Karma of business

The evolution of management, from military to business to personal. Its progression from Taylor’s time and motion to behaviouralists’ mind and commotion, from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the prosperous hierarchy of wants, is now moving from matter and ideas to spirit, using spirit to enrich ideas and matter. If Ved Vyasa’s Bhagwad Gita is replacing Sun Tsu’s Art of War among US executives learning to put “purpose before self”, or realising that karma is a “principle of action” from professors at Harvard, Kellogg, Wharton, as Businessweek reports, it is not a victory of Gita over War or even India over China. It is an enrichment of matter with spirit.

I’m surprised that it has taken so long. The Gita, narrated in the middle of two armies as they readied to destroy one another, is simultaneously a ladder of spiritual ascent and a practical guide to life. It assumes matter is divine and moulds it to serve a higher purpose. ‘Higher’, not in the crude mental-intellectual paradigm, but in a natural progression of life itself. It is something like information being processed through a machine called wisdom. We wait to see how that wisdom influences a whole new generation of managers.

But if that were indeed the case, how is it that India is spiritually rich but materially poor? What can resolve the contradiction that the rishi and the hungry can live side by side, that knowledge and access can amass untold wealth (and no one is grudging that) while a quarter live below the poverty line? Is Indian spirituality a sham, a farce to cover our weaknesses, a pretence to ‘show them’ that even though we’re poor, we’re richer?

I feel India has not walked the material path fully. Somewhere between the age of the rishis and the India of tomorrow, lies a vacuum, an emptiness that needs to be filled by material success. India is lucky that its spiritual halo still survives, nourishes its culture. It is just that the intermediate evolutionary stage of material growth got lost, plundered away. Perhaps India needs to undergo an involution, rather than an evolution, and taking best practices of the West, transform them with wisdom to create a harmonious future where West and East converge.