Management by Values (Towards Cultural Congruence)

Foreword

During the 1980s I studied and wrote about management and leadership. Like others, my perspective was exclusively Western. In search of a different perspective, I travelled to Indian in 1988 where Professor Chakraborty and I became acquainted. The luxury of the Grand Oberoi Hotel where we met stood in sharp contrast to the Calcutta surroundings and to the humble and wise professor.

Professor Chakraborty has studied and written much about management and leadership from the Indian perspective. The professor identifies the Indian perspective, ‘Indian Ethos’, as being self/spirit oriented versus the Western parading ego/matter oriented.

In his books Human Response in Organizations: Towards the Indian Ethos (1985); Managerial Effectiveness and Quality of Work life: Indian Insight (1987); and foundations of Managerial Work: Contribution from Indian Thoughts (1989), Professor Chakraborty makes a strong case for Indian Ethos.

I had an opportunity of exploring the Indian Ethos at first hand in the autumn of 1989. Professor Chakraborty invited me to attend and to be a guest lecturer at a one week seminar, ‘Managerial Effectiveness’ based on Indian Ethos, that he was conducting. The seminar was held at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta for executives from Indian Companies.

The seminar was very different from European and American seminars I had attended. Professor Chakraborty had designed the seminar to allow each participant an opportunity to experience the Indian Ethos. He achieved this through integration of insightful lectures, selected readings, meditation and silence. Three times a day we meditated for 45 minutes were times of silence. These experiences, although at first foreign to me, resulted in a deep inner learning far beyond that which any intellectual or rational experience could have provided. I became convinced that Professor Chakraborty had much insight to offer established Western thinking in the field of leadership.

In this book, Management by Values: Towards Cultural Congruence, Professor Chakraborty delivers his message of Indian Ethos even more profoundly than before. In a penetrating way he analyses the shortcomings of an ego/matter orientation and illuminates the ‘reality’ of the self/spirit orientation. He argues that ‘It is from the depth of inner silence that they [leaders] derive their power to vision, lead and build’.

A great contribution of this book is Professor Chakraborty’s use of reason to help people open themselves to spiritual experiences that can result in a renaissance of true leadership in business and society.

Professor Chakraborty exposes the tragedy of India losing contact with her roots by importing Western ideas of management and leadership. It is ironic that as the West begins to discover what the East has always known, the East is in danger of changing and forgetting. It is possible that this book will be remembered even more for its importance in influencing Indian rather than Western more for its importance in influencing Indian rather than Western leadership perspectives.

Preface

Management by Objectives was a book I wrote in 1976. Over succeeding years, through an extensive range of organizational studies, it struck me that despite the range of elegant, rational systematized, analytic approaches employed-MBO included-neither effective and concrete organizational results, nor a wholesome and humane quality of work-life had become manifest in Indian. It gradually began to dawn on me that the problem lay substantially in the weaknesses afflicting the sphere of human values. For instance, in MBO, setting the level of objectives, or evaluating performance against them, and all such activities inevitably get entangled in the human values implicit within the role-players. This book, therefore, bears the title Management by Values. It is offered as ‘right brain foundation for the ‘left brain rational-analytic approaches like MBO to yield their potential benefits in much greater measure than is evident now.

