Applying Meaning to Management With Ancient Hindu Mythology

Following is an excerpt from an article that appeared in The Washington Post about Managing business using concepts from Indian culture. In fact, there is a rise of Indian management techniques in the West (though not sure about "westernised" India). The Bhagavad Gita has replaced the Chinese "Art of War", said the Business Week few years ago in one of its articles. Will Indians rise to glory by picking a leaf out of their own valuable backyard?

NEW DELHI -- Fifteen young managers with a top Indian retail company met in their office basement recently to sip coffee and listen to a talk about their specialty: brand building. The speaker, renowned mythology expert Devdutt Pattanaik, is also the company's "chief belief officer."

The ancient Hindu tales that Pattanaik, 38, tells his corporate audiences are full of fallible kings, stoically suffering queens, demons enticing the gods into lawless jungles, gods with rivers sprouting from their dreadlocks, and goddesses riding elephants.

But the round-faced, bespectacled author, who graduated from medical school and has worked as a business strategist for the consulting firm Ernst & Young, says he is not like the wise old grandmother who sits under a banyan tree telling stories. Instead, he says, he is helping to create a set of management principles that are steeped in Indian culture. He calls it the "3-B" model: belief, behavior and business.

"Indians are led by emotions, unlike people in the West, who are driven by reason," said Kishore Biyani, chairman of the Future Group, who chose Pattanaik to head this program four months ago. "Not all the Western management models of standard operating procedure fit us. How do we create management practices that are grounded in our rich repository of stories and rituals?"

He writes a column titled Management Mythos for the Indian financial daily the Economic Times, examining corporate behavior in the light of mythic narratives. For example, he gives the name of the mythological character Narada to those who play office politics. The customer is Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. He likens layoffs to the slaughter of cows, which Hindus revere as symbolizing life.

A week ago, Biyani urged his employees to greet each other and customers with the Hindi greeting "Namaste," meaning "I bow to the god in you," instead of the usual "Good morning" or "Hello." "Saying 'Namaste' is not fake drama," Pattanaik told 60 store managers recently. "It is acknowledging the other person's potential to grow. Can you measure that on the Excel sheet?" ...................

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/25/AR2009012502106.html