Rethinking Enterprise Management

 

Several disruptions have come together to affect the efficacy of how enterprises are managed.

• Environment as a stakeholder: The effect of how enterprises function on the environment has become a big issue due to the adverse effects on climate.

• Cultural diversity: In an increasingly global marketplace, all the stakeholders are distributed globally - employees, customers, investors, suppliers, governments. Each of them have its own cultural values that need to be accommodated for harmonious co-existence.

• Loosely coupled workforce: Employee loyalty to a single company can no longer be taken for granted. Technology has enabled remote work and time-shared services for multiple enterprises at a time. This forces enterprises to rethink terms of engagement and IP protection.

• Broadening of stakeholder value: Wealth is no longer the only motivator for participation in an enterprise. Work-family balance, Intellectual satisfaction, community, ethical standpoint, national aspirations, environmental impact, all become important to various degrees for different stakeholders.
  

• Non-commercial enterprises: There is proliferation of enterprises without a profit motive. Examples include social, cultural, political and spiritual organisations for whom serving a cause is more important than financial self-sustenance. The needs of such organisations are not adequately covered by current MBA programs.
  

Enterprise management has evolved from managing a large pool of human robots to a dynamic peer-to-peer ecosystem of fully alive participants with their own multi-dimensional motives and interests. We are approaching the way nature itself operates and must adopt some of its time-tested strategies. At the core of these disruptions lies (i) a marked shift in the notion of stakeholder value beyond wealth, (ii) demand for flexibility and decentralization in decision making, (iii) need to accommodate participants with diverse aspirations and priorities.

To handle these disruptions effectively, we need a new paradigm of management that looks at stakeholders, their identities and aspirations more holistically. Management must evolve strategies for handling stakeholders as an ecosystem of peer living entities, and motivating them to work together to achieve larger causes, while fulfilling their individual aspirations. To achieve this, we need a comprehensive model of stakeholder behavior that captures their multidimensional personality and aspirations. We also need to model how individuals come together to bring an organisation alive.

How Vedic Wisdom contributes to Management

Vedic wisdom offers a comprehensive model of conscious life and its behavior. This model is inherently recursive / fractal and can be extended equally to organizations as well as individuals. In this model, both an individual as well as an organisation can be represented as having pancha koshas or 5 layers of personality with their own unique motives. This expanded view enables us to model a wide variety of enterprises, not just commercial. This includes social, cultural, political as well as spiritual organizations. Such a unified model offers a sound basis for reasoning about organizational behavior and offers a rich set of strategies to navigate diverse personalities. Since this model throws light on the inner springs of behavior, and makes managers more aware of them, we call the paradigm based on the Vedic model as Conscious Management.

Revamping Management Education

To train future managers to effectively navigate the challenges of modern enterprise, we have developed a novel management training program at masters' level that presents the larger context and the principles at work. We introduce the Conscious Management paradigm and its underlying Vedic model. We show how it offers new ways of problem solving. We then introduce the mainstream functional knowledge of management.