anxiousness and the need to find a new harmony between the relationship of human beings and between humans and nature. Humans are part of nature, but the gift of reason is being aware of oneself as a separate entity. It means aware of one’s separation and aloneness. Fromm discusses different ways to overcome the separateness, from primitive rituals, human sacrifice or military conquest, by indulgence in luxury, by obsessional work, artistic creation, or love of God. The new challenge is to reach out to reunite oneself with others and with nature. Fromm’s way to overcome the separateness and anxiety is love. What is love? As our literature review shows love is a very ambiguous concept, so it is necessary to delimit its content. Fromm’s ultimate definition is that love is “union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality” (Fromm, 1956: 20). It implies that love is an activity. It is not receiving but giving. It is in the giving I experience ‘overflowing’, and experience my strength, wealth and power which fills

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me with joy. Giving does not first and foremost relate to the material world, but the giving of oneself. It is through expressing one’s feelings of joy as well as sadness and sharing one’s knowledge that one enriches and enhances other human beings. Giving reflects, shines, and warms, and makes other a giver. In this way, love is a power which produces love, and in terms of education, it means that the teacher will be taught by his students. Fromm’s concept of ‘brotherly love’, which means the wish to promote any other person’s life, seems highly relevant in the context of teaching. The inspiration is imbedded in the maxim “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It is not exclusively directed towards friends but involves experiencing union with all human beings. We are all one in solidarity. It follows that we do not perceive the other, our brother and sister on the surface, where our separateness and our differences are obvious, but we perceive each other in the core, in our brotherhood and relatedness. Therefore, this is love between equals, knowing that in some situations and, in some stages of our lives, we are helpless and vulnerable. For most people, those states are transitory conditions and in almost any person’s life or in any profession there will be opportunities to practice love (Fromm, 1956). Education as ‘Bildung’—helping the students to realize their potentialities One implication of this reading of Fromm is that the teacher’s role is to demonstrate faith in the potentialities of the students and to develop and unfold the capabilities within the context of a classroom. This faith is rooted in personal observations, experiences, and reasoning in my role as teacher. The essence is to judge and held certain values of ultimate concern. It is the participants’ existence that is in play. Authenticity is an essential element in the teaching as well as learning of ethics. The teacher and the students can model particular values through their explicit behavior. My observations and experiences are that the values that are related to care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge are primordial values to be expressed in the classroom. Those values are primordial in Erich Fromm’s concept of love. A central belief is that fairness in the dealing with each other is not enough. To give you as much as you give me, which is the prevalent ethical maxim in our market society, is not enough. The Golden Rule is different: “To do to others as you would like them to do to you.” This was originally formulated as” Love your neighbor as yourself.” Thus, brotherly love is different from fairness ethics. It means to feel responsible for and one with your neighbor, while fairness ethics is transactional, ultimately based upon separation. According to Fromm (1956:130), the practice of love must begin with recognizing the difference between fairness and love. How can a teacher love his or her students in a productive sense? Based upon Fromm’s elemental model of love, which implies four basic components, care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge, we can develop a frame of reference to inform and guide us. Each component and the relationship between the components can be investigated to understand this love concept more fully (Fig. 1).1

374 Fig. 1 Fromm’s love concept illustrated as a diamond

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Responsibility Respect

Care Knowledge

Responsibility is a voluntary act even if it is often regarded as duty. It is a response to the needs of another human being. To be responsible means to be able and ready to “respond”. However, without respect responsibility as well as care, could deteriorate into ‘over-responsibility’, and serve ego’s will to dominate, control, and possess. The root of the word respect is recpicere, which means to look at, the ability to see a person as she is, be aware of the other’s unique individuality. In order to respect a person, knowledge is needed. Knowledge has many layers and many forms, and knowledge related to love penetrates to the core. It implies to transcend myself and my ego to see the other person in his own terms. Fromm (1956) writes that if I on the surface observe that my partner is angry, I should know that anger may be the manifestation of something deeper. Anger may hide a deep sadness. Fromm emphasizes that knowledge has another fundamental relation to the basic need to fuse with another to transcend one’s separateness and warns about the danger of desiring to know the secrets of other persons. The peril is to transform the other to a thing in our possession. It is only in the act of loving that I can find myself, which is strongly expressed in the Delphic motto “Know thyself.” For Fromm, the only way of deeper knowing is in the act of love. Care “is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.” The prototype is motherly love for her child. Love and labor are inseparable. “One loves that for which one labors, and one labors for that which one loves” (Fromm, 1956). There is a tension between care and respect. Care without respect might be perverted to abuse, and respect without care might be perverted to inaction. This tension can only be solved in a paradoxical way. Responsibility without knowledge might be the same as letting a child control a dangerous weapon, and knowledge without responsibility and the will to commit, is impotent. Leadership within the business ecosystem The title of my business ethics course is “Ethical Action: Individual, organization and society.” It assumes a close relationship between the individual actor (I), organization (O), and society (S), conceptualized as an ecosystem. Within this system there is almost an infinite opportunity for conflicting values and interests. For individual actors, there may arise difficult ethical dilemmas. New innovations and new technologies create problematic situations that often requires developing of new norms. 1

In several publications I have denoted this love concept ‘the Ethical Diamond’, see for example, “Informasjonsetikk i Praksis. Datasikkerhet og Personvern» (in Norwegian). (Informationethics in Practice. Data security and Privacy,) Oslo, Tano 1992, pp. 29–32).

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Heinckiens (2014) discusses the relationship among business, society, and the individual, and emphasizes the instability of what he calls the business ecosystems, and the need for individuals to find meaning in their work and to establish a ‘new underlying ethic’ (Heinckiens, 2014: 15–30). The students in my course ‘Ethical action’ is given freedom to select the topic for their group project and based upon experiences the students are highly interested in exploring problems on the individual level that is related to their self-concept, that is to their existential situation. As a result, the fourdimensional framework of Mitroff (1998) is introduced early in the course as one of the frames of references due to Mitroff’s approach explicit discusses the importance of the existential/spiritual level as a contrast to the other three dimensions; technical/scientific, interpersonal, and systemic dimensions. Learning theory How to stimulate empathy? Empathy is ‘not a hard thing’ according to Dauchot (2019). The essence is creating an empathic bond between persons. Empathy should be distinguished from sympathy. Empathy rises when we “cringe” and react when someone is harmed. Empathy means to feel the pain the other is feeling and allows us to see a problem from a perspective outside of own bias and typical way of looking. Sympathy is feeling the same as another, but not taking the further” step” into empathy. Dauchot (2019) emphasizes that it takes time and repeated exposure to develop another person’s “frame-of-mind”, embody it and crating the emphatic bond. In short, “empathy is a transformation from acting as self to acting as other”. Furthermore, Dauchot (2019) believes that some role-playing games in which the players are immersed into like “Dungeons and Dragons”, may in fact be exercises in empathy. One of the elements is acting out their story “crafted” by a master. A key purpose of my course is to stimulate the empathy of the students by creating a safe space for opening up for dialogue and expression of personal feelings. As such the social context is assumed to be a key factor for expressing liberating feelings. The assumption is that role playing is an effective tool that allows open communication without threat of the usual vulnerability. By role play, I mean taking a role of a character or person and acting it out, while a partner and or/and an antagonist is taking a different role. In the course “Ethical Action”, the role is (usually) fictious and not real but it has a degree of consistency. Role-playing is acknowledged as an important part of a child’s psychological development and there is also classical social psychological experiments that role-playing may result in behavioral changes—taking the role of guard keeper in a prison in Philip Zimbardo’s study, and as a teacher in Stanley Milgram’s experiments (1963), or pretending to be a person diagnosed with lung cancer (Maio and Haddock (2014: 157). In the course, I promote the use of the elements of theater, and the students are writing plots, and stage them to keep the actors and the spectators immersed in the role plays. The classroom as a learning experiment The application of role-playing in many contexts is communicated to the students to motivate them for their own main project which are to develop their own role play, stage it, and play it in front of the class in the end of semester. Some of the students

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have no background in role play, and it is important to inform them of the many reallife uses of role plays. Some role plays relate to training in preparation for future performance, and to improve one’s skill. It is often used as a tool in occupational training and not at least in military wargames. In the latter case, it is a gliding scale where role-playing behavior may be simulating real-world conditions. In the latter case, the main purpose is to train soldiers for certain tasks or pilots for future flights. As part of the role play in ‘Ethical action’, the participants are expected to use appropriate clothing to strengthen the cultivation of empathy and influence the spectator’s experiences. Using role play is assumed to directly influence the perception of others’ inner worlds. David Kolb’s (1984) model of learning synthesizes different learning theories and motivates the learning strategies in the course Ethical Action. The four stages in Kolb’s experiential learning theory consists of (1) concrete experiences, (2) reflective observations, (3) abstract conceptualization, and (4) active experimentation. The logic is that an effective learning processes consists of all four stages. However, while the existing academic model puts heavy emphasis on abstract conceptualization, and some weight is laid upon reflective observation, stage (1) concrete experiences, and stage (4) active experimentation are not typically emphasized in academia, except in the schools of arts. The logic in the course “Ethical action” is to give adequate weight also to stage (1) and (4), believing that this emphasis will enhance the learning processes and develop the students in a more broad and holistic way. Active experimenting involves putting into practice what has been gained from the earlier three stages, the empathy, valuing, and feeling that was generated from the role play and discussion. This is really “learning by doing”. Role-playing and writing of personal assignments are the main kinds of active experimentation that allow students to heighten their awareness by enacting their deeply rooted and frequently tacit values. In order to elicit values, one has to act them out. However, Kolb’s stage 2, is important in any class of ethics. Reflection involves examining experience as though the experience was “bending back on itself”, it is an inspection of one’s experience, beginning with the inside and looking outward, and then looking from the outside, inward (Hunt, 1987). To be reflecting when dealing with ethical dilemmas requires a dialogue with self and others about what is considered ethical, what is appropriate for this situation, what feels right, what works, and what does not. Another tool is formation of core groups. It means that the same students collaborate all through the semester. The size of the group is small and ranges from 3 to 5 students. One reason is that openness to learning and development requires a minimal degree of security. In a classroom situation, the social context is implicit. It creates an opportunity for the development of a sense of community, security, and openness. This is the concrete experience stage of the experiential learning cycle: direct, personal, and expressive communication. The classroom as a learning organization concerns a relationship and sense of responsibility to others, seeing the self as part of a greater whole. Even if much of the work through the semester has been done as groupwork, there is one written individual home exam with a week’s duration at the end of the course.

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This kind of exam favors students that have academic orientations. Such an exam gives the student an opportunity to put some of the building blocks of knowledge into a more coherent whole. There is much evidence that the home exam is an important exercise for gaining a deeper understanding of some of the theories and models that have been activated during the semester. More than half of the exam is related to questions about one’s own role play compared with two other groups role play. It gives the students a major opportunity to reflect on their experiences through the course. In terms of Fromm’s fascinating question: “Is Love an art?” “Or is love a pleasant sensation …” (1956, p 1), the answer is that love is an art like living. To learn how to love, we must proceed as if we want to learn any other art. It means to master the theory as well as the practice in the field. There is collected feedback from the different courses where the student’s experiences are reported. We have discussed the students’ self-evaluations in several papers (Ims & White, 1993, Ims & Huse, 1998, Prestmo et al., 2012). The exam in 2021 demonstrated the student’s fascination of Soren Kierkegaard’s theory of the three “existential stages” or ways of life. The students were highly motivated to reflect on their own life in the perspective of Kierkegaard’s esthetical and ethical mode of life.

4 Conclusions and Suggestions for Further Research It is surprising that there are relatively few approaches based upon the phenomenon of love in business education. It follows that the notion of self-interests are so reduced and misunderstood that it is not discussed at all, only taken for granted. On the contrary, a proper understanding of the love concept would have important implications. As it is now, self-love in our culture are frequently regarded as a vice, a sin. However, the reasoning in this paper is that self-love and loving of others are indivisible. The failure to distinguish self-love and love for others may have many causes. Calvin and Luther’s theology have been interpreted so that one should subject oneself to external authorities and suppress one’s individual self. However, love implies respect for one’s own integrity and uniqueness. To love your own self is very different from selfishness (Fromm, 1947:131). Seeing love as an activity, not as a feeling, implies a productive orientation in life. The fundamental maxim is to love “thy neighbor as thyself”. One way to understand the depth of this maxim is to be informed by Gandhi’s ethics, the concept of Ahimsa and Gandhi’s fight for freedom for “his” people in a non-violent way. The famous social science researcher James March has written that one of the most important tasks in the future is to undermine the belief in the assumption of individual selfishness which is an assumption not supported by evidence of a modern empirical “theory of man” (Zsolnai, 2014). The present paper makes the primordial assumption that it is a human basic need to connect and to obtain unity with others. The maxim that individual actors are trying to maximize their individual wealth and at the same time ignore the consequences for others, for

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their brothers and sisters does not fit into the “theory of man” from which we have reasoned and drawn our conclusions. The course Ethical action aims to prepare business students for becoming leaders in all types of organizations. A relevant question is what kind of leadership theory could match the course? The love concept in the classroom may support the movement of empowering, which is very strong in Scandinavian countries. In fact, we are aware of the shift from ‘span of control’ to “tiring down of the hierarchies” in leadership theory. The knowledge is now spread out in the organizations more than before, thus we do not need the command–control-type executives anymore (Zuboff, 1988). The new trend is to build power by empowering others. Power and love are not a contradiction. It is important to distinguish between power ‘over’ in the meaning of domination and exploitation of others, and power ‘to’, using one’s power to give meaning to one’s life, and apply one’s power to flourish and develop one’s potentialities. We are endowed with the capacities to speak, walk, form friendships, be productive, grow, and create. If we are not using this power, we became frustrated, sick, and unhappy. The meaning lies in the unfolding of one’s powers, by living productively through activity. Fromm (1947) underscores the strong and intense power of our passions, and specifically that a person may be ‘driven’ by different forms of greed (stinginess, masochism, envy, jealousy). Such actions are neither free nor rational, and a person who is obsessed repeating himself or herself become more inflexible. “He is active, but he is not productive” (Fromm, 1947:87). The existential/spiritual dimension in the Mitroff’s (1998) framework is exposed frequently in the “Ethical action” course. It is in line with Fromm’s statement that “Our moral problem is man’s indifference to himself” (Fromm, 1947:248). This is related to James March’s (2006) attacks on the myths of rationality, and his attempts to explore alternative visions of the human experiences and the human spirit. He states that rationality is both a description, prescription and characterization of the human spirit. However, human existence might be organized around identities rather than instrumental choices. Then concepts of duties and obligations will be more central than concepts of preference and interests. In a world of identity, the central question is: “What does a person such as I do in a situation such as this?” The key concept will be “to discover and create conceptions of self and match them to situations in a way that gives coherence and comprehension to existence” (March, 2006:27). The course “Ethical action” is oriented towards a deeper understanding of the self-concept, as it addresses how individuals are able to live with themselves and heighten their awareness of their beliefs and values in order to avoid situations where they are sitting deep in the mud. Authenticity is an essential element in teaching as well as learning of ethics. The teacher and the students both can and should model particular values through their explicit behavior. My observations and experiences are that the values that are related to care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge are primordial values to express in the classroom, and they are in fact the pillars of Erich Fromm’s concept of love. The paper has attempted to address some of the complex and challenging implications for teaching ethics in the context of professional development and management

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education. It is my hope that the concept of love will prove helpful and stimulate ideas for future research and teaching. Acknowledgments I am grateful for Laszlo Zsolnai’s generous support and encouragement to write this paper, and for improving the first draft in a profound way.

References Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern ethics. Blackwell. Berg Eriksen, T. (2000). Augustin. Universitetsforlaget. Bird, F. B. (1991). Good conversations: A practical role for ethics in business. In The role of “good conversation” in business ethics. James A. Waters Colloquium on Ethics in Practice, Boston College, USA. Bouckaert, L. (2006a). The ethics management paradox. In L. Zsolnai (Ed.), Interdisciplinary yearbook of business ethics (Vol. 1). Oxford Bouckaert, L. (2006b). When more ethics create less ethics—Some further clarifications on the ethics management paradox. In L. Zsolnai (Ed.), Interdisciplinary yearbook of business ethics (Vol. 1). Oxford Buber, M. (1964). Jeg og Du. Munksgaard. Dauchot, N. (2019). https://medium.com/@nickuxd/personas-empathy-and-role-playing-117eb6 c10dd5. Accessed January 5, 2021. Ferris, R. (1988). How organizational love can improve leadership. Organizational Dynamics, 16(4), 40–51. Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin Books. Fromm, E. (1947). Man for himself. An inquiry into the psychology of ethics. Henry Holt and Company. Fromm, E. (1956). The art of loving. Harper & Brothers Publishers. Ghoshal, S. (2005). Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 4, 75–91. Heinckiens, P. (2014). The impasse of leadership, in leadership, innovation, and spirituality (Eds. P. Nullens & J. Barentsen) Peeters. Hunt, D. E. (1987). Beginning with ourselves. Practice, theory, and human affairs. Brookline Books. Ims, K. J., & White, J. A. (1993). Learning ethics in a social context: a practical guide using experiential learning theory. Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society, 4, 725–735. Ims, K. J., & Huse, M. (1998). Community in the classroom: The philosophy and practice behind a course in ethical action. Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society, 9, 1077–1088. Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice Hall. Kouzesk, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (1992). Ethical leaders: An essay about being in love. Journal of Business Ethics, 11, 479–484. Løgstrup, K. E. (1991). Den etiske fordring, (The Ethical Demand) 2. utg. Copenhagen. Maio, G., & Haddock, G. (2014). The psychology of attitudes and attitude change. Sage. March, J. (2006). The myth of rationality. In L. Zsolnai (Ed.) Interdisciplinary yearbook of business ethics (Vol. 1). Oxford Mele. (2011). Catholic social teaching. In L. Bouckaert & L. Zsolnai (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of spirituality and business. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioural study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371–378. Mitroff, I. (1998). Smart thinking for crazy times. Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc. Piper, T. R., Gentile, M. C., & Parks, S. D. (1993). Can ethics be taught? Perspectives, challenges, and approaches at Harvard Business School. Harvard Business School. Prestmo, M., Pedersen, L. J. T. & Ims, K. J. (2012). Tre myter om etikkens vesen. En refleksjon over etikkens innholdsside og pedagogiske utfordringer ved en handelshøyskole. In K. Ims & Ø. Nystad (Eds.): På Tvers – praksiser og teorier om økonomi, kultur og natur for det nye årtusen. Festskrift til Ove Jakobsen. Universitetet i Nordland. Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline. The art & practice of the learning organization. Doubleday. Tang, T. L. P., & Chen, Y. J. (2008). Intelligence vs. wisdom: The love of money, Machiavellianism, and unethical behavior across college major and gender. Journal of Business Ethics, 82(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-007-9559-1 Vetlesen, A. J. (1994). Perception, empathy, and judgment. The Pennsylvania State University. Zsolnai, L. (2014). Beyond self: ethical and spiritual dimensions of economics. Peter Lang. Zsolnai, L. (2018). Beyond self. In L. Zsolnai (Ed.), Ethics, meaning, and market society. New York. Zuboff, S. (1988). The age of the smart machine. Basic Books.

Teaching Ethics to Management Students in a Growth-Obsessed India Jagdish Rattanani

“Both managers and students may wonder why they should be interested in ethics. What is there in ethics for me?” S. K. Chakraborty wrote in a paper titled “Ethics for Business: Drawing on Indian Values” (Chakraborty, 2002). Almost two decades later, the question may be more significant and particularly so in an India that has become one of the fastest growing global economies. The students of today were born after the nation changed direction and pushed liberalization and privatization under its New Economic Policy of 1991. As the elaborate set of restrictive rules and regulations for businesses, the so-called license-control Raj, were demolished, India changed. Faster GDP growth over time brought not only an explosion of glitzy malls, fancy cars, and gated communities but also “the impending crisis of rising inequality” (Kapoor, 2013) seen every day in the slum colonies, marginal laborers, and homeless children who play on the streets just outside schools where future managers study to earn their MBA degrees.

1 The Boom and Its Underbelly The qualifications represent hope of high-paying jobs in a GDP-obsessed country so that prospective managers asked about the future of India would often answer in the tone of the growth story—a rosy picture in which India grows to make its mark on the world stage. Five years ago, this author put the same question on the future of India to junior school students from poorer neighborhoods. The students, studying in classes from five to ten, often in a civic school, are paired with mentors who are MBA participants at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s S P Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai. The mentors are senior in age and often from backgrounds that J. Rattanani (B) S P Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai, Maharastra, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_31

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are privileged or at least not as underprivileged as the mentees. The mentor–mentee match-up is part of experiential learning that is designed to sensitize and expose MBA participants to issues of urban poverty (SPJIMR 2014). The answers of a majority of the juniors’ in that casual interaction contrasted sharply with the view of the MBA participants: the future is bleak because the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Since an estimated 55% of the 22 million people of Mumbai live in slums (de Silva, 2018), the anecdotal view came from representatives of a majority living in appallingly poor conditions in what is the financial center of India. This was a raw presentation of the “underbelly of the Indian boom” (Corbridge & Shah, 2013) and pointed to some of the subterranean rumblings under the neon-lit GDP that has become the persistent theme of India in the last three decades. Even in the mid of slowing growth that plunged to new lows as the COVID pandemic struck, the narrative on India’s future set in the unilateral metric of a headline growth number has remained unchanged and unconnected to the picture on the ground. For example, toward the end of the year 2020, several papers ran this headline from a report filed by a news wire: “India to become fifth largest economy by 2025” (Press Trust of India 2020a). Growth has without doubt opened new opportunities with better jobs, higher pay packets, and growing aspirations but a single point focus on one metric is so much in the air that it has supplanted itself in the national mindset almost as an end in itself, sans the purpose and meaning of the growth parade. It is now quite common for the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India’s Central Bank, and the Monetary Policy Committee to hear demands that it push GDP growth by lowering interest rates and tolerating higher inflation, which, after all, works like a tax on the poor. This national mood, as it were, translates to the world of business and managers-to-be as a signal to deliver on numbers, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. What does teaching ethics mean in such an environment? More importantly, how does this teaching help managers transition to the workplace and practice as professionals in an economy where they live and experience a bright picture of growth but must make their mark by selling goods and services to a majority who may live and experience a very different story? Adding to the narrative is another theme that has an immediate and direct bearing on the subject of ethics in business. This is the persistence of “corrupt financial/economic practices of vast magnitude affecting large sections of the public” involving business, politics, and criminals, the “B-P–C triangle” in the words of S. K. Chakraborty (1997), who was then writing in the aftermath of the economic reforms. A particularly vivid picture of the state of affairs long after reforms took off is captured in the book “The Rise and Fall of Nations”. In India, the talk in business circles was … about the growing power of the middlemen who hold court in the Tea Lounge of the Taj Mansingh hotel in Delhi. Long known as the place where wealthy families meet to introduce prospective marriage partners, the Tea Lounge had emerged as a hot spot to meet government fixers. At one table sat the middleman who could resolve delays in land purchases from the state; at another sat the go-to guy for cases stuck in the backlogged courts; at a third sat the fixer who could speed the approval of state bank loans. The evolution of the Tea Lounge into a kind of shadow cabinet office was seen

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as typical of the cronyism that often infects state capitalism, and which would soon discredit the then ruling government of (Prime Minister) Manmohan Singh (Sharma, 2016).

Stories like this tend to signal that high levels of corruption and high growth can co-exist in the India of today, feeding a host of complex messages to businesses looking to make their mark and to students who will join these businesses tomorrow. The signals have also fed into a reckless gung-ho-ism, of which a revealing example was provided by none other than the former Governor of the RBI, Raghuram Rajan. He said: “One promoter told me about how he was pursued then by banks waving checkbooks, asking him to name the amount he wanted,” speaking about “the historic phenomenon of irrational exuberance” seen in the growth cycle (Rajan, 2016). Apart from this, many participants have personally experienced bribery and corruption in their daily lives and some at the workplace in their short tenures before they quit to join the MBA program. A survey by Transparency International reported that 89% of Indians surveyed thought corruption is a “big problem” in India, 39% had paid a bribe for public services in the previous 12 months, and 46% used personal connections for public services in the previous 12 months (Vrushi, 2020). Any teaching on ethics devoid of the current context in which the subject is discussed therefore runs the risk of going through the motions without a buy-in from the participants, let alone a hearty embracing of the ideas or learning goals that such a course might aspire to. The inevitable end result of this is the not uncommon refrain, sometimes heard in class and probably more often outside it, that business begins where the class on ethics ends. Combined with the grammar of a typical B School that tends to privilege utilitymaximizing approaches, and to put it more bluntly, “the inevitability of tooth-andclaw capitalism” (Parker, 2018), managers-to-be may have internalized messages that see themselves primarily as agents to deliver shareholder value.

2 In the Classroom This translates to classroom discussions. Given a business dilemma with little or no personal conflicts, there is a quick alignment in favor of “commitments of economic agents” (Badaracco, 1992) as participants can easily, immediately, and it appears quite obviously buy into the logic of protecting market shares, building brand value and beating competition. This is a business school, after all, and ethics is being discussed in the context of a business here. Moreover, in a dilemma, there isn’t a clear and desirable answer and so the discussions can go in all directions without the risk of violating any ethical code. Alongside, there is a refreshing throwback as an equal or slightly lesser alignment can be seen around “responsibilities beyond firm’s boundaries” (Badaracco, 1992) as students in the Indian context are equally prone to argue that business decisions cannot be to the exclusion of the big concerns of society. In short, we see a sharp sense of the imperatives of business in the lead, counterbalanced in part by voices in support of societal concerns ahead of business

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needs. This is a good place to be. It tells us that bright, sharp, business-oriented students have within them space that can balance if not prioritize societal concerns over the demands of business growth when faced with a conflict. A vast majority of them intuitively understand the significance of ethical conduct, no one condones or celebrates stories of corporate greed and not one of them, we can safely argue, came to do an MBA because they want a career in business as a license to lie or cheat. Not one would want to work for companies that do not have a good record of ethical conduct. Equally, participants can get conflicted when abstract theories are applied to real-life situations, they can slip (and some fall with a thud!) even in a hypothetical situation when temptation is high and they are also eager to discuss the “right” answer to an ethical dilemma so that they can keep to the straight path. The compass is in need of calibration but it is not exactly broken. Usually, lost in the clash between economic agents and societal concerns are two other universes that carry profound implications and can go on to influence the way managers of tomorrow are shaped—the “commitments of private life” (Badaracco, 1992) that can fire-up participants to look within the self for answers and “commitments as company leaders” (Badaracco, 1992) that can drive a conversation and build an understanding of the aspirations and sensitivities of co-workers in the organization. This anecdotal view of recent years in teaching ethics to students of management in a leading Indian school of management (SPJIMR, Mumbai) resonates in many ways with a survey of participants at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB), a leading school of management in India. This 2002 survey to capture the “ethical profile of IIMB students” showed that “they are caught between ideals and the world as it is” and that the students “are clearly performance driven and have imbibed much of the ethic of modern capitalism” (Krishnan & Reddy, 2002). The following findings stand out: • Over 92% of the respondents agree that the primary goal of an organization is earning profits and maximizing shareholder value. • More than 86% agree with the broad idea that businesses have a responsibility towards society. • Almost 90% are of the view that good ethics is no substitute for performance and that the observance of a strong ethical code cannot be an excuse for nonperformance by an organization. • At the same time, more than 73% believe that unethical practices are not justifiable in the name of performance. • More than 56% believe that to achieve success in business dealings, one may occasionally have to indulge in a certain degree of dishonesty and half-truths and the same percentage believe that to be ethical in the real world is difficult and impractical. • A little over half would not hesitate to pay a bribe in a business situation if needed (Krishnan & Reddy, 2002). The authors note:

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At the level of general beliefs, people do not wish to dichotomize, but when it comes to specifics they often do so—‘ethics in theory’ vs ‘ethics in practice’. Put another way, at a philosophical level the respondents are idealists, but when it comes to practice, they are pragmatists.” (Krishnan & Reddy, 2002)

The analysis aptly sums up what till today remains the bind of students studying for a business degree in a nation where, to borrow the words of S. K. Chakraborty, “things seem to have been going from bad to worse” (Chakraborty, 1997); then it was “usually below the surface” (Chakraborty, 1997) and now it is out in the open.