About the subtitle, ‘Towards Cultural Congruence’, there are at least two points to make. Why cultural congruence? Isn’t humanity the same after all? Would we not, by aspiring for cultural congruence, undermine our openness to nourishment from other cultures? The premise of this book, as of its predecessors, is that it is a reality that cultures and civilization do vary a lot at the empirical, manifest, vyavabarika level. World civilization appears to have evolved like an orchestra, with a great many instruments in the ensemble. Although the underlying notes struck on each may be identical, yet each instrument is necessarily played in its own distinctive style and technique for true for true response. This is the major reason for my concern with cultural congruence. Another is that when in the name of openness we merely imitate, it cannot promote a genuine and enduring development capable of earning respect and admiration for India in the world. This volume does not subscribe to the determinism that importing the latest technology also mandates the import of methods for handling the human side of organizations, except at a very superficial level. Moreover, our openness to other cultures does tend to be sham unless it is preceded by respectful openness to our own roots. Honest, sincere cultural ‘chauvinism’ (as many call cultural congruence) has a solid redeeming core in contrast to gullible aping of other cultures. Nor do I share the facile assumption that the modern mind is more enlightened in any real sense than the classical mind. The second point about ‘cultural congruence’ is the widespread bewilderment affecting the Indian managerial mind-both academic and practising-about the very existence of a definable Indian culture. The surface strife and diversity in our Epics and society on so many scores confounds them and they surrender the task of delving deeper to discover the unity that lies beneath. It is sad therefore that our great modern thinkers-Tagore, Vivekananda, Gandhi, Aurobindo, for example-who have devoted their lives to the betterment of our society almost before the very eyes of this generation are often summarily dismissed in a scanty line or two as being irrelevant and much else. This seems to be scourge that afflicts the contemporary Indian mind. Hence, in Chapter 8 of this book, after a close, sustained and respectful scrutiny and assimilation of the thoughts of these modern rishis of Indian, I offer readers the phrasc ‘sacro-secular symbiosis’ to sum up Indian culture. As I understand it, it is Indian’s mission to recreate this synthesis of the spiritual and material-the former showing the light to the latter-through each endeavour of hers. It seems to be a crucial failure of the modern mind not to comprehend the great truth about Indian, that her material affluence has always followed her spiritual efflorescence. To enact again and anew this unique script is our basic duty today. This is India’s prime relevance to the world. The new-found, yet old-time, ecological awareness’ syndrome of our days unmistakably points to the duty of expressing this symbiosis in all kinds of organizations. Of course, in the light of human values, ecology has to include both ‘physical ecology’ and mental ecology’. The call to India, therefore, is to foster and offer ‘manager-sadhaks,’ and similarly, we need teacher-sadhaks, politician-sadhaks and so on to cultivate genuine Indian values.

Another thing about culture in a highly pluralistic society like India’s needs to be said. By culture we do not mean here just the sum total of external customs, i.e. deshachara (local customs) and lokachara (folk customs), or manner of prayer and worship, or architecture and music, and music, or dress and food, or poetry and paining...Culture viewed in this way has undoubtedly gained wonderful enrichmen from the ceaseless currents flowing into India from various corners of the earth millennia. Pluralism at this exterior level is therefore patent. But remaining content with our understanding of Indian culture at this level alone is akin to missing the wood for the trees. Nor is the ‘historical-anthropological-sociological’ interpretation of it adequate or integral. Tagore, in an essay entitled The Centre of Indian Culture (1919) said: The main river of Indian culture has flowed in four streams-the Vedic, the Puranic, the Buddhist, and the Jain. It had its source in the heights of the Indian consciousness’ (emphasis added), and Tagore is recognized as the most universalized embodiment of the essence of Indian Culture which remains concentrated deep in the collective unconscious of its people. This assessment has been a major inspiration to me in my work.

Currently there is a legitimate and growing interest in discovering the ‘Indianness’ of Indian management. These efforts are based primarily on empirical studies of various categories of successful Indian enterprises, probable following the lead of many recent American books of this genre. The approach in this book is almost the reverse. Whatever Indians apparently do today-good or bad, successful or sloppy-is not intrinsic ‘Indianness’ The empirical or the practical cannot determine the ideal or the normative. Rather, the empirical shall be judged as wholesome and worthwhile only if it represents the tireless striving to express the ideal. This is what ‘management by values’ should mean. Viewed thus, I doubt whether any Indian organization today reflects quite [that ideal ‘Indianness’ which, as mentioned before, lies in ‘sacro-secular symbiosis’.

Contents