LSD for the Social Business

Image via Wikipedia

JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com, quotes his friend Prof. N. Venkatraman in his latest blog (emphasis mine):

"... businesses used to be hierarchies of business units whose assets were called customers and products; that they are changing into networks of business units whose assets were called relationships and capabilities."

Also, Verna Allee talks about Value Networks instead of Value Chains as the next gen of business visualization & analytics.

These are fundamental changes in the beliefs in Business, not just behaviors. One that I am happy about since I can relate to them instinctively, thanks to my heritage.

The what & why of Business - East vis-a-vis West

Alexander & the Gymnosophists of India

In my last post titled Business Sutra for the Future of Work, where I announced this series, I forewarned you that I'll henceforth try to blend my Indian heritage with the western learnings in my quest to understand how things are evolving with respect to social in particular & what needs to be the strategies. Thusly, you might find stuff that you are not familiar with. Though I'll try and give some 101 as & when required, I think it is good if we understand the difference in Indian & Western beliefs (& thus behaviors). In this post I introduce you to the differences between the two thoughts - Western & Eastern.

I grew up reading & listening to the various stories from across the world. But my Indian upbringing did have a bigger impact on my beliefs. And I did read more of the Indian Mythologies than most of my friends & relatives who were introduced to them, but were made to read more of the western stories thanks to our education system. If you are convent educated (yes, we have lots of them in India), am sure you are aware of numerous Biblical stories. More than Indian stories (well, I know you are aware of Ramayana & Mahabharata, but most probably not the rest).

The western thought is predominantly influenced by the Greek & Roman mythologies and the tales from the two testaments of the Bible. And then there are Nordic & Celtic influences too and a lot many more. And if you look at them all, they all say that you have one life to live and that you need to achieve / enjoy what you can in this one life. The judgement will be at apocalypse/Armageddon/2012 AD/whatever.

The Indian thought on the other hand is shaped by the belief in rebirth, that there are infinite lives to live. And you are constantly being judged and bear the consequences, either in this life or the future lives - Karma.

So the Western people have this one life as the denominator of whatever they do in their one life and the Indians have infinite lives as the denominator of whatever they do in this one life. Which means, to the Western people, they are the sum total of their achievements in this one life. To the Indians, whatever they do amounts to nil, zero.

Eh?

So do I mean to say we Indians are not driven because we are not fired with the ambition to achieve everything in this one life?

No, absolutely not. What it means is that for us, the purpose of life is introspection. Figuring it out. Because we believe we have infinite lives to do it all.

Westerners do business to do it, achieve. They concentrate on the how. Indians do business to figure it out, find the meaning. They concentrate on the why.

If all this went over the top, may be I can get Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik to explain this to you better with a story.



So what does this difference in belief translate into, as behaviors? Let me take Dr. Pattanaik's help again and show you this slide from his TED India talk:

So while I leave you to mull over this, I will be back with another post. Hope I could set the stage for us to proceed further? Please leave your comments here or email me @ naasat.in.

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.”