3 Business Pushes a Voluntary Code Businesses have not been impervious to the challenges and turbulence amid the growth frenzy. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the 125-year-old association of businesses which now has over 9,000 members, says it considers “ethical practices in business dealings” to be critical for the development and growth of industry in India. The CII President for 2020–21 was Uday Kotak, a banker, who wrote: “If India wants to increase its growth rate from the current around 5% to higher numbers, there is no alternative but building trust and that trust will be built only through better governance … building the trust bridge is core to our future” (The CII Code, 2020). The words came in a note along with the CII’s new “guidelines on integrity and transparency in governance and responsible code of conduct,” called the “CII Code 2020”. The guidelines, which are the latest in a long and ongoing effort, encourage CII members to sign the suggested “model code of conduct”, which covers clauses on keeping accurate accounts and records, prevention of bribery and corruption, fair and equitable treatment, health and safety, quality of goods and services, and good corporate citizenship. The CII names companies that have signed up, like a roll call of honor that now has 438 companies listed on its website. Many others, the CII notes, are “at different points in this journey and each company will proceed down this journey at its own pace” (The CII Code, 2020). In these companies, an employee trained to follow the code should, at the very least, be free from the risks that stood out in a survey by EY that found 78% of respondents saying that “fraud, bribery and corrupt practices continue to happen widely in India,” followed by 48% stating that “it is common to use bribery to win contracts.” The survey also said that “more than half (57%) say that, even though senior management said ‘no’ to bribes, they would choose to ignore unethical actions of employees to achieve corporate revenue targets” (EY APAC Fraud Survey 2017), an indication of how idealism might yield to pressures of business in a market where growth is the mantra. The gap between idealism and pragmatism was on display recently when powerful industry bodies, including the CII, asked India’s Union Labor & Employment ministry to suspend the operation of India’s labor laws that offer workers a host of protections and asked that workers required hours be increased to 12 h a day (Ministry of Labour & Employment 2020; Press Trust of India 2020b). The

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demand came amid the pandemic, undoubtedly a time of unprecedented stress for business but also stress for hundreds of thousands of workers who migrated from urban centers and industry hubs back to their villages, often on foot, with little or no means to support themselves as India went into a lockdown. Yet, at another level, business has been at the forefront in pushing for higher standards of governance and ethical conduct. The most desirable of employers in India today are from the set of companies that subscribe to a code of ethical conduct. The leading among these tend to visit the top ranked schools to hire the next generation of managers. This is a cozy compact—the top ranked schools, companies, and students locked into a virtuous cycle in which ethical conduct is said to matter, is thought to be enforced and is sold as a differentiator. A lot of conversation on ethics covers this limited space—an island of tranquility in a sea of turbulence. Common advice to business students is to carefully pick the “good” companies to work for, but this says nothing about how the few so-called “good” ones must work with many “bad” ones, as it were, and in the intermingling waters of a modern-day business, everything is muddied in some sense. The advice to students is well intentioned and useful, but an unintended consequence is that it limits the canvas of ethics in business to the nuts and bolts of compliance in a limited set of companies. This is to the exclusion of a wider engagement with the issues under discussion. Managers can act in a certain way because they are told that is the norm in this specific company—follow the rules and regulations and required best practices and you are good to go. The entire gamut of compliance invites attention to the rule book—the “what” to do and the “how” to do it. This helps reduce risk and helps operationalize ethics in a modern business setting, but it can and often does take attention away from “why” we do what we do, and refuses to engage in areas where the rule books are silent. Further, the plethora of corporate training programs and the way corporates try and make an example of compliance violations further add to the conversations of ethics being about adhering to the written word in a given code. It turns away attention from questions beyond the transactional framework of keeping the business machine operational, as seen in the demand by CII and others seeking suspension of labor laws that protect the rights of workers. This ends up discouraging hard questions on the role of business in society, the growing influence and power of business and other concerns that have been the cause of declining trust in big business. A limited vision cannot foster a more ambitious aspiration for ethics because the message it offers is narrow: if in doubt, ask your supervisor! An oversimplified ethics “manual” will also have variabilities in style, culture, and the approach, reflecting how the particular company codifies, disseminates, and lives its version of ethics. For example, “facilitation payments” (Viksnins, 2015) are not uncommon and there are companies that have used them but don’t write a policy on it and even encourage it informally. Given this, managers tend to keep complexities aside, follow the rules (or weigh the costs–benefits of bending them), and get on with work. This has reduced the capacity of managers to engage with ethics in all its depth, breadth, and expansiveness that is on offer.

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A step up the ladder comes from the space of “integrity ethics”, or the so-called “high road” to the “low road” of compliance ethics. This “attempts to create an awareness of a public service ethos, ethical standards and values, plus a process of moral reasoning to inspire exemplary actions or ethical conduct” (Hejka-Ekins, 2001). In this approach, described here essentially for public administration but equally extendible for all conduct, “the emphasis is usually on the awareness of ethical standards and the moral reasoning necessary to promote ethical conduct and individual integrity” (Hejka-Ekins, 2001). Yet, the question that stares us and will not go away is not about more models to teach, more codes to write, or more frameworks and theories to offer. All of the focus on ethics has actually delivered more violations than ever. Many MBAs, the class of managers who tend to rise up the corporate hierarchy faster, can get sucked into the pressures of the business, with little or no enthusiasm for abstract theories that are not easily relatable to real-life situations at one end, and manuals or codes that are a list of lifeless ‘dos’ and ‘do-nots’ at the other. It merits reiterating that there is a reservoir of ethical energy already with students, attributable at least in part to a host of socio-economic and cultural factors—family upbringing, traditional Indian value systems, religious beliefs and practices, influence of parents, school education, or the way communities and neighborhoods bond and interact. Broadly, these influences work in quite the opposite of the American way that tends to favor “self-interest, instrumentalism and ‘the bottom line’” (Furman, 1990). R. C. Sekhar of the T A Pai Management Institute, Manipal, at a roundtable on ethics with S. K. Chakraborty once noted: The language students speak, and the kind of symbolism to which they respond, are strongly rooted in the Indian idiom. For an example, I found that many of my students were extremely attached to their mothers. Therefore, to develop a teaching module, you have to recognize the deep roots that families have in the minds of people … I have found that young people are extraordinarily ethical in their manner, and they have their roots in the Indian ethos. But many of their external manifestations, symbolically were somewhat different from the older generation’s (Reddy, 2002).

Given all of the above, the question that stands out is not how ready or open the participants are, or if they are willing to engage with the subject of ethics in business in its fullness but how ethics courses in business schools can help in building on the available ground of ethical moorings and use these to protect participants from slipping and hurting themselves as they begin working as managers. In other words, how can ethics teachers help tap into some of the idealism of a good number in the class and then help sustain and export it to a workplace where conditions are anything but ideal? In part, the challenge is the “bad management theories” (Ghoshal, 2005) of the kind that make students see themselves primarily as economic agents to deliver shareholder value. “The perceived wisdom that business is about profit maximization has undergone many challenges…” yet “changes in the curriculum have been largely cosmetic” (Baden & Higgs, 2015). This is so across the globe and equally if not more so in India.

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As Manas K. Chatterji, co-editor of the International Journal of Peace Economics and Peace Science and a professor at the Binghamton University’s School of Management who has taught at the Wharton School and held visiting appointments at universities across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the US, said recently in an interview, “Management education in India has followed whatever we do in the United States. This is very, very sad.” In the interview, Paul Shrivastava, Chief Sustainability Officer of Penn State University, Director of Sustainability Institute, and Professor of Management at the Smeal College of Business, concurred: “I’m really surprised that Indian academics have not taken up the intellectual challenge of indigenizing a management knowledge that would be connected to the Indian tradition. After having such a cultural asset for thousands of years, to ignore that and to just follow the Western model of MBA and now to come to the realization that actually that model is wrong … this is ironic”. The conversations were part of a new initiative at SPJIMR created with Laszlo Zsolnai, Professor and Director of the Business Ethics Center at the Corvinus University of Budapest, called “Flourishing in the New Era” (Zsolnai, Rattanani, & Tahora, 2021). It built on a long tradition at the institute under the late former Dean Dr. M L Shrikant of bringing Indian teachings, notably knowledge from Vedanta texts, into the modern-day MBA curriculum. Given the growing influence of the US model, and the dynamics of India’s growth journey, the burden on the ethics course should be higher. This is one place where the first conversations on leadership, purpose, direction open-up, and more profound questions can begin to be explored at the intersection of business, society, and the journey of a life well lived.

4 A Wider Lens “Ethics in business” cannot be about ethics only in business. It must offer a wider lens on life. A code of conduct written as a set of business rules of engagement is derived from the wider lens and not the other way around. A wide lens invites attention to a host of ethical concerns, ranging from simple everyday issues to more complex ideas on our models, assumptions, and attitudes. A dip into this ocean would demand engaging with cases not only from the heart of business but also from non-business situations that are all around us, within the knowledge of participants but not often the subject of discussion in the MBA program. Not disconnected from business are the stories of everyday life, from GM crops in the fields and GM mosquitoes in the laboratory to conflicts of class, caste, development, and issues of inequity, inequality, and modernity itself with climate change and the age of the Anthropocene presenting a new universe of ethical challenges. All of this cannot be covered in one course but they are all relevant in the ethics class. The preferred route at SPJIMR is a mix of business and non-business cases, interspersed with reflection exercises, which leads on to a series of frank, small group conversations with a range of CEOs. During the course, the students are invited to reflect on their goals, their inner aspirations and on re-discovering and calibrating

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the moral compass they already carry within them. In conversations with business leaders, the CEOs reflect on their respective businesses and life journeys in meetings that are at least 90 min long and can stretch into several hours, with groups of about ten students each. The students are free to quiz the business leaders they meet on any and all areas of work and life. And since these are intimate conversations, CEOs can go off the record, share their ideas and are enabled to reflect on what they have or have not achieved as the next generation asks questions. The student groups then take their conversations back to the full class. The structure is designed to make the engagements interesting, with an openness that can allow an exploration in multiple directions. It allows for a multidimensional view of how ethics plays out in real life, with students engaging with the subject in their unique ways and moving at their own pace. The interviews are meant to be wide-ranging, full-bodied, and no-holds-barred, including questions on trust or lack thereof in businesses and the personal role of the leaders at the table on these concerns. While looking out to a wider canvas, what is being invoked is the inner person asking questions to the self, inquiring into personal choices and the building of a well thought-through point of view. The questions participants are encouraged to ask themselves about various scenarios are of the kind: “What would I do?”, and “Why?”. A wide lens allows students to engage on events and issues that can fire high interest and enable them to explore their belief systems, making ethics a more personal journey rather than the stuff of lofty theories or as a constraint that impacts performance. As M. L. Shrikant, the former Dean of SPJIMR who for many years ran a course called the “Science of Spirituality” based on traditional Indian teachings of the Vedanta, once said in an interview with this author: “You (learn to) know the limitations of your ability, you know there are biases in your decisions and hopefully you know how to account for them.” This opens a host of inquiries that are all about the person, the individual, and the specific person’s understanding and ideas about how he or she wishes to engage with the world. At this point, the ethics course is about life, of which business is one small part. “What should I do?” is a question that triggers connected questions like, “what kind of a person am I?” and “what do I wish to become?” so that the search is within. The course on ethics seeks to shape and influence that individual understanding. To do this, the full range of life experiences and ideas must be open for debate, including assumptions on growth, shareholder primacy, and capitalistic models that are at the heart of conventional business settings. In the end, the “process of ethical decision-making is the engagement of the person—an emphasis on being, rather than, or at least alongside—doing. The focus of this approach is on virtues or character, since it is a moral agent who must make ethical decisions. Stanley Hauerwas and Paul Wadell (1982, as cited in Furman, 1990), for example, argue that ‘without a sense of who we are and what we ought to become, it is difficult to determine what we ought to do’” (Furman, 1990). The individual is important. This is a long journey of inner growth, the growth that only human beings can attain. It cycles back to Indian spiritual traditions that

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teach us that the inquiry must be into the inner domain of thoughts and ideas. This is growth. Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the renowned teacher of Vedanta, wrote: “Growth itself would be the meaning of life. Once I have grown physically, I am considered to be an adult. Still, there is another area of growth called inner growth, emotional growth or moral growth, which is centered on my will. This growth, too, is the meaning of life. I have to grow until I find fulfillment. The meaning of life, then is to grow into a full, complete human being” (Saraswati, 1989). Leaders living a life of achievement, fulfilment, and joy can spring only and only from this space; the rest are distracted by a game of darts they must toss at targets thrown every once in a while, by the outside world. When ethics is about business “out there” rather than the person “in here”, it is like one more business decision under the pressure of the given environment with an eye on delivering immediate results. Theories and frameworks, or rules and regulations can be of little help here. What takes over are convenient justifications to cash in here and now, feeding into a moral disengagement and delivering of violations that are progressively bigger, bolder, and more brazen. This opens the not uncommon questions: “What have we done?”, or “Who pays the price?” It is true that society suffers, so all of us are in this together but the significant point to be made here is that the individual suffers in ways that we do not or cannot always capture. Our collective failures are writ large on the face of a society we fear is in moral decline but this gives no hint of the collapse within the hearts and minds of individuals who crossed the line and then crashed, eventually left to negotiate this fall in isolation. Given that ethics is about the individual, the gain or the loss from actions is not disconnected from what happens to the person taking those calls. The balance sheet of life and deeds plays out in complex ways and over longer time horizons. Also slow is the process of influencing and transforming the individual, a process in which ethics courses can offer a kick start. Young audiences can be impervious to this ‘slo-mo’ drama playing out in life. But what is easier for intelligent and wise managers to see is that without this clear grounding, many are signing up for a bad bargain. In this understanding, we are throwing our young citizens into difficult waters in a world that cares not about what happens to them, as long as they do as told, i.e., meet given targets. But excesses will come calling. The resulting pain and personal slide is almost impossible to see or study. We have a larger, collective battle at the societal level but within that are a million battles being fought (and lost) by individuals in private. This is the danger of a blind race to meet the GDP story. In a sense, this is students coming in harm’s way, delivering for today what will become a burden tomorrow. We need to alert them to the risks, and ask them to “draw the line in a safe place” so that they learn “how not to go to jail” (Christensen, 2017). This is not in the nature of “scaring them straight” (Wines, 2008) as was attempted in a B-School where MBA participants were introduced to white-collar convicts but to allow for more reflection and understanding of how situations can turn. The exercise in this sense is preparing participants to consider the big questions of life and the direction they wish to choose. A student coming into class with the single point aim of becoming materially rich in a short time is encouraged to consider that

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payments come in multiple currencies—we earn and lose monetary rewards but also in terms of respect, love, togetherness, gratitude, peace of mind, and happiness in the heart. They are currencies, too. These are important conversations that students pick up fast, particularly in India, where cultural moorings can be helpful in furthering this inquiry. The question is which story do the participants buy, and how a course in ethics can help participants think through the choices they may make. One is the story of material rewards that respects the ends and makes way for a story of glitz and glamour on the outside. Its markers are higher consumption, instant gratification and the imagined thrills of modernity. The other is the story that respects the means and makes way for inclusion, service, and fulfillment. Its markers are an inner search and important questions on the purpose and meaning of business and life itself—the why we do what we do. A course in ethics can be a journey from the former to the latter if it can trigger imagination and engage participants well enough to launch each one of them on their own unique inquires. Some of these lessons are eternal and will come back to participants again and again. The message is well captured in S.K. Chakraborty’s words that come across as clearly today as they did when he wrote them decades ago: “Ethics is not martyrdom. I am the gainer” (Chakraborty, 2002). That is as simple as it is profound, an approach that can unlock an expansive, inspirational, uplifting engagement with the world.

References Badaracco, J. L. (1992). Business ethics: Four spheres of executive responsibility. California Management Review, 34(3), 64–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/41167424 Baden, D., & Higgs, M. (2015). Challenging the perceived wisdom of management theories and practice. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 14(4), 539–555. Chakraborty, S. (1997). Business ethics in India. Journal of Business Ethics, 16(14), 1529–1538. Chakraborty, S. (2002). Ethics for business: Drawing on Indian values. IIMB Management Review, 14(4), 50–53. Christensen, C. M. (2017). How will you measure your life? Harvard Business Press Books. Corbridge, S., & Shah, A. (2013). Introduction: The underbelly of the Indian boom. Economy and Society, 42(3), 335–347. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2013.790655 de Silva, L. (2018, May08,2018). Ten facts about poverty in Mumbai everyone should know. Retrieved from https://borgenproject.org/tag/mumbai-slums/ EY APAC fraud survey. (2017). EY APAC fraud survey 2017: How should over-burdended complaince functions respond? (No. EYG no. 02079-175Gbl). EYGM Limited. Retrieved from extension://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/https://assets.ey.com/content/dam/ey-sites/ ey-com/en_gl/topics/assurance/assurance-pdfs/ey-how-should-over-burdened-compliance-fun ctions-respond.pdf Furman, F. K. (1990). Teaching business ethics: Questioning the assumptions, seeking new directions. Journal of Business Ethics, 9(1), 31–38. Ghoshal, S. (2005). Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 4(1), 75–91. Hejka-Ekins, A. (2001). Ethics in in-service training. In T. L. Cooper (Ed.), Handbook of administrative ethics (pp. 79–104). Marcel Dekker, Inc. Kapoor, R. (2013). Inequality matters. Economic and Political Weekly, 48(2), 58–65.

