VALUES MAKE EFFECTIVE MANAGER

The term good manager is not an acceptable jargon in management literature as both practitioners and researchers alike talk only about effective and ineffective managers. You are an effective manager if you deliver results and an ineffective one if you can’t. There is a catch, though — even the best of effective managers find themselves in situations that prove their undoing.

But still there are some theories of management that have started taking into account that effectiveness is only acceptable if it comes through the right means. So, ends are not enough means too are important. In fact, Gandhi was of the view that means and ends are interchangeable. The difficulty is that not many will be fancied by this means and ends debate as in these competitive times, in which the winner takes all, the ultimate test is the end result.

How then to identify the qualities of a good manager? Almost impossible to enumerate but one way out is to take a recourse to Plato whose advocacy was that kings should be philosophers and philosophers should be kings. The meaning was that should be guided by larger interests adopting means that are fair and square.

Taking a cue then we can well prophesy that managers should be philosophers. But the difficulty is that philosophy is not a part of the curriculum in any of the B-Schools, and their number may be rather astronomical globally. There may be that occasional paper or section in the syllabus in the name of values and ethics. This is not to advocate restructuring the course curriculum of a typical B-School programme, but certainly the idea needs to be explored that we need to make good managers who are concerned about results but with the eye on means that are fair and square.

Where to find such a curriculum? And then rejecting an over 100-year-old revolution that began with pig iron workers trying to raise their productivity in a steel plant under the guidance of an industrial engineer may not be accepted by many.

Well the pig iron workers did revolutionise the method of loading the iron bars to meet the demand sparked by the Spanish American war, but over the years, we have created a new education system altogether that treats pupils like the experimental guinea pigs. Anything and everything is being taught to them in the name of management education with the very paradigm that began in the US around a century ago being questioned in its own land, it is time to look for a different model. Can the Indian ethos provide some insights?

Ethos is the characteristic spirit of a culture, era or community as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations. Though identifying a standalone Indian ethos may not be a hundred per cent valid proposition yet, we can certainly claim that there was an ethos that we identified as Indian. It was based on a value system that could be copyrighted as the Indian ethos.

It was this ethos that noted Indologists and internationally acclaimed writers like AL Basham, Fa-Hien, and Max Muller had written about in their accounts of India. It is this value system that our present President of India keeps harping on while emphasising the need for resetting the moral compass. Managers must stand on a high moral ground.

TAKE SOME FOOD FOR THOUGHT

With life expectancy on the rise, Alzheimer’s is becoming a serious cause for concern. Even as medical researches keep giving prescriptions, observations suggest that this degenerative disease of aging is still not being tamed. Let us talk about how the disease develops. The one popular assumption about Alzheimer’s is that the brain cells gradually degenerate and die with aging.

A commonly offered analogy is of a large and heavily illuminated room in which hundreds of bulbs are glowing. As these bulbs cannot last forever, they gradually lose the strength to glow and get blown off. Naturally, the illumination level of the room will slowly decrease till it turns completely dark. To a certain extent this analogy does explain the onset and rise of Alzheimer’s. Aging brain actually resembles this phenomenon.

But there is a difference between electric bulbs and the brain cells. And this difference is important. Human cells are organic and living systems and they don’t follow the law of entropy. That is, they draw stimulation and inputs from the external environment and thus can continue to charge themselves as long as they are able to interact with the environment and draw energy. Of course, this ability is also limited, but it certainly can give longer sustainability.

The boundaries of these living cells are permeable and usually draw more than what they dissipate. So in medical terms they have a self-regenerating mechanism as they are dynamic and in continuous interaction with the external environment.

Simply stated with the help of this dynamic interaction, the cells will be able to prolong their life. In most cases, the problem arises due to disuse atrophy, that is the capacity to regenerate will decline and finally end if the living system is not put to use. It is something similar to what happens in the case of a fractured limb that is plastered and immobilised. That is the reason why doctors advise patients to keep moving the open parts of the plastered limb.

There have been cases of aged people who could delay and sometimes defy Alzheimer’s. There are researches that suggest that reading, thinking and keeping the mind active may have positive contributions in keeping Alzheimer’s at bay. A study at Wisconsin Medical School conducted on 2,000 aged people has found that studying is good for health. Another New York doctor has opined that brain activity has an overall salutary effect on health, particularly mental health. Such activities keep the permeability of cells agile and ensure longevity.

Normally, it is assumed that studying is a passive activity, but the fact is that it activates the whole system. Our sense organs become vibrant and are charged. For the aged, studying can have miraculous effects on health, both mental and physical. Studying is also a kind of exercise, and a useful one. The best way to defy Alzheimer’s is to continuously let the brain cells remain active.

It is, of course, important to understand that aging is a genetically determined activity and biology will be an important moderator, but the crucial importance of psychology cannot be denied. Thinking positive is good for the head and heart. So let ‘think more and live more’ be your slogan for life. This food for thought can help in giving strength and life to the brain cells and thus help them remain alive and kicking.

