Tracing Leadership back to Scriptures

Have we ever thought about leaders in Indian scriptures and the relevance of that style of leadership in the context of the present organizations?

Recently, I was going through a broadcast called ‘Business Sutra’ on CNBC TV18 where Mr.Devdutt Pattanaik was speaking about the relationship between leadership and scriptures. Mr.Devdutt Pattanaik is a Chief Belief Officer at Future Group. In this article, I have tried to pen down an essence of the discussion he was having with the interviewer. He mentioned some valuable points which I was not aware of earlier.

The discussion began with how various avatars of Lord Vishnu represent leadership at various stages and phases of a corporation’s life?

If we have a look at Vishnu’s image, we see the following in each of his four hands:

• One hand has the shankha (the conshell) which is used for communicating
• The other hand has chakra (the wheel) which is used for reviewing
• The third hand has the gada (the club) which is used for discipline
• And the fourth hand has the padma (the lotus) which is used for appreciation

All the four qualities mentioned above are essential traits for any good leader and Lord Vishnu symbolises the same. Now, let us focus on discipline as one of the traits. To discipline people, does the leader have to follow a set of rules or is there any rule book in place?

Here, we need to understand that every rule exists in a context. When the context changes the set of rules also change. For example, rules for T20 are much different than those of a test cricket.

In scriptures, we don’t have fixed rules but we do have fixed principles. The rules are further explained by the concept of “Yuga”. The world exists in four parts just like the life cycle of a human being. They are youth, maturity, old age and serenity. There are different set of rules in each of these stages. As we see, this is analogous to the corporation’s or product’s life cycle as well. All the Yugas will have different set of rules based on one common principle called ‘Dharma’.

Hence, the roles of different avatars of Vishnu uphold the same overarching principle of Dhrama but following different rules. So, using one overarching principle (or goal/vision for an organisation), different kinds of leadership is required in different phases in an organisation’s life cycle. But, all the leadership decisions and actions taken being in-line with the organisation’s goal/vision (the one overarching principle).

This was a short analogy between how leadership can be traced back to scriptures and how the analogy is relevant in the context of the present organisation also.

--By Sachin Wagh