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Krishnan, R. T., & Reddy, C. M. (2002). How Indian students see ethics and society: a survey. IIMB Management Review, 14(4), 76–83. Ministry of Labor & Employment. (2020). Union labor and employment ministry will take all possible steps. Press Information Bureau, Government of India. Parker, M. (2018). Shutdown the business school: What’s wrong with management education. Pluto Press. Press Trust of India (2020a, December 26, 2020a). India to become 5th largest economy in 2025, 3rd largest by 2030. Indian Express Retrieved from https://indianexpress.com/article/india/indiato-become-5th-largest-economy-in-2025-3rd-largest-by-2030-7120917/ Press Trust of India (2020b, May 08, 2020b). Lockdown-hit industry demands suspension of labour laws for 2–3 years. The Times of India Retrieved from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/loc kdown-hit-industry-demands-suspension-of-labour-laws-for-2-3-yrs/articleshow/75632673.cms Rajan, R. (2016). Resolving stress in the banking system. Bengaluru: Reserve Bank of India. Retrieved from https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Speeches/PDFs/RSBS220616AF29FC8F00A048 B58685073669B575C5.PDF Reddy, M. C. (2002). Approaches to the teaching of ethics, in conversation with S K Chakraborty and R C Sekhar. IIMB Management Review, 14(4), 61–67. Saraswati, S. D. (1989). What is the meaning of life? Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, Retrieved from https://arshavidya.org/what-is-the-meaning-of-life/ Sharma, R. (2016). The rise and fall of nations: Ten rules of change in the post-crisis world. Allen Lane Penguin Books. SPJIMR (Producer & Director). (2014, 22 Jan 2014). Mr. Allen Bradt, GMAC MET Fund, speaks about Abhyudaya at SPJIMR. [Video/DVD] Mumbai. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=a7ewC7-27GM The CII Code 2020. (2020). Guidelines on integrity and transparency in governance and responsible code of conduct. Retrieved from https://www.cii.in/pdf/CII Guidelines on Integrity Transparency in Governance and Responsible Code of Conduct_Feb 2020_Final.pdf Viksnins, P. (2015). 5 tips for companies on navigating facilitation payments in India. Retrieved from https://www.corporatecomplianceinsights.com/5-tips-for-companies-on-naviga ting-facilitation-payments-in-india/ Vrushi, J. (2020). Global corruption barometer Asia 2020: Citizens’ views and experiences of corrupton. Transparency International. Wines, W. A. (2008). Seven pillars of business ethics: Toward a comprehensive framework. Journal of Business Ethics, 79(4), 483–499. Zsolnai, L., Rattanani, J., & Tahora, S. (2021). Course outline: Flourishing in the new era. Unpublished manuscript. SP Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai.

Ethics, Consumerism and Sustainability in the Backdrop of the Kathopanishad Piya Mukherjee

This approach prevents the pursuit of profits and consumerism, as ends in themselves; each action is assessed in terms of its utility towards the ultimate goal of moksha. Thus, environmentally harmful consumerism is reduced. The temptation to succumb to use the wrong means for quick success can be avoided. Thus, if Shreyas, i.e. the pursuit of moksha, is taken as the purpose of human life, individual and collective endeavours become balanced and more compassionate. Thus, these learnings of the Kathopanishad can help mankind create more humane and sustainably successful systems, by tweaking the motivation for actions, and hence improving the choice and quality of actions. The paper briefly looks at the placement of the Upanishads in the Indian scriptural system, moves to the relevant teaching of one of the primary Upanishads, that is, the Katha Upanishad, explores the concept of worthy human goals, as described in this treatise, and then discusses the impact of the choice of goals on ethics, consumerism and sustainability, before finally stating some concluding thoughts.

1 Upanishad and Its Place in the Indian Vedantic Scriptural System The Indian Vedantic scriptural system may be said to include the following, in the stated hierarchy, from the most important core learning to the explanatory scriptures: • Texts of Shruti (transmitted by verbal instruction, learnt literally by listening, from the Guru to the disciple)—comprising the Four Vedas (Rig, Atharva, Sama, P. Mukherjee (B) Vivekanand Education Society’s Leadership Academy and Research Centre, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_32

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Yajur) and the Upanishads, which most commonly appear towards the end of the Vedas. • Texts of Smruti (meant to be remembered and involving a greater look at the human mind, in order to help the disciple or student assimilate the above learning)—such as the Bhagavad Gita. • Nyaya Sutra or Brahma Sutra (meant to clarity rules of grammar and interconnectedness of concepts, for accurate interpretation of various concepts and terms). • Prakarna grantha scriptures (meant to explain certain aspects of the Shruti and Smruti scriptures in greater detail, for easier understanding of the subject, by a novice student)—including the Pancadasi, the Tattvabodha, the Vakya Vritti and so on. The Vedas can be classified broadly into two sections known as “Karma Kanda” (segment related to Karma or actions) and “Gyana Kanda” (segment related to knowledge). The “Karma Kanda” section states various actions, rituals, meditation and worship that a person may do, in order to gain what he or she wishes to gain. The “Gyana Kanda” section refers to the Upanishads, that is, a distinct set of scriptural learnings that deal with the sole goal of “Moksha”, that is, the clear and assimilated understanding of the individual that he or she is not the body, mind or emotions, but is “atma” or consciousness or sentience, and that this sentience is “Brahman”, or the all-pervasive, limitless “is-ness” that exists beyond the limitations of time and space. In other words, for a scripture to be called an “Upanishad”, it needs to clearly state and explain the oneness of the “atma” or individual consciousness, with “brahman” or universal consciousness. Hence, an Upanishad will include one or more “mahavakyas” (literally, great statements or statements specifying this equation of oneness).

2 Worldly Pursuits—The Four Purusharthas Knowing that human life, with a few notable exceptions, is about the pursuit of happiness through different means, the Vedantic scriptural system classifies the various pursuits into the following four categories: Dharma (living a life as per religious and ethical injunctions), artha (pursuit of wealth), kama (pursuit of pleasure and fulfilment of desire) and moksha (pursuit of permanent freedom from sense of limitation). These are explained as follows: 1.

Dharma—The pursuit of performing an action to earn “Punya” (favourable or meritorious fruit of an action) so to enjoy a better, more desirable, or more comfortable world, here or hereafter (after the physical body is shed), is called “Dharma”. This purushartha applies to those people who either know or believe that life does not end with the cessation of the present physical body. Hence, “life” is not seen as a one-time occurrence but as a cyclical series of births

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and deaths, with the potential to improve the circumstances of future birth– death series, by carefully choosing present actions that will help accrue punya. A person pursuing dharma as a goal, or purushartha, usually aims to attain “swarga” or heaven, after the death of the physical body. Hence, the individual is guided to choose present actions with their future results in mind. Artha—This purushartha represents the pursuit of material wealth in the form of money, possessions and power. It includes pursuit of security in any form. These give material comfort to a person. Kama—Kama means the pursuit of pleasure by fulfilling one’s desires. Kamadriven actions bring a sense of being “complete”. These desires can range from the sensory pleasures (say, eating tasty food) to the intangible and sublime (e.g. savouring the beauty of a sunset). It may be observed that the pursuit of kama is seemingly never-ending (as new desires take the place of previous desires that are now fulfilled), and is often linked to the pursuit of Artha, as material wealth becomes necessary for the satiation of several kinds of desires. Moksha—This represents not just the fourth and final purushartha, but, as per Advait Vedanta, the only true purushartha for one who finds himself or herself born as a human being. The pursuit of moksha, by shedding ignorance about one’s true nature, and understanding that one is the limitless “atma”, which is the same as all-pervading universal consciousness, is called Moksha.

Dharma vis-à-vis religion In Vedanta, the word “Dharma” can have various nuances of meaning, such as nature (as in the inherent nature of things and people), duty, advised way of life and also religion. The term “religion” as usually understood from the Western perspective deals with an individual’s faith in a certain kind or form of divinity. The purushartha of Dharma, on the other hand, is not linked to any one particular form or kind of deification—it is an understanding of the universal covenants of Ishwara (i.e. the order nurturing and governing all creation), voluntarily followed by the person who has clarity on the intangible aspects of life, who aspires to live in harmony with the overall order of creation and who wishes to do no harm to other human beings and creatures while pursuing his or her purushartha in life. The link between ethics and dharma Dharma is more than a mere list of do’s and don’ts; it is a sophisticated set of guidelines that help the individual understand actions and their reactions. For example, “Do not lie”, “Do not cheat” and “Do not kill” are offered as guidelines since the results that such actions bring will not be harmful to the person desirous of swarga. Such guidelines, when codified by society, are usually called ethics. They may change and evolve, through time and place. However, the fundamental values underlying the guidelines are usually far more enduring. Actions that are thus done as per these guidelines are called “dharmic”.

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Core Teaching of the Katha Upanishad with reference to the four human purusharthas The Katha Upanishad (also known as the Kathopanishad) is one of the primary Upanishads, appearing in the Yajur-Veda, and purportedly written around ninthcentury BCE. One of the key tenets of the Kathopinashad, with reference to the four human purusharthas or goals, is the concept of Shreyas (that which is superior and should be hence preferred as a goal) and Preyas (that which gives pleasure and is hence usually chosen as a goal). This concept was explained by Lord Yama (the Lord of mortality in the Indian mythology) to the young Nachiketa, son of Sage Vaajshravas, while the former answered three questions of the latter, by way of granting him three boons, including that of an understanding of the truth of the self. In the course of granting the third boon, which was answering Nachiketa’s question about the very nature of life, the self and apparent death, Lord Yama speaks of the two paths available to human beings: Anyac chreyo anyad utaiva preyaste ubhe n¯an¯arthe purus.am sin¯ıtah.: tayoh. s´reya a¯ dad¯anasya s¯adhu bhavati, h¯ıyate ‘rth¯ad ya u preyo vr.n.¯ıte (1.2.1): There are two paths for people to tread in this world, and either one of these two paths one can choose: the path of pleasant experiences, and the path of good deeds.

He then goes on to explain the above in great detail, showing how each path takes the human being to a different destination, and therefore how it is wiser to choose the path of the “excellent” to the path of the “pleasurable”. Preyas stands for three kinds of pursuits, namely, dharma, artha and kama. All kinds of “bhakti and upasana” (devotional activities, worship and religious rituals) form part of this, as do the duties of the householder. Shreyas, on the other hand, stands solely for the pursuit of moksha. The choice of Shreyas as one’s purushartha implies that all other worldly pursuits lose their primary importance and becomes a means to an end. The impact of the chosen purushartha on decisions—relevance in the contemporary world In the contemporary world that is beset by pandemic-related woes, the concept of “Shreyas” vis-à-vis “Preyas” holds great significance. It helps clarify priorities in life and guides the resolution of seemingly complex dilemmas of “Should I be doing this or doing that instead”. Further, it has the ability to guide wiser choices at an individual as well at the collective level. Our observation of our own actions and those of others around us usually reveal that dharma, artha and kama are often pursued as ends in themselves, that is, they are viewed as the final or culminative sources of lasting happiness and freedom from the sense of “smallness” or limitation. The choice of these three purusharthas does not eliminate, but may instead consolidate, the spirit of competitiveness, ego-driven achievement, and hence unchecked consumerism. This is because any purushartha excepting that of the pursuit of moksha consolidates the individuality of the person and reinforces the sense of non-connectedness, or “You are different from others and hence must distinguish yourself from others”. Dharma may have a regulating

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effect on the above phenomenon, but the domain of dharma too is not free from the human traits that lead to undesirable outcomes. This means that choosing artha and kama as our goals, whether regulated by dharma or otherwise, leads to the creation of a society where production of goods and services, and their consumption, follows the externalized, sense-driven and hedonistic motivation of “I want” type of actions. This is bound to have an extremely adverse impact on various aspects of human and environmental sustainability. But the choice of moksha as the purushartha transforms the vision and hence the actions of the individual. The first three purusharthas now become means to an end and lose their primacy. Since Advait Vedanta categorically states knowledge to be the only path for moksha, all activities such as pursuing material wealth, enjoying pleasurable experiences, etc. become relevant only as far inasmuch as they can help the student or seeker to gain moksha. One may understand this further by way of three everyday examples: • A career that was before a sense of pride and identity now becomes a means for doing one’s greater duty in order to make the mind relatively purer, so that the purified mind may assimilate the knowledge that enables moksha. • The income that was earned as an end in itself and hence sought to be maximized is now viewed as a means for keeping the body and mind healthy, so that moksha may be pursued. Further, that same income is now viewed as a resource that can bring succour to the underprivileged in society, and such charitable acts are done for the sole purpose of purifying the mind to make it more competent for gaining knowledge in the pursuit of moksha. • The body whose good health and pleasing appearance were goals to be pursued (as kama) is now seen as a sacred tool or instrument that allows the intellect to comprehend the true purpose of the apparent human existence. Hence, all practices for taking care of the body that were previously done as ends in themselves are now re-calibrated and done with the sole intention of serving the pursuit of moksha. Does the choice of Shreyas happen naturally and instinctively? Indeed, no. The Kathopanishad clearly states that only a few rare people will have the discrimination, or “viveka”, to realize that the pursuit of dharma, artha and kama are endless and do not culminate in lasting happiness and will hence begin to question the relative importance of these three purusharthas. Such a person, when guided by the Guru, will then also realize that if what he or she is seeking cannot be gained by action (as the impact of the action is temporary and linked to the extent of the effort), then it must be “gained” by knowledge, or more accurately, the shedding of ignorance.