 

THE POWER OF DESIRE

The mind of the human beings is the storehouse of immense power. It not only creates desires, it is also instrumental in fulfilling those. It is in this light that the adage “Where there is will, there is a way” has to be seen. But often people have doubts about the capacity of this wonderful power house to deliver. The reason being that they find many of their desires unfulfilled.

There is a need to understand this in greater depth. In fact, the very people who doubt the power of the mind in helping them get what they want may have had experiences to the contrary. That is, they would have achieved what they desired on certain occasions. This is then the issue that needs to be analysed. Why at times you get what you desire and why at times you don’t needs to be probed.

The answer lies in the subconscious mind. Apparently, this subconscious mind is dormant, but that does not mean it is fully inactive or comatose. It is still working, though the activities related to that work may not be felt or perceived by the conscious mind. What you desire may be achieved by you when you are able to harness the power of the subconscious mind, and people have experienced this. Yogis and saints perform wondrous feats which are commonly supposed to be miracles, the uncanny events.

Psychologists put such phenomena under the broad umbrella of parapsychology. But those explanations notwithstanding, the fact remains that such things do happen that fall beyond the realms of apparent rationality. Apparent because rationality itself is bounded by limitations and at times cannot extend beyond a certain level.

Of course, mathematical science has a very prudent answer to such issues in the theory of chance, the probability of the likely and the unlikely. But chance itself is another fuzzy concept and cannot be explained in black and white. An important question that crops up is that can human mind be trained to arouse the powers of the subconscious every time one desires? This is what is still not understood because the ability to arouse the subconscious depends on many factors and controlling all of them is not possible every time.

But let us examine how desires can be fulfilled with the power of the subconscious. People often attribute this to God or prayers, but why is it that God intervenes and prayers work sometimes and not every time? There lies the answer. It is the power of desire, the intensity, and the strength with which the subconscious is invoked or aroused.

In the Ramcharitmanas, there is a beautiful couplet: “Jehike jehi par satya sanehu, so tehi milaye, na kachhu sandehu.” The meaning is that whosoever desires something with real intensity, he will certainly get it. This is the essence of the Biblical canon: “Love the Lord, your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

In Paulo Coelho’s classic work of fiction, The Alchemist, it is said that if the intensity of the desire is genuinely strong and comes from the heart, the forces of the nature conspire to ensure that it is achieved. And this lies behind the ancient proverb: “The doctor dresses the wounds and the God heals it.” Cases of medical wonders are legion and the reason is patient’s faith.

TRADE AND HUMANITY

Attitude of industry towards human beings had come a long way from the initial view of classical economics that treated labour as a factor of production along with land, machine and materials. With more and more insight available about the human nature this factor of production, the labour, became a resource, rather the all-important one. What was philosophised by Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management theory based on economic — rational premise gave way to Theory Y of McGregor that suggested that man is basically good. But with the recent Factories (Amendment) Bill 2016 raising over time hours for factory workers the wheel seems to turn back.

Productivity has always been an issue with industry and in these competitive times it has become more so. Statistics suggest that of the 100 top revenue generating organisations of the world over 50 per cent are Business Corporations and not nation-states. World’s three richest people are richer than the GDP of more than the 30 poorest nations. We are approaching a state where one percent will own wealth equal to 99 percent of the people. Where do we go from here? And what about the Philosophy of Human Resource Management (HRM) that is touted so much these days. Needless to say that most organisations are paying just lip service.

The expression HRM is popular to the extent of being hackneyed and human resource managers proclaim to be the people centric to the hilt claiming their organisation as one that is of the people, by the people, for the people. But there is a need to examine how true these claims are? The fact is that the attitude towards human beings engaged in industries and business organisations has not changed much except for the jargons that mostly serve cosmetic purpose. Even today there are organisations and managers who still consider that employees belong to a lower order meant only for satisfying their physiological needs. So Taylor’s ghost still looms large on these organisations and his philosophy of man’s economic rationality rules the roost. In these organisations there can be found an oblique insensitivity toward personal dignity of employees who are supposed to be mere tools of production, more mechanical than human. They view the workplace from their own tinted glass that is coloured with only profitability and productivity. Human beings are not machines, and only a good pay and neatly designed work environment may not necessarily make them productive. We’ve gone wrong in our assumptions about human nature, which is unstable and volatile? The assumptions behind the theories of productivity, though, hold good and give results, but only if other things are equal. But other things are not equal as has been discovered time and again. The worker is not an isolated machine and results do not depend only on internal state of health, good or bad conditions of the physical environment and economic interests. The worker is a human being, a member of a team, family and society at large.

Do the employers of these industrial organisations really accept the underlying philosophy of “human resources’’ which encompasses ‘total knowledge, skills, creative abilities, talent and aptitude of the worker as well as the values and attitudes and beliefs of the individuals existing thereof’. Perhaps not.

Though there are few enlightened managements but these are notable exceptions. For the rest people philosophy does not make good business sense.