Krishna, Management Sage

The plot of the Mahabharata, including the circumstances in which the sermons of the Gita were delivered, is well known. On the brink of the Kurukshetra war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, Arjuna, leading the Pandava army, has second thoughts about taking up arms against the Kauravas, whose leaders are his cousins. krishna, his charioteer, remonstrates with him and finally persuades him to dump his doubts. The arguments he uses comprise the Gita – a book within a book, and easily the most-closely analysed of all the sacred Hindu texts.

The central theme of Krishna’s lecture, nishakama karma – the need to engage in action, but with detachment, without expecting any reward from it – is also widely known, and, indeed, has been much debated. Some have argued that the “fatalism” Indians are sometimes accused of stems from internalising the concept of nishakama karma. Again, in The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen has made the case that Arjuna’s initial reaction could well be as valid a moral position as that of Krishna’s.

Debashis Chatterjee, currently Director at the Indian Institute of management, Kozhikode – which routinely figures high up on Business Today’s annual listing of top business schools –also pursues a second career as a writer. His specialty is culling management lessons from the ancient Hindu texts. Having mined the Vedas, Upanishads and similar works in earlier works such as Leading Consciously, he turns in this book to the Gita. But Timeless Leadership: 18 Leadership Sutras from the Bhagavad Gita avoids dis- cussing any of the Gita’s contentious aspects. It is more of a primer for executives who know nothing whatsoever about either the Mahabharata or the Gita.

However, it is interesting enough. Thus, Chatterjee maintains Arjuna’s dilemma should resonate with modern day executives since all wars are initially fought in the mind. Arjuna’s “near and dear ones”, whom he does not want to fight, can be compared with “the thoughts and emotions we are deeply attached to”, or the difficulty all of us face in “evolving out of our comfort zones”. “Arjuna is not unlike a (business) leader who has to navigate the corporate world through shifting moods that cloud his vision and distort his awareness,” he writes. “Fear of the boss, pressure of deadlines, grief over job losses, long hours of separation from the family, self pity and shame resulting from underperformance – all of these paralyse a person at work.”

Later chapters elucidate related concepts in the Gita such as the unity of thought and action – renunciation, a favourite Hindu theme, does not imply doing nothing, it notes – or the power that comes from having an honest purpose, or the importance of overcoming the ego, or of pursuing perfection, not success. Likening the Gita to “a conversation on performance enhancement”, Chatterjee also reinterprets certain passages to stress the importance of keeping information overload – and the resulting attention deficiency – at bay. But exactly how to achieve all these undeniably noble objectives is not spelt out – either in the Gita or by Chatterjee.