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3 The Link Between the Purusharthas, Ethics and Consumerism Even a cursory analysis of the four purusharthas will reveal that the choice of any one or more of them has an impact on one’s ethical proclivities, as well as the lifestyle one chooses. For example, the choice of Artha and Kama as predominant purusharthas will almost invariably lead to a ceaseless cycle of production and consumption of products, services, entertainment, etc., since the mind believes that these are the means for lasting happiness. Consequently, the tendency to use fair as well as foul means in order to achieve one’s goals, both at an individual level and at the organizational level, is likely to be high. Unfair competition will be common. Thus, the human ability to have clarity about ethical principles and the willingness to implement the same are likely to become vulnerable when the chosen goals are predominantly in these two categories. The choice of dharma as a purushartha has a significantly higher beneficial impact on the individual, the organization and society. This is because decisions taken with the aim of adhering to this purushartha are more likely to be as per scriptural guidelines and injunctions, with the well-being of maximum stakeholders in mind, and with the aim of minimizing harm to any person or category of persons. The impact on ethics will be more positive, as a person choosing to follow dharma will almost invariably be aligned with the principles of ethics. Similarly, the impact of such a choice, on consumerism, is strongly positive, as individuals and organizations will consciously and objectively analyse the need for production and consumption and choose the same only after considering the various costs (in terms of human, environmental, monetary, etc.) of resources. However, it is the choice of moksha as a purushartha that has the maximum potential to impact society for the better, in terms of consumerism, ethics and sustainability. An individual whose actions are motivated by the pursuit of moksha views all other purusharthas as a means to an end, and not an end in themselves. He or she will be successful in stepping out of the “hamster-on-a-treadmill” syndrome of continuous consumerism, done in the mistaken belief that lasting happiness, via, such consumerism, is just around the corner. Accordingly, such a person will finely calibrate decisions, actions, purchases, policy-making and so on, in order to arrive at an answer to the questions: Does this best serve my purpose and pursuit? Is it essential for me or for my organization? Such objective questioning, in turn, is most likely to lead to a fine-tuned lifestyle at an individual level, and a set of guidelines for harmonious convergence of organizational goals, at the collective level. This can be analysed as follows: • The choice of moksha as a purushartha will enable the person to choose the first three goals as consciously chosen pursuits, to be undertaken in a measured manner. Hence, the “keeping up with the Joneses” syndrome gets minimized if not completely vanquished—a gentler and subtler level of kama, or pleasure, now becomes an ally of the mind in the pursuit of knowledge. The pursuit of artha

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becomes regulated within the larger goal of moksha. Consumerism gives way to sustainable living practices. The pursuit of dharma, too, is seen as a useful but not final milestone, and hence regulated in the light of knowledge. • As a manager, decision-maker and policy-shaper, the individual now carefully considers the impact of each choice or action on multiple stakeholders and seeks to maximize well-being while minimizing harm. Other things being equal, such decisions, consequently, have a relatively more lasting and positive impact on the organization and on society. The probability of scams and corporate scandals drastically diminishes when greed and the untrammelled pursuit of artha no longer govern business decisions. • At a collective social, national and global level, the deliberate choice of pursuing the goal of self-liberation enables “compassionate capitalism”, wherein wellbeing is incentivized; not merely profits or even market share and customergoodwill. The focus shifts from exploitation of resources, in order to produce more goods and services, to shaping minds and mind-sets for collective harmony and wellness. Collaboration gains sway over competitiveness. Principles of ethics and justice have a greater opportunity for flourishing in such societies, when priorities have shifted from short-term greed to long-term, sustainable living and thinking.

4 Concluding Thoughts The above explanation reveals a few things about the interconnectedness of ethics, consumerism and sustainability. These can be brought into further convergence, by reminding ourselves of the “Mahavakya” of the Kathopanishad: Neh Nanasti Kinchana, meaning, there is nothing else (other than Atman or Brahman, or universal consciousness). This statement serves as a compelling reminder to us as individuals, managers, corporate leaders and social catalysts, to pursue only that goal, which is beneficial, and to realize the essential interconnectedness of humanity. This thought may be elaborated upon, as follows. Ethical living and sustainability seem inversely proportional to wanton or profligate consumerism. While the latter calls for the rampant use of natural resources, the former caution us about the same and nudge us into wiser, more long-term approaches. The year 2020 has brought the need for wiser, more holistic approaches to living into sharp focus. Hitherto acceptable norms of thinking, living and being have been challenged. Humanity has needed to examine its own motivations for actions, with ruthless honesty. In this year, disease, death, loss of livelihoods and other linked challenges have impacted the lives of almost all segments and strata of society. Terms such as “de-growth” and “shrinking economies” have moved from the pages of textbooks into human lives. Hence, this year has made mankind even more acutely aware of the compelling need to understand and implement practices that reinforce the well-being of our interconnected lives. It has demonstrated that what affects one country or group of people will soon affect the larger group.

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The post-pandemic world may witness conflicting trends of collaboration (say, for vaccines) and competitiveness (say, for natural resources), globalized mores (say, for knowledge sharing) and insular, country-specific strategies (say, for production of goods and services). In such a world, more than ever, there is a need for a panglobal, just, and lasting “navigation” system that allows for these conflicts and yet accommodates them to enable convergence of actions for collective well-being. Social and cultural norms related to wellness, celebrations, marking important milestones of life and even everyday living may do well to veer away from present trends of consumerism-linked behaviour to more mindful, ethical and planet-friendly practices. At such times, the wisdom of the scriptures can stand like a lighthouse, bringing a beacon of light, to those who find themselves floundering when hitherto successful priorities no longer seem to serve mankind well. The scriptures not only reinforce the essential truth of interconnected well-being, but also provide guidance about the path to be chosen as the primary pursuit of life. The choice of moksha (which is considered Shreyas in the Kathopanishad), as the sole purushartha, and the accommodation of dharma, artha and kama (considered Preyas) only as allies to the pursuit of moksha, causes a radical shift in priorities, decision-making and action. Ethics and sustainable living practices receive a boost, while the nature of consumerism changes from “consumerism for its own sake” to “careful, conscious and meaningful consumption”. This has a far-reaching impact on the individual, the organization, society and the world. Leaders of a “shrinking economy” can decide to carefully match existing resources to the most optimal utilization, in the light of the multi-level challenges that have impacted the world. Corporate heads in industries that have seen “de-growth” can choose compassionate ways of aligning their financial priorities with the larger priority of human well-being. And individuals tasked with the responsibility of decisions can make the same in the light of tried and tested wisdom that has withstood the test of time.

References Kathopanishad. (2018). With Shankara Bhashya. Gita Press.

Exploring the Centrality and Transformative Power of Spirituality Katalin Illes, Nitha Palakshappa, and Madhumita Chatterji

The importance of human values in management education and practice is progressively being accorded greater attention. There is increasing and widespread awareness that the complex grand challenges of our time need to be broached with a consciousness demonstrating embedded ethics, responsibility and sustainability in order to respond appropriately. We use deep personal reflections to reveal narratives that provide a richly layered understanding of what SK Chakraborty referred to as a “subjective realisation of spirituality” and how it intersects with ethics, responsibility and sustainability to ensure that human values are central to management thought and action. Through this very personal journey, informed by our collective experience as management educators, we explore the possibility that spirituality offers as a transformative force in management.

1 The Context One of the biggest challenges that we face today is the tension between an individual’s personal needs and social needs. Systems of political ideology ranging from autocracy to democracy with variants like socialism, capitalism and mixed economy have not been able to deliver the promise of a successful and sustainable society. We do not need scientific research to prove that humanity is at a crossroad and unless K. Illes (B) University of Westminster, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] N. Palakshappa Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand M. Chatterji ABBS School of Management, Bangalore, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_33

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we radically change how we relate to each other, to all creatures and to our planet we face an abyss with catastrophic consequences: Within the lifespan of someone born today, our species is currently predicted to take our planet through a series of one-way doors that bring irreversible change and commit us to losing the security and stability of the Holocene, our Garden of Eden. In such a future, we will bring about nothing less than the collapse of the living world, the very thing that our civilisation relies upon (Attenborough, 2020:120–121).

No country can boast of a truly egalitarian and just society. In many instances, the institutions created for safe-guarding ethical principles are often themselves under scrutiny. In recent times, international organizations such as the WHO or the highest national courts of Justice are often seen in the media in a less than positive light. The rush to “master the world” has not taken into consideration inherent vulnerabilities of the masses and therefore a “victor and victim” syndrome continues to dominate both personal and professional interactions. There is a ubiquitous need to inculcate future generations with a paradigm shift in the way material wealth is accrued and prized. Materialism has become the accepted norm, success is measured on the basis of acquisition of material goods and quantification of all activities is considered higher science than a qualitative holistic understanding. An analytical, fragmented approach has led to a myopic view of happiness and satisfaction—devoid of understanding the power of interconnectedness. The world is better viewed as a matrix that warrants an appreciation of the “bigger picture” to create the delicate balance needed for sustainable existence. Over the past centuries humanity has essentially lost this balance. “We moved from being part of nature to being apart from nature” (Attenborough, 2020: 125). If we want our species to survive, we urgently need to change how we live and how we relate to our environment. “The planetary boundaries model is designed to keep us on the right path” (Attenborough, 2020: 126) and tells us what to do to revive the natural world but it does not address the question of lifestyle. About 50% of humanity’s impact on the living world is attributed to the richest l6% of the human population. The lifestyle that the wealthiest of us have become used to on Earth is wholly unsustainable (Attenborough, 2020: 126). It is becoming painfully obvious that individual survival is only temporary in the broad scheme of things and we need to tap into our deepest personal resources in order to focus on collective human needs rather than only our own short-term survival. Within the extant societal framework, the gap between rich and poor is growing continuously and there are no signs of real wealth redistribution to ease the pain of those who live in unimaginable poverty. While there are calls for frugality and a return to a simpler, more sustainable lifestyle in developed economies, the uptake of these initiatives is rather slow in affluent societies. The short-sighted instant gratification predominantly expressed in business and among individuals has brought “humanity” to the brink of annihilation. News from London, Bangalore, Auckland or any other city in the world brings the latest death tolls related to COVID-19, casualties of war, devastation caused by wildfires, rising water levels and other disasters caused by climate change into our living rooms—all grand challenges. Human misery is placed firmly in our consciousness and when

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we listen inwardly, we realize that we have a choice. We can shut out the world and focus on our self-interest or guided by spirituality we can move to the subjective realization that we are able to act and make a difference. There is a disconnect between abstract acknowledgement of concepts and acting upon the values that underpin them. The actions we take are individual, context and needs driven and cannot be effectively forced by legislation. Meaningful relationships and actions that enable us to see our shared human essence are necessary for a sustainable world. Rational, scientific thinking can help us only to a certain extent. We need to feel our interconnectedness. In our view it is the true understanding of spirituality that sows the seeds of optimism, love, understanding, hope, peace and above all faith in humanity. It is only through mutual understanding and constructive participation that we can rebuild a sustainable future. We use the concept of spirituality to explain the underlying reality that binds the entire human race together and helps us adopt an “ethics of care” for our interdependent world. The need for a holistic and symbiotic view in this scientific and fragmented world is brought to the forefront as the path towards true progress. We offer individual reflections on how they came to their personal realization of the importance of spirituality in life and how the deep connection with their human values enabled them to lead by example, inspiring others to seek these values and act upon them in their own lives. The uniqueness of this chapter lies in capturing the deep personal reflections to arrive at what SK Chakraborty referred to as a subjective realization of spirituality and how it intersects with ethics, responsibility and sustainability to ensure that human values are central to management thought and action.

2 The Central Importance of Spirituality The European Spirituality in Economics and Society (SPES) Forum defines spirituality as: “…people’s multiform search for the deep meaning of life that interconnects them to all living beings and to ‘God’ or Ultimate Reality…” (Zsolnai, 2015: 4). The SPES definition resonates with the idea of “subjective realisation of spirituality” and recognizes the deep-rooted human need for meaning and purpose—we acknowledge agreement with this definition. Although techniques of meditation, mindfulness and prayer can be taught, the journey to realization of interconnectedness is a unique and highly individual process. We are aware of the large body of literature on spirituality—many authors writing on the subject feel obliged to offer their own definitions and either critique or add to existing definitions. This paper does not intend to contribute to extant discussion on definitions, rather the focus is on the importance of the practical and subjective realization of spirituality. Spirituality manifests in diverse ways. Experiences are subjective but as one feels the connection to other human beings and all creatures everything on the planet, one becomes more caring, respectful and loving. The growing “grand” challenges in the world can lead individuals from the external and material to the internal and

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spiritual self. As more people search for alternative ways of living and relating to their context, we see an increased interest in spirituality as the backdrop for such things as sustainability, workplace harmony, increase in productivity and quality of life. “True sustainability requires a change in our fundamental values, it requires us to be fundamentally countercultural and revolutionary, at least as to the common culture and its evolution since Second World War, if not earlier” (Carrol, 2004: 2). A personal journey approach, as adopted by the authors, explores the value changes required to achieve true sustainability through the practice of spirituality. The idea of the human spirit or the highest form of Bliss experienced by immersing oneself in spirituality “strikes at the very root of narrow views based on selfishness and is the foundation of higher ethics. This higher Self is of the nature of Bliss, as displayed in our instinctive love of Self; and to recognize it in others is to bring social harmony for no one will be inclined to harm himself. It paves the way for spiritual and moral perfection” (Krishanswamy Iyer, 2006: 239). “Behold the universe in the glory of God: all that lives and moves on earth. Leaving the transient, find joy in the Eternal: set not your heart on another’s possession”. This is a verse from Isopanishad one of the principal Upanishad texts of Indian philosophy, which emphasizes the transient nature of material world in offering true bliss (Mascaró, 1965/1979: 49). A similar sentiment is expressed in Christianity: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Holy Bible (1985) Matthew 6: 19–21). The sacred texts in different traditions encourage us to focus on the long term and spiritual rather than the short term and material. Following this guidance is not so easy when societies demonstrate the polar opposite of the teachings. It requires personal realization and a strong desire to follow the road less travelled. One can learn from the examples of others, however each individual journey is unique and addressing the questions of meaning and purpose are part of an examined, well-lived life. During our research exploration one of the authors expressed the three most important aspects of spirituality as being unconditional love, accountability and responsibility. “When I am connected to the life force (spirit of life) I feel unconditionally loved. This love gives me strength and inspires me to pass on this unconditional love to others. I am accountable to God (higher consciousness) for my life (that I received as a gift) and for all my actions. This accountability makes me very selfaware, self-observant and motivated to give and do my best in all circumstances. I am also responsible for all who/ what I am entrusted with. This includes not only other human beings but also the environment”. In order to ensure that spirituality is focussed on inner awakening, it is important that the central tenet remains somewhat secular and accessible across all religions and traditions. Spirituality is visualized as the concept of connectedness, harmony and completeness for sustainable living in this monograph. It refers to the spirit

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within each individual that the authors believe relates to the enduring virtue in every individual conscience of the world, cherishing the inner life force that is unwavering compared to the outer environment that is in constant turmoil. The first step on the spiritual journey is to pause, slow down and try to take control of the overactive mind. This step does not require anything more than curiosity, an open mind and some self-discipline so it is readily available to all including those with a secular outlook on life.

3 Subjective Realization of Spirituality The three authors of this chapter live on three different continents and came to spirituality through distinct personal experiences. All of them appreciate the benefits of spirituality. Though their spiritual practices differ they adhere to similar values, leading by example with values of caring, respect, honesty and love at work in Higher Education Institutions across India, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Society bestows the highest pedestal to professionals with the belief that professionals use their knowledge and skills to make life more comfortable and sustainable for all members of society. We believe that professional management education needs to inculcate the value of honouring the trust that society reposes on all professionals. Unfortunately, many professionals today use their talent for personal gratification and growth. Competition is favoured over cooperation in the name of better quality. Words such as ambition, passion and relativity are often used by professionals to camouflage greed, selfishness, hedonism, dishonesty or falsehood to name a few. In 2020, the World Economic Forum “manifesto” redefined the purpose of a company as one that “serves society at large…supports communities…pays its fair share of taxes…acts as a steward of the environmental and material universe for future generations” (Schwab, 2020). This shift highlights the importance of realigning management education as most professionals in the companies hold management degrees. Stewardship which closely resembles trusteeship, promoted by Mahatma Gandhi, requires a cathartic change of business purpose from shareholder orientation to stakeholder alignment. This presupposes a deep-rooted change in the very foundation of a company and requires total revamping of the management education curriculum and delivery. One of the most pressing needs today is to re-orient young minds towards a more sustainable lifestyle. Most management education institutions (driven by a strong revenue model) have traditionally created clones with only one purpose—making a profit. The world is at an inflection point demanding immediate remedies for the various calamities resulting from the excessive devastation of nature for selfish greed. Education, especially management education, cannot remain aloof from the real challenges that we are collectively facing because business plays a major role in the existence of this world. A truly future forward management education needs to integrate an analytical, emotional and spiritual connection with the business environment.

