Date: October 22, 2024
The demise of Ratan Tata marks the end of an era. An era of visionary leadership that began 100 years back with Jamshedji Tata, that continued through JRD Tata, finally ended with Ratan Tata. Business for the Tatas was not just about making money and getting rich. It was about creating enduring brands and building communities without throwing away ethics and ideals.
A particular commercial ad of the 90s of Tata Steel comes to mind where after showing a whole lot of community activities it finally ended with the tag line: We also make steel. It never sounded like a bombastic claim. Because that’s what Tatas were known for. This value system of the Tatas is in consonance with the ethos of our nation. Even in the latest instance we saw how a sinking Air India was bought and turned around by them adding great value to the aviation sector.
Nowadays, we are too taken in by the American style of capitalism which has already run its course because it goes against all the laws of Dharma. We are seeing the limits and failure of the “profits-only,” purely commercial, narrow vision of increasing shareholder’s value – all around us. Genuine leadership qualities and “thought leaders” have largely vanished from the corporate and public spheres. Yes, there’s a surfeit of Management by Objectives, Transactional Analysis, TQM, Game Theory, Six Sigma – but still they are not able to produce genuine leaders. Like JRD or Ratan Tata.
In fact, the world is suffering from shady leadership. That is why we have all those scams in the corporate sector. That is why the financial volcanoes like the one in 2008, keep on erupting at regular intervals. We see a regular recurrence of asset bubbles, stock market crashes and financial mismanagement which have to be bailed out using the hard-earned money of the honest citizens. With all the sophisticated “management techniques” at our disposal to increase efficiency, when we find that the system throws up such monstrosities at regular intervals, we should understand that the root causes lie elsewhere. Not in the management tools that we use.
If we probe deeply into the managerial causes of underperformance, incompetence, corporate failure and collapse in the business world, we would find that top managements, the business schools that train them, the consultants who advise them, are all guilty of having a destructive preoccupation with analytical technique – too narrow in its conception and too short term in its approach……there is too much stress on quantification and quantitative methods; on mathematical models – and a total side stepping of values and ideals.
But we must understand that life is not governed by mathematics. The corporate philosophy says that one’s spiritual and social life should reside outside the work-place and this is one of the sources of our present problem…. that our lives are not integrated. Mere logic, mathematics and the intellectual approach without any reference to the higher dimensions of life, is bound to lead to failure – because it only gives a partial view of things and with a partial view, we are bound to fail.
“For man intellectually developed, mighty in scientific knowledge and mastery of gross and subtle nature, using the elements as his servants and the world as his footstool, but undeveloped in heart and spirit, becomes only an inferior kind of Asura using the powers of a demigod to satisfy the nature of an animal.”
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, Vol. 1, p. 237
Why do none of our business schools, the mathematical models have anything to say about our race to the edge of the precipice of ecological suicide? Or of societal collapse and global unrest arising out of obscene economic inequality?
If we carefully study the cases of corporate collapses in recent times – Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Satyam – we would find that they had the best of managers, legal advisors and technical personnel. Yet they collapsed in spite of having the best of technical know-how. They failed because of greed, lack of integrity and honesty and shady dealings just to enhance the bottom-line. In fact, Satyam was given an award for Best Corporate Governance before it went belly-up!
It seems that along with the ability to display an efficient corporate governance model, they also were efficient in hiding their shady management practices for a long time. Same goes for Enron and Lehman Brothers. And we have not heard the last of these stories.
If we continue to be guided by rogue capitalism that demands a 14-hour work day with employees burning out and even dying in their twenties and thirties and we become a nation of hustlers always trying to get ahead by hook or crook throwing away all the rules of justice and fair-play, moral and financial integrity – then we would be heading for the breakdown of physical and mental health, breakdown of families and community and that would ultimately lead to civilizational ruin.