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The New Business Mantra
BY L P Bhanu Sharma
The way we perceive business and go about managing organisations have undergone a complete metamorphosis in recent days. A walk down the business section of the local bookstore made me stop and look. I could not believe it for some time. A title like “The Tao of Personal Leadership” made me glance at the top of the case to make sure I hadn’t gone down the wrong aisle. But business and the way we do it—just like everything else on the planet–is changing, whether we’re aware of it or not.
I have enjoyed keeping up on the latest trends in sociology, science and psychology. I slowly realised that books which challenged the way I thought and acted were more satisfying. In my personal library, the books which told of the potential of spirit increased faster as compared to the books that told of potential in business.
Even in business and management, things have taken dramatic shifts during the last couple of decades. The books in today’s business section are focused on the new way of doing business. Instead of just “Swim With The Sharks” we have “Swim With The Dolphins.” Instead of “Leadership Secrets of Attila The Hun” you can now find “Jesus CEO.” Instead of “Top 10 Successful Marketing Strategies” we now have the “Bhagawat Gita For Managers.” Although “Guerrilla Marketing Attack” still takes up a lot of shelf space, you can easily locate “The Corporate Mystic.” The use of the word “competition” in marketing textbooks is less frequent and is being replaced by the word “cooperation.” How did this happen?
Most organisations of the past, including few that are still operational today, were based on Newtonian scientific thinking. These ideas confused “control” with “order”, “the parts of things” as “keys to the whole”, and everything as a machine that either ran well, or didn’t. They discounted relationships and ignored connections. Mistakenly, they placed the highest priority on that which was provable and material. Things occupied the prominent place replacing the importance of human beings. When something went wrong, the main focus was to find out “who” and not “why.” With this paradigm as our universal model there is no hope, only eventual decay, destruction, and a growing competition.
Today religion, management, marketing and organisational psychology are inter-linked and researchers and authors alike speak the same language and have almost the same focus. The whole concept of leadership has transformed overnight. A few years ago, Stephen R. Covey came up with his famous works “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and “Principle Centred Leadership.” The trends are also very clear after one looks at books like “Leadership and The New Science-Learning About Organisation From An Orderly Universe” by Margaret Wheatley. Some of these books have taken powerful propositions and transcending ideas from quantum physics and placed them in the field of business. But it went farther than the concepts of just business and leadership; it touched every aspect of our lives. Wheatley says, ‘We need to stop seeking the universe of the seventeenth century and begin to explore what has become known to us in the twentieth century.’ This new way of looking at the universe changed the way I look at business.
New discoveries in science and psychology are dramatically changing the way we look at organisations. The role of organisations is being redefined and crystallised. Recent authors view organisations as artificial bodies created to serve human beings. Instead of organisations and machines becoming important, human beings are increasingly taking the focus. We are now slowly learning that organisations are there to maximise our happiness. We are now learning the difference between control and order, parts and the whole and the material and the consciousness. This new dimension to doing business has clearly created a new business mantra: The Humanistic Organisations.
(Sharma is Chartered Accountant, Management and Financial Consultant, Trainer on Organisational Development and Positive Living)
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