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Globally, people are raising their voice against the present form of market structure that was promoted by capitalism, as Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz rightly observes capitalism needs being “saved from itself” (Riback, 2019). While people are looking towards business to offer solutions this can only happen if business education reorients itself to deliver both values and skills. Palliative measures such as the introduction of one course, a single project or a few community-related activities in a management programme are not the answer. Profit maximization needs to be replaced by purpose maximization and business education needs to take a holistic approach to develop talent with integrity and desire to create value for society and the planet. Spirituality in its true sense of “the higher spirit” in human beings needs to be awakened and our encounter with spiritual experience harnessed to provide direction and purpose in life. Management education requires an emphasis on embedded values and character building. A sense of accountability and responsibility for every action that a student takes on or off campus has to be inculcated through training and practice. A multidisciplinary approach which includes humanities subjects such as history, literature and philosophy provides a wider horizon for management students. In 2019, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old environment activist, has asked the most apt question at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in September 2019, “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth”. It is the era of the “Anthropocene” the age of the Humans (Crutzen, 2002), and this era is witnessing the greatest manmade disasters as a result of economic greed. Educators have a responsibility to teach new leaders that everything on the earth cannot be measured in economic terms. In the simplest sense, land, for instance, is not just a resource for economic gain it needs to be worshipped as the giver of food, livelihood, shelter, dignity and security for all the life forms on this earth. A management programme that nurtures this viewpoint among their learners is more likely to create the platform for a substantive and enduring change in the contemporary business environment. An important prerequisite for this is imbibing and capturing the spiritual mindset of academics and students. As integral thought “promoters”, business and management educators have a responsibility to raise awareness and steer students towards sustainable and ethical practice. Equipping students with the latest technical and scientific knowledge is only one aspect of the task. What is required is a mechanism to lead individuals back to those core human values that are deeply engrained in all cultures and faith traditions. Levinas (1996, 1998) argues that we are responsible not only for ourselves but for others “Prior to any act, I am concerned with the Other, and I can never be absolved from this responsibility” (Levinas, 1996: 290). The focus here is on building respectful relationships. Buber (1970: 156) also points out that “Duties and obligations one only has towards the stranger: towards one’s intimates one is kind and loving”. The challenge is to introduce this “duty and obligation” in the core curriculum of educational institutions in such a way that it is normalized and evolves into an expected societal behaviour over time. The cognizance that young and appropriately educated people are crucial to the future of our families, society and country drives our view that education has to

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orient the young towards humility providing the basis for acceptance of diversity, learning from diversity and respect for diversity in thought and deed. The objective of university education should inculcate analytical and independent thinking so that one is able to sift the truth from falsehood especially in this age of information. Such an approach sows seeds of humanistic integrity in the hearts of our graduating students, realigning objectives and purpose. In this context, the role of the management educator is to nurture a more meaningful connection between the purpose of the individual and the organization—a pursuit focussed on matters more long-lasting than profit and reputation. This we feel is the essence of spirituality in education. The authors offer their personal reflection to illustrate very different journeys that led to the subjective realization of spirituality. What we see clearly is that spirituality is not static—it is continuously evolving and enriched by our life experiences. We gain insight, strength and a deep feeling of interconnectedness and responsibility from our daily spiritual practices. We believe that these personal resources are available for all those who are willing to review their personal and professional lives and intend to lead purpose and meaningful lives. Katalin: From an early childhood I have been aware of an organising, divine force in the world. I have never questioned its existence, but it took me a long time to appreciate that I can be unique and interconnected at the same time. Until recently questions of one’s inner life and spirituality have not been discussed openly. I still find it a bit awkward to share deeply personal experiences particularly in a professional setting. It is only my desire to help others to tap into their own wealth of spirituality that encourages me to write about the topic. As an educator I feel that walking the talk and leading by example is the only authentic way to inspire others. Faith gives me strength, focus and determination to do my best even in difficult circumstances. My spirituality is all embracing and provides a solid foundation for my personal and professional life, so “my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Holy Bible (1985) Matthew 11:30). My values are informed by Christianity and a Protestant upbringing. Love, respect, honesty, helping others and resisting temptations are values that are not unique to Christianity. By recognising and respecting these values in all cultures and faith traditions I am enabled to build meaningful relationships with people across the world. These relationships continuously enrich my life, teach me and help me to stay open-minded and appreciate the value in all. For me, the highest level of consciousness and a beautiful confirmation of values and spirituality are expressed in the four lines below: To see a World in a Grain of Sand. And a Heaven in a Wild Flower. Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand. And Eternity in an hour (William Blake).

Although I’ve known William Blake’s poem for almost fifty years it is only now as I am living through the Covid 19 lock downs in London that I feel the real depth and liberating power of these words.

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We can experience the subjective realisation of spirituality in a whole range of art forms and also in seemingly ordinary, everyday situations. These experiences can lift our spirit, nourish our souls and expand our heart’s capacity to love and appreciate life and everything in it. Over the years the meaning of time has changed for me dramatically. As a child I dreamt about the future. As a young adult I was either busy making plans or spent hours painstakingly analysing the past. It is only in maturity that I learnt to be fully present and appreciate that “To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven:” (Holy Bible (1985) Ecclesiastes 3). The world is in turmoil. Covid 19, Brexit, the recession and rising unemployment triggered a lot of fear and anger. People cannot breathe and feel increasingly vulnerable. The combination of current events highlight how fragile we are as a race. We are at a crossroad and it is time to rethink who we really are individually and as a community and how we want to be and relate to the world. On the 18th of December 2020, the UK newspapers announced that the Prime Minister “Cancelled Christmas” because of the rapid spread of the new variant of Covid 19. Reflecting on the headlines I realised that the spirit and essence of Christmas that is love, generosity, care for others and the world can never be cancelled. In 2020 we had to celebrate alone or with the smallest of our family unit. But it was and is always in our power to lift up our hearts, move towards the light and feel connected to everyone and everything on the planet even when we are not able to enjoy physical closeness. Madhumita: I had a very happy childhood growing up in a loving family. I studied in a Jesuit School whose Principal, Father John Moore, had a great influence on all of us. We were taught to be good human beings before being successful beings. I was taught by my parents that all faiths teach love and compassion. Thus, my first lessons on spirituality began at home and school. The importance of unconditional love and protection came alive during my interaction with specially challenged children. These experiences helped me understand the meaning of seeing the “bigger” picture than just limiting to immediate gratification. I have recognized that defining ethicality from a linear perspective is anti-inclusive growth. The concepts of justice, equity, diversity, inclusion are all interlinked and we cannot tradeoff one for the other. I believe that spirituality builds faith in the positive thoughts and makes one more optimistic about the wonderful gift of life. The present pandemic has created fear and apprehension all around, but it has also brought to the forefront the innate urge in human beings to survive. It has made us realize the importance of relationships with family, friends, neighbors and other individuals around us. It has taught that one must cherish every moment as future is so uncertain. One has to learn to see others in oneself and oneself in others during this crisis to tide over it. Nature has suddenly come alive with the message of timelessness and beauty all around. Across the world there is a realization that how materialistically we have been torturing this planet! Today most of the organizations are struggling to build the lost trust with their employees and their families. The plight of the daily wage earners and

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migrant laborers in India trying to reunite with their family demonstrated how our avariciousness blinds us to emotional aspects of love and faith, believing that it is only the basic food, clothing and shelter that underprivileged need. As I watched I became conscious of the existence of unsung heroes and the actual nation builders. Spirituality was reflected in the selfless behavior adopted by our doctors, engineers, police, and health workers during this Mephistophelean event. The concept of “Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha” and “Nishkam Karma” of Indian ethos and philosophy have become pertinent to me. Dharma is nothing but an ethical code of conduct, Artha is the material wealth that is needed to survive, Kama is the enjoyment of both material and physical pleasures of life and Moksha is selfrealization. One cannot change the order of happenings-Dharma has to guide Artha and Kama. Moksha is understanding the futility of Artha and Kama as life goals. “Nishkam Karma” emphasizes that means is as important as the goal. However, achievement of the goal is dependent on a wide array of factors some of which may be beyond our direct control and can result in unexpected consequences. During such situations “Nishkam Karma” provides equanimity because it removes despondency or guilt as well as arrogance and complacency if the means have been honest, in nonachievement and achievement, respectively. Wealth earned ethically and enjoyed ethically will never lead to any catastrophe whether it is climate change, social degeneration, economic aggression, political manipulation or other similar malaise. Nitha: I grew up in a small New Zealand town, the eldest child of immigrants with a rich cultural context that extended back to India. My childhood was happy, surrounded by family, friends and many Indian aunt’s and uncle’s providing surrogate extended family support that would have been a given had we stayed in India. Despite this, the dichotomy of how we traversed life in a new country was not lost on me. Suburban New Zealand was ‘white’ and in many respects did not offer spaces in which one’s own culturally-centered consciousness could surface. In contrast, our family home was steeped in traditional cultural and religious practices. I saw the two as separate environments within which I coexisted. This important realization was not available to me then and the true impact of how and where I grew up is something that I sit with now. My most formative years were spent attending educational institutions in Hamilton, New Zealand. A relatively stable environment was interspersed with lengthy family trips back to India. My father, a social anthropologist, would travel to remote parts of India for his fieldwork while we immersed ourselves in the web of our vast extended family. These periods surrounded by traditional cultural influences provided a very strong set of values that helped to define my late teenage years. Love, humility, empathy and a sense of the privilege that my ‘dual-context’ upbringing provided were central to my core values. The connections that these sabbaticals enabled are perhaps what has now allowed me to reclaim my Indian heritage in a way that feels both familiar and comfortable. However, as I left behind my teenage and early adult years crowded with the concerns that transcend cultural boundaries, I embarked on a career as an academic and fell into the conventional rhythms of work and home. In doing so I unconsciously

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distanced myself from trusting in the unknown and nurturing the ‘inner’…in essence disregarding the strength of my individual spiritual practice. I understand retrospectively that in many ways I was purposeful in resisting the level of awareness that would have enabled an earlier connection with my own consciousness–it was easier. For me, consciousness is inextricably intertwined with awareness–and awareness requires personal action. The pivot in my frame of thinking was a trip to India accompanying a group of students on a study tour that focused on responsibility, citizenship and ethics. Immersing myself in India devoid of family yet still feeling a deep connection was a moving experience. I was suddenly aware of my roots, sure of my core values and held an unequivocal sense of what I considered important. Such a level of selfawareness was a necessary precursor to reconnect with ‘purpose’–my own subjective realization of spirituality.

4 Conclusions In this chapter, we suggest that spirituality is central to the transformation that the world needs both at individual and collective levels. Spirituality is continuously evolving and offers purpose and meaning to the seekers. It is practiced individually in different ways yet connects us to our core values and raises awareness about our interconnectedness and responsibilities. We argue for the centrality of spirituality in management education. Spirituality is a force for good that needs to be placed at the forefront of our collective consciousness and be mainstreamed in our education systems. Business Schools around the world have a moral responsibility to initiate such a shift and propel the change from a short-term, profit-oriented mindset to a purpose-driven, sustainability and responsible leadership-driven curriculum. Business Schools educate the next generation of leaders in society and it is vitally important that students graduate with a spiritualitybased, values-driven, sustainability-focussed mindset—reflecting a clear purpose and a strong desire to use their talent to lead the transformation of organizations and societies. The pandemic has been a reminder that while we may not yet understand exactly how, there is a connection between the strength of purpose an individual has and how this aligns to the purpose of the organization they function in. Understanding and nurturing this link is key to managing the grand challenges that we face today.

References Attenborough, D. (2020). A Life on Our Planet. London: Witness Books. Buber, M. (1970). I and Though. 3rd Edition 1970. Translated by Kaufmann, W. Morrison and Gibb Limited for T&T. Clark, Edinburgh

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Carrol E.M. (2004). Sustainability and Spirituality, State University of New York Press. Crutzen, P. (2002). Geology of mankind. Nature, 415, 23. Crutzen, P., & Stoermer, E. (2000). The “Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter, 41, 17–18. Holy Bible (1985). The New King James Version. Thomas Nelson Inc. Krishanswamy Iyer, K. A. (2006). Collected Works of K. A. Krishnaswamy Iyer Holenarasipur: Adhyatma Prakash Karyalaya. Levinas, E. (1996). The Levinas Reader. Oxford Blackwell Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Mascaró, J.. (1965/1979) (translated and selected) The Upanishads. New York: Penguin Books. Riback, C. (2019). “Joseph Stiglitz: Saving capitalism from itself,” Chris Riback’s Conversations, June 21, 2019 Schwab, K. (2020). Davos Manifesto 2020: The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Davos, Switzerland: World Economic Forum. Zsolnai, L. (Ed.). (2015). The Spiritual Dimension of Business Ethics and Sustainable Management. Amsterdam: Springer.

Epilogue

Man, the Unmanageable: Meditations on Clarity, Morality and Meditation Arindam Chakrabarti

1 Introduction It is not uncommon, nowadays, to treat Bhagavadg¯ıt¯a as a management manual, because narratively, for those seventeen (excluding the first which dramatizes and contextualizes Arjuna’s moral psychological crisis) chapters, Krishna appears to be giving three major lines of strategies—active (karma), contemplative (jñ¯ana/dhy¯ana) and emotional/devotional (bhakti)—for Arjuna to get skillfully back into his marital duties. But, neither Vivekananda nor Vinoba Bhave, neither Swami Yogananda nor Sri Aurobindo—all of whom have interpreted that perennial philosophical text— would approve of adapting the teachings of ethical action with no desire for fruit or of total surrender of the ego and initiative to love of God to the art of aggressive competitive profit-maximization (for what contemporary business management calls “improved performance” is measured fiscally by outcome and output). For all the growing literature on “ethical” business management—for more than two decades now there have been book titles such as “Business Management: A Kantian Perspective” (Bowie, 1999)—management would never be a practice of duty for duty’s sake without desire for the fruit of action! Instead of arguing bluntly against the idea of “using” G¯ıt¯a-spirituality as a management tool-kit, in this paper I want to address a related problem: If the following three things: practice of meditation, rational philosophical analysis of the nature of the self and the mind, and development of a good social and moral character are supposed to be somehow mutually complementary and connected virtues, why is it that we encounter so many uncritical, dogmatic, and logically dim ideology-driven social activists, corrupt meditators and clear logical thinkers who have no interest in meditation?

