Modern Management Through Ancient Indian Wisdom: Towards a More Sustainable Paradigm
The paper attempts to establish the relevance of the teachings of Ancient Indian scriptures like Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Manu-smriti, Arthashastra, etc in the practice of Modern Management. In this paper, we will see that though Drucker's modern management paradigms like MBO are very ideal theoretically and can be derived from the ethical and spiritual frameworks of ancient Indian ethos however, in practice, companies are struggling to implement these frameworks effectively because they are still not aligned to the teachings of ancient Indian scriptures. Also, through the same body of knowledge derived from ancient Indian scriptures, we will try to understand the reasons behind individual decision-making failures ultimately leading to institutional failures and in the process would look forward towards integrating some elements into the existing frameworks to create a more sustainable management paradigm. In this regard, I have created a model which depicts a 6-fold path of “Jnan” or Knowledge through which we can not only better manage on an individual as well as institutional and global level, but also better able to contribute towards restoring World peace and uniform economic order through spiritual congruence.
Value -Based Leadershi p Princi ples: Importance in the Modern Technical Education
This paper aims to reiterate the importance of values in leadership development and the importance of value education in technical institutions. Technical institutions have a role to play in not only providing quality technical education but also to make students aware of the value systems so that they could demonstrate value-based leadership in their professional life. Few qualities that are essential for value-based leadership are discussed in the paper and it is proposed that they need to be instilled in students who are studying at technical institutions.
An investigation of the moral reasoning of managers
Factors which could be expected to influence the moral reasoning of managers at work were exam ined. Two hundred forty-three managers from four manufacturing firms participated in this study. Factors examined were the perceived ethical climate of the organization, as measured by the Ethical Climate Questionnaire; and the extent an individual focuses on the situation in deciding how to behave, as measured by the Self-Monitoring Scale. Moral reasoning, as the dependent variable, was measured using the Defining Issues Test. Results show that contrary to expectations, neither perceived ethical climate nor self-monitoring are related to managers' moral reasoning. Several interesting descriptive find ings were obtained, including the finding that age was negatively related to moral reasoning. Implica tions for further research are discussed.