INTRODUCTION

Being Inspired to Lead

Being is One:
The wise say it
In many ways.
RIG VEDA

This is business, not personal.”

How many of us have heard this at work? It is as if we are expected to set aside our real being and put on our business persona when we enter through the corporate door. For that matter, how many of us ever talk of being in the workplace? Instead, almost all models of business leadership are typically about doing and having—that is, what should business leaders do in terms of actions and have in terms of capabilities to succeed? Yet these conventional models of leadership are failing us now as we careen from one global crisis to another.

This book is filled with more than forty stories meant to inspire business leaders to reimagine their role as human beings (rather than human doings or havings) in solving the global crises that business helped create. It includes stories from the wisdom of ancient India, personal experiences, and more than a score of examples of transformative business leaders. These timeless ideas are brought together through an overarching allegory of two birds in a tree that first appeared more than three thousand years ago in one of the world’s oldest sacred texts.

A New Narrative

To be honest, this is not the kind of book that I thought I would write. While this book is descriptive and personal, my professional career has been largely prescriptive and impersonal. You see, I’ve spent the last thirty years immersed in business data and analysis—first as a student completing long years of doctoral studies in business, then as an assistant professor of business at research universities, next as an entrepreneur implementing business solutions based on customer and product data, and finally as a sustainability consultant and researcher helping senior business executives of Fortune 500 firms. I’m an analyst through and through, you may say.

But this is not a book for analysts. This is also not a book of business practices for solving the world’s problems. The solutions are not so neat, simple, and universal that they can be listed as practices. Instead, this is a book that tries to inspire a new kind of leadership. I chose this approach for a simple reason: we are storytelling and story-seeking creatures who are moved by descriptions (not prescriptions) about the kind of person we want to be. This book aims to explore through inspiration rather than prescribe through practices.

We are at a turning point in our history, as our science and instincts tell us. What we do in the next twenty years in business will determine our future way of life, our children’s heritage, and the fate of many species on Earth. It is hard to imagine that for our entire history until the 1800s, a person could expect to live for less than thirty years on average (while now that number is seventy). Indeed, for much of human history, our lives were “poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” in the philosopher Hobbes’s memorable phrase.

Capitalism and business (by which I mean modern industrial and services corporations) enabled the large-scale production of goods and services that lifted entire countries out of this misery in just two centuries. As a result, global per capita income increased tenfold between 1800 and today, with a hundredfold increase in America alone. All this progress was achieved despite the world’s population increasing sevenfold, rising from 1 billion to 7 billion, in the same period. It is an economic achievement without parallel in the history of the world.

Yet this growth in human prosperity has come at a great cost to the larger context that is foundational to business, such as nature, humanity, and the credibility of the economic institutions of capitalism. Two-thirds of our water and land ecosystems (forests, wetlands, coral reefs, oceans, etc.) are now degraded significantly. We are at risk of a global warming of 4°C–6°C above preindustrial levels, largely because of industrial activity.¹ We are losing species at a hundred to a thousand times the rate of their natural loss. At this rate, we will kill off 30 percent of the world’s species by 2050 and 50 percent by 2100.² We are triggering the sixth great extinction of species on Earth, called the Anthropocene since it is due to human industry.

Over twenty thousand children die every day from poverty, hunger, preventable diseases, and related causes.³ The vast majority of the 100 million people who are expected to die by 2030 from pollution, hunger, disease, and natural disasters if the world does not act fast on climate change will be the world’s poor.⁴

In America, only about 30 percent of employees feel engaged in their work.⁵ This alienation has increased as the gains of business have largely accrued to those at the top. While the ratio of CEO pay to average employee pay in America was about 30:1 in 1980, it is now around 243:1.⁶ The spate of corporate scandals in recent years has led to a crisis in the public’s trust in the integrity of business leadership. In 2012, only 18 percent of the global public trusted business leaders to tell the truth.⁷

Yet these statistics have done little to fundamentally change business. Even worse, they seem to have numbed the public. Here’s another statistic as proof: in a recent survey of twenty-two thousand people in twenty-two countries, the percentage of people who thought ecological problems were “very serious” had dipped to its lowest in twenty years.⁸ We desperately need a different approach for making the case for change.