A. Chakrabarti (B) Department of Philosophy, University of Hawaii, Manoa, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Mukherjee and L. Zsolnai (eds.), Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_34

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The chief purpose of this paper is to investigate what exactly is the relation between the practice of meditation, logico-conceptual clear thinking and reasoning, and practical moral and social virtues. My hope is that these three aspects of human perfection, so to say, ideally should hang together. The Yogav¯asis.t.ha (YV)—a massive 9th Sanskrit text originally called “The Way to Liberation” (Moks.op¯aya)vividly describes the co-presence of these three kinds of virtues in the ideal spiritually free-in-this-life person. Having achieved perfect tranquility of mind—literally, having gone beyond the fluctuations of the mind simply through philosophical reasoning with oneself (being an out and out intellectual text, YV looks down upon bodily or psychic yoga through breath-control, etc.) The living liberated person laughs at the ways of the world, finding its pleasures insipid in the beginning, in the middle and in the end. Yet he does have fun in this world which he makes fun of. He avoids the extremes of anxiety or complacency in crises, he remains neutral between mutual enemies, he is always kind and generous. He does not get exhausted by the hectic affairs of his daily life. Outwardly he remains busy with a lot of initiatives in which he is efficient but at heart he is quiet and restful without any burning desires. He is polished, sweet-tempered, altruistic, and smiles before he talks. He is brave in battles and enjoys himself and entertains others with fresh sports, fun and games. He usually has mastery over many special sciences and is respected for his skill in debates and dialogues (YV: Upa´sama(V) Chap. 18, and Nirv¯an.a (VIb),170)

Of course, this is too perfect to be realistic. But the drift is clear: Yogic or broadly contemplative perfection is supposed to make the philosopher socially urbane, ethically virtuous and also intellectually sharper. But how? What is the connection between spiritual practice of inwardness and tranquility, moral character, and logical acumen? Let me start by setting up a robust opposition which says that there is no connection whatsoever between them. The following types of considerations could be adduced in support of a claim of a complete disconnect between Yoga on the one hand and analytical logical acumen or ethical excellence on the other: Some people do Yoga and meditation regularly but are not very moral in their public or private life. Quite a lot of people display exemplary moral virtues in their lives but have no time for practicing meditation. From these facts we can conclude that meditation has nothing to do with morality that calming the fluctuations of the mind through contemplative practice is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a good human being or doing the right thing. Similarly, lots of very clever, analytically rational and theoretically knowledgeable people—many of them successful scientists—show no inclination to meditate. And many who are good at arresting the flow of their wavy minds by meditation seem to be bad reasoners and averse to analytical thinking. Such failures of correlation show that meditation has nothing to do with logical acumen or rational thinking and that it would be a pun-lover’s mistake to construe Descartes’ choice of the title: Meditations on First Philosophy as a kind of concession to spiritual practice. Perhaps the best positive case we can make for the practice of Yoga, if we concede that meditation has no impact on moral character and demands little reasoning or

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conceptual abilities is that it helps us “manage our emotions.” But does it? If a man uses his emotions to increase his “productivity” and social skills, let us say, but in spite of all his regular meditation routine, remains morally decrepit and intellectually confused, can we say that he exemplifies the virtue of emotional self-management?

2 Philosophical Conceptual Clarity and Yogic Meditation I will now close my eyes, plug my ears, and withdraw all my senses. I will rid my thoughts of physical objects — or, since that is beyond me, I shall write those images off as empty illusions. Talking with myself and looking more deeply into myself, I’ll try gradually to know myself better.”

Don’t these lines sound as if they are from some sort of an autobiography of a Yogi? Actually, as some of the readers must be recognizing, they are the opening lines of Descartes’ Third Meditation (on First Philosophy). The coincidence becomes even more intriguing when one reads on the rest of Descartes’ chapter. One of the alternative objects of meditation recommended by Patañjali in his Yoga-S¯utra-s is the idea of God—not quite a Christian creator God but a unique center of consciousness, free from the bondage of karma and desires and afflictions, “where the seed of omniscience reaches its highest conceivable perfection”. This third Meditation of Descartes also happens to focus on the concept of God, though a radically different concept than the one recommended by Patañjali. Yet, it would be shocking to both Western rationalist-modernists as well as to Eastern lovers of mystical wisdom to call Descartes an unwitting practitioner of Yoga! Descartes was a mathematician posing as a sceptic in his search for perfect certainty through purely logical reasoning and thereby laying the foundations of European Scientific Epistemology. What does that have to do with Eastern spirituality which is supposed to help us transcend all logical thinking and plunge us in an oceanic intuitive experience of God, self or nothingness? Nevertheless, the autobiographical account of how Descartes is preparing himself, after having stumbled upon the existence of the first person, for further philosophical discoveries sounds uncannily yogic. Indeed, that description of withdrawal from all the external senses seems to echo Bhagavadgita VIII, verse 12: sarva-dv¯ar¯an.i samyamya, mano hr.di nirudhya ca, m¯urdhny a¯ dh¯ayatmanah pr¯an.am a¯ sthito yoga-dh¯aran.a¯ m. Having restrained all the doors of one’s body, and arresting the mind in one’s heart, one practices the Yoga of steadfast concentration by gathering the entire vital force on the top of the cranium.

A similar resemblance between the two traditions can be noticed with regard to the description of an ideal moral agent. When in the VIth chapter of the Gita, an ideal Yogi(n) is defined as one who looks upon others’ pleasures and pains in analogy with his own pleasures and pains and sees everyone as equal, seeing everyone in his self and his self in everyone else, that description seems to correspond with Adam

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Smith’s description of sympathy as the most important moral sentiment: “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him….” And yet, the popular image of Yoga meditation, with all its emphasis on special postures and breathing techniques and levels of inward one-point focusing of the mind, with a certain kind of tranquility as their goal, has little to do with being fair or just in one’s social conduct or empathizing with or trying to alleviate the suffering of others around us. Yoga seems to be as amoral as it is anti-analytic or a-rational. But is it? How could we live with such a tritely tripartite picture of human nature where thinking and doing are so insulated from feeling that an emotionally balanced tranquil Yoga-adept could so easily be a dimwit or a debauch? Even if in Hindu, Buddhist or Sufi religious imagination and hagiography one finds some “holy fool” (Paagol Thakur or Khyaapa Baul) type living liberated characters who are so far beyond good and evil that they live like drunken dimwit drop-outs, the standard purpose of Yoga surely is not to become such irresponsible citizens as some Tantric bum! Even if contemplative poise is not a sufficient condition for good conduct, at least it must be a necessary condition for intellectual virtues such as knowledge and rationality. Otherwise the basic assumption of Yoga metaphysics of the mind would be false. Because Yoga looks upon an afflicted state of the nature-constitutive feelings of pleasure, pain and torpor as the cause of theoretical ignorance or logical confusion, an ill-balanced affective life to be the cause of greed, hate, violence, cruelty or egotism in public social life. Unless Yoga philosophical psychology is fundamentally mistaken, how can people have clear and correct ideas and beliefs about themselves and the world while “the turbulent rivers of their minds flow toward evil”? I shall try to answer these questions by looking at the place of logical reasoning and ethical conduct in the life of an ideal meditator, as recommended by S¯am . khya-Yoga, Mah¯ay¯ana Buddhism, and Kashmir Shaivism. But I shall also question the general line of thinking which draws conclusions about (lack of) correlation from real-life statistics, by looking at the fate of the purported unity of moral and intellectual virtues. By unity I don’t mean strict identity or reducibility: to claim that not doingto others what one would resent if it is done to oneself (Mah¯abh¯arata Book XIII, Ch. 113,verse 8) requires clear conceptual thinking is not to say that fairness in practice is nothing but clear thinking ! The connection between cognitive clarity and just conduct consists in the former creating the enabling (necessary, not sufficient) conditions for the latter. Let us forget about Yoga or meditation, for a moment. Let us look at the direct correlation between cognitive rationality and ethical perfection. It is also a fact that many obviously moral people seem to be logically dim and many gifted logicians turn out to be ethically derelict (Gottlob Frege, the father of modern mathematical logic was a Nazi sympathizer), in spite of which Western philosophers who recognize these facts still find the view that intellectual and moral virtues go together quite convincing.

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What I am trying to say by drawing attention to this last pair of correlation-failures between cognitive and moral merit is this. Convinced by Plato, Aquinas, or Spinoza, some thinkers assume, in theory, that knowledge and logically circumspect thinking about oneself and one’s environment are necessary and conducive—note that I am not saying sufficient—conditions for the practice of moral virtues. They would find it upsetting that each of these features seems to be easily available in actual people well without the other—that there are stupid saints as well as intelligent rascals. In a similar way, someone like me, who assumes that Yogic meditation is helped by and helps sound rational judgement as well as virtuous conduct, would find it deeply embarrassing that there are so many meditating nincompoops, non-meditating smart intellectuals, virtuous non-yogis and rogues who practice yoga regularly. But the embarrassment should not lead to jettisoning the textually endorsed and conceptually intelligible idea that Yoga-meditation requires and ensures ethical alertness, clarity of rational analytical thinking as well as mindful management of emotions, just as even a large number of well-behaved fools and knowledgeable crooks would not quite refute the claim that knowledge and virtue are closely connected. Perhaps what Kant called the “crooked timber” of human nature is indeed so gnarled and knotted that no straight entailment thesis can be defended: perhaps a certain sort of spiritual contemplativeness, in some cases and to some extent, can co-exist with paucity of intellectual and ethical virtues, while moral and logical excellence do not automatically entail spiritual depth! It would still not follow that spirituality or Yoga is incompatible with analytical acumen, much less that a morally virtuous person should be unable or unwilling to meditate! But mere compatibility is not even a weak version of unity! A text like Bhagavadg¯ıt¯a, while being quite open to the idea of many alternative forms of Yoga or alternative paths to being good or wise—some more cognitive, some more action-oriented, some more emotional—seems to uphold a moderate unity thesis by claiming that pure knowledge firmed up by practice of friendliness, compassion, sincerity and self-control leads to the highest Yogic tranquility; that Yoga is skill in action, that emotional equanimity as well as a moral equality in one’s treatment of others naturally flow from Yoga, and that discursive even metaphysical wisdom (jñana) and intelligence (buddhi) are the secret of moral as well as spiritual perfection. How can one defend such a unity thesis in the face of such glaring failures of correlation? Of course, there is one rather easy way out of this conundrum. Whenever the concomitance fails one could claim that one of those terms was not really present. The allegedly seasoned Yoga practitioner who shows cruelty or corruption in actual social conduct, one could insist, is not properly practicing Yoga. Or, more daringly, one could insist that an apparent absence of yogic contemplation is not a real absence. The life of the spiritually un-inclined intellectual who seems to be so brilliant in his scientific enquiry is not really devoid of Yoga, one may say. Sam¯adhi of one sort or other, after all, is a property of all states of the mind. (Yogabh¯as.ya 1.2). Even a C¯arv¯aka thinker such as Daniel Dennett when he focuses on what he is going to write in his next book goes through a short-lived sam¯adhi state. Even he meditates, although he may not call it that. This line of defense of the connection thesis is

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seductive but it smells of circularity. We seem to be stipulatively defining the three kinds of excellences in such a way that the “discovery” that one cannot flourish without the other becomes an analytic claim.

3 A Strong Unity of Virtues Thesis Strong supporters of the unity of intellectual and moral virtues have quite openly taken this circular-sounding tack when faced with glaring cases of dis-unity: Rational wisdom and practical virtuousness must go together because when one is found without the other, it is not a genuine case of wisdom or virtue. A certain head of a powerful state may seem to be very shrewd and very blood-thirsty at the same time. But his worldly shrewdness and reasonableness, one can insist, is a veneer underneath which lies a moronic lack of imagination (an inability to put himself in the victim’s position, for instance) which makes him so ethically challenged. A totalitarian or terrorist who urges his people to kill enemies of his religion may sound very pious, look very saintly, or act super-intelligent, having mastery over the latest technology for mass-destruction or mass-brain-washing. But he is neither wise nor pious, and I would say that he does not qualify to even enter a class called “Meditation 101,” even if he spends a lot of time praying in his own temple. The idea of emotional intelligence helps us diagnose such glaring cases of clever thugs, as cases of lack of intelligence, after all. This, incidentally, is a rather steep requirement which would disqualify not only a short-tempered Schopenhauer but most of us academic types who profess to possess cognitive skills of one kind or another. Our knowledge, as one contemporary Indian spiritual teacher puts it, informs us but does not transform us. Socrates, Spinoza and the Mah¯abh¯arata would quite openly use such harsh standards, rejecting the erudition, eloquence and brilliance of those of us who passionately cling to our views and reputations and are easily crushed by personal calamities and easily bribed by accolade, as knowledge improperly so called. They would have no use for techne or even episteme which fails to result in arete and phronesis. The contemporary epistemologist Linda Zagzebski, in her book Virtues of the Mind, puts forward such a unity thesis: There are both logical and causal connections between moral and intellectual virtues that are just as extensive and profound as the connections among various moral virtues (Virtues, p. 158).

She shows how logically the moral quality of honesty entails, through careful preservation of truth and justification of what one tells others, the intellectual qualities of perceptual acuteness and judicious weighing of evidence. She also tries to demonstrate that causally moral failings such as excessive pride, envy and desire for power can get in the way of epistemic virtues such as detecting one’s own errors and facing the consequences of one’s own views. The pugnacity and egotism with which many scientists and professional philosophers cling on to their own positions,

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often refusing to see evidence to the contrary, shows how lack of spiritual training in non-clinging has slowed down the progress of science. The reason this is relevant in the present context is that one can easily find such close logical and causal connections between the requisite qualifications of Yogic Meditativeness and intellectual and ethical excellences. If, after remaining frozen in a trance like transcendental meditation for a couple of days or meditating routinely on Brahman, Allah, God or Emptiness, a religious person shows signs of idiocy, irrationality, incoherent and confused thinking or emerges as a suicide bomber or a serial killer with some allegedly celestial commandment to exterminate in order to liberate, or starts selling his own meditation-technique as an efficient marketing mantra, we could safely say that such concentration or spiritual experience is not Yoga, because it is not supported by good reasoning and does not result in non-violence and nonacquisitiveness, in ahim . s¯a and aparigraha. The Yoga-bh¯as.ya clearly connects nonviolence (a virtue of the heart, as it were) with truthfulness and trustworthiness (more epistemic virtues) by the following remark: If you speak and think just as you have perceived, just as you have reasoned for yourself, just as you have heard from reliable sources, if your words are uttered with the intention of transmitting in others the understanding or knowledge that you have yourself achieved, if your statements are not deceptive, nor erroneous, nor communicatively vacuous (by being unintelligible or tautologous), then you may be called a truthful person. Also the whole purpose of speaking should be the good of all living beings, as far as possible, and not harming another living being. Even when spoken with such good intentions if your speech hurts and harms others then that will not count as truth-telling even if it is literally stating the facts as they are (Yoga-S¯utra Bh¯as.ya II/30).

Mah¯abh¯arata enriches the epistemic notion of truth (as believing and describing things as they really are) by building in thirteen other connected virtues to it, and these include focused steadiness of mind or a peaceful contemplative disposition. So the integration that I am trying to argue for is attempted solely by a very rich notion of truthfulness and sincerity in the 12th Canto of the Mah¯abh¯arata. (Incidentally Bernard Williams—in his recent book called Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton University Press, 2002) especially Chaps. 5 and 8 on Truth’s relationship to Sincerity and Authenticity—sets himself a similar agenda, which I take to be a healthy antidote to the dismissive minimalism and deflationism regarding the concept of truth). The thirteen virtues are: Equanimity, equality or equity, self-control, non-jealousy, forgiveness, a positive cheerful attitude tempered by shame (if one slips), forbearance, non-maliciousness, renunciation, meditative concentration (dhy¯anam), a detached civil dignity, patience, kindness and noninjury.

