P. Murthy

Of late, there has been a deep interest in the subject of cultures and group behaviours with large numbers of nations engaging in international trade and other kinds of interactions. While a large body of knowledge in this area is available about other nations, it is only recently that interest in the study of Indian ethos has received attention. This paper is one such attempt to identify the distinctive features of leadership in the Indian ethos and contrast it with the delineation of leadership in the Western ethos. It is suggested that while there are several similarities, the spiritual orientation and non-desire motivated action distinguish leader ship in the Indian ethos from that in the Western ethos.

A business corporation capable of evolving, termed a learning corporation, has a conscious quality. It is the systemic version of a rigid structure-preserving corporation that would be expected eventually to run into problems and end up as a failure. The conscious corporation analogy can be used to simulate the sequence of processes that occur during Upasana, a Vedic technique of meditation. In this essay, it will be argued that the Vedic view of consciousness is parallel to the postulate that successful business corporations have a conscious quality, and if the Upasana process sequence is considered as a competence model, in the Chomsky-ian sense for corporate consciousness, the executive functionary in a successful corporation is effectively a practitioner of Upasana

Today, ethics has become an important dimension for businesses. Broadly, there are two lines of thought on this issue. The first one suggests that ethical issues have to be resolved through development of appropriate ethical standards at personal or organizational level. The second one emphasizes the process of developing ethical standards rather than the standards themselves. This paper argues that the latter line of thought, when taken forward, implies that ethical dimension is essentially challenging businesses to transform themselves and their people at a very fundamental level in order to evolve continuously to higher levels of perfection. The deeper significance is that in future, businesses will play a dominant role in bringing forth the human spirit, an aspect that is hitherto perceived to be in the purview of other human activity systems like the Church or family. This restructuring at the societal level is probably the most fundamental message of this age of growing interdependence.