Business Sutra for the Future of Work

A very happy new year to you all!

If you did not notice, I now have a new domain name. After nearly a decade & a half of having a presence on the internet. The name reflects my quest to marry the Indian Introspective methods with the Western Skepticism to figure out answers to many worldly things - not the non-existent (ná ásat) - that dog me. I think I'll give it a couple of decades before I graduate to thinking about the non-existent. :) So don't be surprised if I bring in some heavy doses of Indian philosophies, mythologies, folklores, etc. in the coming posts.

Though I have always believed that there is a lot to be learnt from my own heritage wrt business & its management, I was unable to find much literature or people who had made the connect. Until I stumbled upon Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik recently when I came across a recommendation for his book Myth = Mithya A Handbook of Hindu Mythology on my Facebook stream.

Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik is the Chief Belief Officer at Future Group, one of the largest large format store chains in India.

Wait, what? Belief?

Yes, that's what I thought too when I heard it the first time. But it makes perfect sense. Business is after all the sum total of human behaviors & behaviors are most often than not influence by beliefs. And while behavior is increasingly measurable (and thus manageable) belief is not, and thus has not been managed or even considered in business management/administration.

Sounds logical enough to me. Though I would welcome your views if you do not subscribe to it. You can leave a comment here or mail me at naasat.in (any thing is ok in front of the @, they will all come to me).

To know more about Dr. Devdutt's views on the Indian way of doing business (which we have ourselves forgotten thanks to the westernised education), you can listen to him in this excellent series on CNBC TV18 called Business Sutra.

I hope to take up the concepts of Karma, Kama & Dharma and Lakshmi, Saraswati & Durga in my next posts and relate them to business in general and wrt Customers (internal & external) too.

I am aware that my audience is predominantly from outside of India, so I will take care to describe key aspects of the various Indian Philosophical concepts as well as the Mythological characters & the Hindu Pantheon (there are 33 Million gods & goddesses, many demons but no devil) so that you can understand me better, where I come from.

And finally, the reason why I am writing these: that I can understand these concepts better myself! And I am encouraged in this by what Peter Senge, author of the seminal work "Fifth Discipline", states in an interview:

“My intuition is they (India and China) will move somewhat together but in very distinctive ways. But I think the thing that will be really common to both of them will be the fact that they won’t be able to do this without reconnecting their heritage. They will have to develop a confidence that they can do this as Indians and they can do this as Chinese. They have learnt a lot from the West but they don’t have to copy, they cannot create a Chinese or Indian version of a Western model. The Western model itself is basically bankrupt. It does not give enough attention to the human side of development.”