So, all those jealous hardhearted people who speak the plain truth in order to teach someone a lesson, all those promise-keepers who are ready to kill their neighbors simply because they had made a foolishly revengeful promise, all those restless distracted gossips who are ready to tattle because they cannot wait to see the excitement or the suffering that will follow, are, by these criteria, not telling the truth. Even

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in Ny¯aya -V¯arttika (1.1.7) Uddyotakara while defining the testimony of a knowledgepossessing true-believer as a source of knowledge at second hand says that the hearer would not have the appropriate epistemic warrant unless the trustworthy speaker– (¯apta) tells things as they are by being moved by compassion for others. The Kashmir Shaiva author Utpaladeva opens his own gloss on his cryptic verses on “Recognitionof-God in Subjective Consciousness” with these beautiful lines:” Why did I write this treatise? I had to write it because I had to share my knowledge with other people. Why did I have to share my knowledge with other people? Because I was ashamed of enjoying alone the treasure of wisdom which has been given to me as a gift and I wanted other people to benefit from it too (ek¯aki sampad¯alajjam¯anah.).” Just as kindness can lead to speaking out what you know, fearlessness or courage can also lead to speaking out. The sincerity with which the ancient Indian woman philosopher G¯arg¯ı speaks up in a male dominated assembly where she was once shut up rather rudely is recorded in the Br.hd¯aran.yaka Upanis.ad. In spite of being threatened by the main speaker that she is crossing her limits and may die if she asks more questions, she asks the most spiritually profound and trenchant pair of questions which brings out the deepest metaphysical truth about the self from Y¯ajñavalkya, her formidable interlocutor. Her truthful dare epitomizes, for me, all three characteristics of intellectual honesty, moral courage and Yogic equanimity which comes out of winning over fear of death.

4 Logical Reasoning and Yoga Meditation Yoga practice, we must not forget, is squarely based on S¯am . khya theory of knowledge. S¯am . khya recognizes three sources of knowledge: Perception, Scriptural Authority, and Inference. But it rejects, in so many words, the possibility that the first or the second, sensory perception or Vedic or any other kind of testimony would show us the way to complete cessation of suffering. What is left then? Contrary to popular expectation, S¯am . khya does not bring in extrasensory perception at all. No experience can give us liberatory knowledge. What kind of knowledge of the difference between the manifest (vyakta) manifold of the effects and their unmanifest (avyakta) cause on the one hand and pure consciousness (jñ¯a) on the other can liberate us, permanently and exhaustively from all kinds of suffering? Well, it has to be knowledge by reasoning or inference. That is S¯am . khya’s official answer. And Yoga does not depart from this in spirit, in so far as sam¯adhi or concentration-states are first described as “with rational discrimination,” “with inner argumentation” and then only proceeds to the non-conceptual highest states. The centrality of logical reasoning in Yoga practice is clearly enunciated in the prePatañjali (most likely Pre-Buddhist) ancient text Maitr¯ayani Upanias.ad. It speaks of six instead of eight limbs of Yoga. These are:

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Breathing exercises (pr¯an.ayama). Withdrawal of the senses (praty¯ahara). Meditation (dhy¯ana). One-tipped holding of the mind on an object (dh¯aran.a). Inward reasoning (tarka)* Stilling the flow of the mind (sam¯adhi).

Indeed, this Upanishad says that the ultimate experience of Brahman is attained through reasoning alone: “Having fully arrested the outward flow of speech-mind-and vital energy, onesees Brahman withreasoning” (brahma tarkena pasyati)!” It is this six-limbed yoga, rather than the eight-limbed yoga of Patañjali, that Abhinavagupta alludes to in his early eleventh-century magnum opus Tantr¯aloka, when he asserts, that the most important limb of Yoga is “good reasoning.” In the 4th and 13th chapter of this definitive work on Kashmir Shaiva Tantra, Abhinavagupta says that much more essential and effective than breath-control or withdrawal of the senses is the Yogic method of arguing with oneself and deepening the lessons learnt from one’s teacher or scripture by self-critical rational reflection. Abhinava calls this method for the “powerful mind” (´sa¯ ktopaya), which is one of the four alternative paths to the recognition of the unity of Universal consciousness and the individual knowing self. In some rare cases, such good reasoning dawns on a practitioner without any extraneous instruction from any teacher. For such people, their own intellect or conscience act as their teacher. And in the Tantra-s, they are said to be “taught by the goddesses—the self-aware sensory powers.” Such a self-taught good reasoner manifests the divine flash of cognitive “genius” (pratibh¯a), an intuitive synoptic insight into all things, and especially into the essence of all languages and authentic spiritual traditions (¯agama). But even if one is not graced with such innate talent, with practice of clear thinking, logical reasoning, study of scriptures, instruction by a capable teacher, debate and discussion, the shaky flame of universal cognitive fire becomes gradually steadier and brighter. With a rationally cleansed and brightened light of insight “everything can be known,” says Abhinava quoting Patañjali’s Yogas¯utra (Tantr¯aloka: IV and XIII). Similar importance is given to reasoning in the Mah¯ayana Buddhist tradition of meditation as well. Refuting common misconceptions about meditation, Tsong Khapa (the Tibetan M¯adhyamika Buddhist philosopher) responds to two anti-intellectualist qualms with characteristic vigor. The first misconception: “When meditating on the path to Buddhahood, one should not do repeated analysis with discerning wisdom. Such analysis is only useful at the level of preparatory studies.” Tsong Khapa responds: This is nonsensical chatter of someone who is utterly ignorant of the crucial points of practice … First study with someone what you intend to practice and come to know it second hand. Next use scripture and reasoning to properly reflect on the meaning of what you studied, coming to know it first hand … Thus you need both repeated analytical meditation and nonanalytical stabilizing meditation (´samat¯a and vipassan¯a).

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Again Tsong Khapa warns us: “Not knowing this system, some even propound, ‘If you are a scholar, you only do analytical meditation. If you are a spiritual seeker or adept, you only do stabilizing meditation.’ This is not the case, because each must do both … you must use discernment for both of these methods of meditation. If you lack or are deficient in such analytical meditation, then you will not develop stainless wisdom, the precious life of the path” (The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, or Lam-Rim by Tsong Khapa, translated by Cutler and Newland et al. Snow Lion Publications Ithaca 2000).

5 Yoga and Moral Virtues Not only are the positive and negative virtues of Yama and Niyama relevant as initial qualifying conditions of Yoga practice, constant self-vigilance about non-injury to other living beings, truth and non-covetousness and sexual continence is all along important, since as long as one has a human body one can expect to feel the inner enemies of lust, desire, anger and egotism. Even the living liberated person normally behaves in a virtuous way, albeit effortlessly. So, ethical conduct accompanies Yoga practice at the start, in the middle and at the end. There is an intricate rhythm of mutual support and safeguarding through which these moral virtues work in unison. Truthfulness works only when tempered with compassion, as we have already shown above. Compassion without analytical reasoning and the regular practice of selfcriticism would turn into self-indulgent sentimentalism. Non-acquisitiveness and vigilance against greed are needed to protect the meditator from using her spirituality as a ruse for gathering fame or fortune. Why then do we see so many alleged Yoga practitioners living or at least occasionally behaving in ethically deplorable ways? Well, the answer, I am afraid, has to be that there are too many imposters, fakes and self-deluded claimants of Yoga-expertise. Partial development of only one aspect of the Yoga practice to the neglect of others leads to such fake Gurudom or what Kant called Sensation-Dreamers and Reason-Dreamers! (See Dreams of a Spirit-Seer by Immanuel Kant). After divulging to the insistent Naciketas, the mystery of the deathless self which can only be “realized” by a lucky few, Death, in The Katha Upanis.ad warns, “No one who has not desisted from wrong actions, has not become calm, has not arrested one’s mind, can recognize the true nature of the self, only by proper wisdom can the state of freedom be attained.” Krishna says very categorically: “For a person who does not have self-control, Yoga would be hard to attain (asamyat¯atmano yogo dus.pr¯apa iti me matih.). With a facile appeal to the popular but ill-understood notion of “transcending all morality,” a large number of Yoga teachers practice and preach licentious corrupt behavior. Any one who has to practice Truth or Ahimsa in their full form would need to concentrate dispassionately on evidence with pure devotion to truth and give up greed. Yoga without constant striving for minimizing violence and acquisitiveness is a farce.

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6 The Unmanageability of Human Beings In his monograph “The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, wrote: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made.” No amount of value-education can turn a selfish person into a constitutionally altruistic person, just as (again to quote Kant), the lack of good judgment and inability to form clear concepts and lack of interpersonal understanding (Verstehen) is a deficiency “which no school can make good.” The Mah¯abh¯arata, in spite of being a tragic tale of human destructiveness and frailty, praises humanity in the highest possible terms. Nothing is nobler than being human (na m¯anus.a¯ t s´re¸s¸thataram hi kiñcait), it asserts in the encyclopedic XIIth Book of Peace. What is that human-ness which it extols? Should we take it normatively as ideal—but rarely exemplified–human virtues such as truthfulness, non-cruelty and non-envy and humility, the 13-fold cluster of virtues which the Mah¯abh¯arata calls “the thirteen forms of Truth”? Or should we take the entirety of human nature, with all its fragility and finitude, its vulnerabilities and its values, its creativity and its contradictions, to be constitutive of that humanity which the Mah¯abh¯arata values above all? After exploring this, in the light of the Mah¯abh¯arata, we shall proceed to the impossibility of “managing” human nature. Even Vy¯asa, the poet of the timeless multi-layered saga of (what Immanuel Kant calls) “the crooked timber that is human nature,” ends the epic literally by throwing up his hands and lamenting “Here I am crying with raised hands, but nobody is listening to me.” One such uncontrollable trend all over the world, and especially in a “development-driven” India trying to become a superpower competing with the USA and China, is the decline of “the humanities,” in favor of computer science, engineering, space-science and nuclear power, and business management. Can we maintain the Mah¯abh¯arata’s concept of what it is like to be really human, in the face of such ecologically and ethically destructive disvaluing of the humanities? We end with this open question, because perhaps it is in such self-examining interrogatives—in re-enacting a timely and cosmopolitan Pra´sna Upanis.ad—that the greatness of humanity consists. What makes humans so great is that human beings can resist their natural impulses, and engage in debate and dialogue with one another before jumping into action or slumping into inaction. They can explore the depths of their own diseases and examine their own pains. They can perform sacrifice: ty¯aga, giving or offering. True, all of us have a potential for aggression and destruction, cruelty and greed that we can individually and collectively overcome. Humans can take initiative to enjoy the world by giving up their egos. They have hands, with which they are free to grab or give, hurt or help, throttle or caress, fingers which can play music on strings or percussions, or pull triggers and punches. These “or”s and the pairs of options they open up place a burden of responsibility as well as give them the wings of liberty.

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7 Concluding Unorthodox Confession When I am torn between two incompatible philosophical positions, such as a direct commonsense realism about the external world and a subjective or post-modernist idealism, or between hard determinism and libertarianism about the future, or between a substantial eternal self and a mere set and series of loosely connected ephemeral psycho-physical states, as I clearly and distinctly feel the force of the arguments and counter-arguments on either side I sometimes feel like Wittgenstein did, that the problem must be spurious and both sides must be somehow trapped by language. But at other times I feel a profound sense of perfect equipoise and an epoché which enables me to occupy as it were that middle ground between the two cognitive armies where I become ready to listen to an almost celestial song in a middle voice. For a few moments, during these rare transformations of philosophical dilemmas into a literally breath-taking opening up of a space where pure awareness self-savors awareness, I seem to be in no rush to take any one side. I viscerally feel the connection between breath and mind, or to be precise, between no-mind and no-breath. The alternation of a perfectly indecisive intellect turns into the playful freedom to choose between optional ways of world-making. From the opening line of the N¯asad¯ıya Hymn or R.gVeda to the opening line of N¯ag¯arjuna’s M¯ula- Madhyamaka-K¯arik¯a (The Central Verses of The Middle Way), the exclusion of both logical extremes and even of their denials does not leave room for any admissible ontological thesis in the logical space but it does not therefore exclude a middle. The middle between such affirmations and negations is somehow mysteriously connected to the middle between in-breathing and out-breathing, that hair-line ¯ gap between one wave of cognition and another that the Tantric Agama-s talk about. This secret middle point is felt as the phenomenological heart of pure objectless subjective but egoless consciousness. This makes good sense of N¯ag¯arjuna’s identification of emptiness with the middle place, of the use of the Sanskrit word vimar´sa for the most intimate unique freedomentailing feature of consciousness in Abhinavagupta’s thought as well as its use for a pendulous doubting awareness in Ny¯aya. Questioning, doubting, debating are thus felt by me, in those moments, to be continuous with the act of meditation. I begin to see a trans-historical significance in the fact that Descartes had to go through the skeptical cleansing before regaining epistemic access to the self and the perfect Being, though he slipped back into metaphysical egotism. Sincere engagement with rational two-sided reasoning headed for an ego-shattering stalemate constitutes a path to that viewless nowhere where nondual sentience can stay free. It can playfully and compassionately look back at its own silly attachments wondering, as a woken up person does, how on earth I could think I was someone looking at other things and thinkers? I confess that whenever I have this experience for a few brief moments, I am tempted to think that I am beginning to understand what Abhinavagupta meant when he wrote, In his magnum opus Tantr¯aloka (VI, 9–13),

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That pure sentience whose ultimate essence consists in the sheer light of awareness, when it gives up the roles of the object known and of the ego knowing it, shines all by itself as the clear sky. This pure sentience is called the empty form of consciousness which is the final stage that the Yogins attain through their reflective discursive cogitations of the form: “not this, not this.”

This open empty space-like consciousness itself takes the form of the vital force called “pr¯an.a” and creates the vibrating waves of thrill in the body, surges up as the inner drive of the will and is known by such various names as: “vibration,” “efflorescence of creativity” “tranquil repose” “the living being” “the genius in the heart” (pratibh¯a). Of course, this state does not last. I feel compelled to leave the middle and take up a definite position (as Descartes did), defend it with conviction which brings attachment, call that “my view,” my lineage, my culture, my discovery, etc. Thus I am back into the entire package of egotistical living. But I have an optimistic feeling that if I could somehow keep practicing, to the best of my ability—and this is where Dharma comes in as a glue between Tarka and Yoga—the virtues of non-injury, candor, non-acquisitiveness, friendship, compassion, rejoicing at others’ success, cheerfulness, indifference toward others’ moral failings, then the integration between my analytical rational equipoise and my moral mindfulness would together gel into a more permanent disposition toward a contemplative calm. Such a peaceful inwardly vigilant and outwardly unattached disposition may enable me to witness this wonderful sport of the plural world of much pain and some pleasure while being right in the middle of it. Such integration of logic and meditation can happen, I believe, only if the bridge of unflagging moral mindfulness is cultivated. It is because I lack proper practice of Yama and Niyama that these ecstatic transformations of philosophical analysis into contemplative stillness do not stabilize in me. If some day I ever come closer to the hardest achievement in this integration program— living unselfishly by the internalization of Other-centered ethical virtues—I shall be able to tell you exactly what morality has to do with spiritual salvation. Or better, you will have to figure it out, albeit fallibly, just by watching me act, because I shall stop talking about it. It remains an open question whether such a silent inward self-effacing viewless compassionate “tender”-hearted person can be any good as a “leader” in the management-sense of the term.

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