While people tune out as numbers foretell a dire future, narratives cling to the mind. We instinctively know what psychology has concluded: real change happens not through the practices of the reason-driven mind, which rationalizes what we have already decided, but through the emotion-driven mind, which is moved by the images that stories and other narratives evoke deeply.⁹

If the great English statesman Winston Churchill had said that he had nothing to offer but “more data analysis,” instead of “blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” as he roused his people to war, his message would have been much less compelling. This is why I will try to describe a new model of business leadership through stories.

The Fundamental Question

After three decades of observing, teaching, and participating in business and business leadership, I have come to the conclusion that something tremendously important has been missing all along. It is the question of why business and business leadership exist at all.

In truth, the buck stops with business leaders, such as corporate leaders and corporate investors. They are the ones who have to balance the interests of governments, the public, customers, other investors, and other stakeholders in business. If business is chiefly responsible for our current mess, then it makes sense that business should be chiefly responsible for fixing it.

When business leaders see business as disconnected from the world and pursue a purpose that is limited to themselves and their company, they are following a closed model of capitalism. They differentiate their company and themselves from others by asking, How can I do better than others within my closed system? How can I get a bigger share of a limited pie than others?

It is no wonder that the popular approaches are failing us because they do not focus on restoring the context so that business can operate well. We need a new purpose that puts the restoration of nature, our humanity, and institutional credibility at its core.

Business has tried to fix the symptoms without going to the root of the problem. It has done the minimum and given us corporate social responsibility initiatives that are peripheral to a company. Instead, what we need is a more inclusive approach that asks leaders to make the setting in which they and their companies operate central to their decision making.

In such an inclusive approach, while leaders recognize the importance of profits and growth, they don’t see them as the primary goals. Instead, they see them as the outcomes of larger goals that preserve and renew the foundations of business.

Amid the pressures of everyday activities and the business demands of the short term, establishing the priority and resources to take care of the contextual foundations is hard unless there is a strong motivation to do so. For all these reasons, business leaders need to first get inspired before they are willing to act. But what’s the key to inspiration’s door?

Being: The Mother of All Concepts

My own experience has convinced me of the need for fundamental changes in the underlying beliefs that drive the mind-sets of business leaders. In turn, these beliefs are heavily influenced by a business leader’s identity or sense of business self.

When our inner sense of our business self and our beliefs about business and its context change, then our behaviors, practices, and outcomes will follow. At first, this insight seems remarkably easy to implement—all we need to do to improve business is to improve the inner selves of its leaders. Of course, changing one’s inner self is the ultimate quest and concern of the world’s ancient religions and philosophers. Millennia have been devoted to this quest, yet the process of real inner change is rarely easy or clear.

When talking of identity or sense of self, we begin with the surface identities we assume in our personal and business lives. As we dig down, we realize that our sense of self is really much deeper than our surface identities, such as the organizational title given to us by our company. It is also much deeper than our attributes (such as our business skills, age, or gender) or even our definitions (such as our name).

As we continue this stripping away of identities, attributes, and definitions, we come to the question of who we really are at our core, behind the shifting qualities and limitations of our life. We arrive at the question, What is the essence of a human being? In doing so, we are revisiting an inquiry that is at least three thousand years old and gave rise to the world’s first philosophical idea: the concept of a fundamental reality called Being that is beyond and prior to all attributes and limiting definitions.¹⁰

Put simply, Being is the very essence of existence (to be) that is available to us at our core. According to this view, all things in the world emerge from this reality, which is their fundamental essence. The philosopher-sages of the civilizations of Greece, India, China, and the Middle East twenty-five hundred to three thousand years ago were especially preoccupied with Being. It has been described in many ways (the One behind the many, Ultimate Reality, Truth, the Eternal, Godhead, and even God) and through many tongues (Brahman, Sat, Nirvāṇa, Tao, Sein, Ousia, Ontos, and others). It may be the mother of all concepts since it is about the very nature of existence itself.

Being and related concepts have transcended religious, spiritual, cultural, and philosophical boundaries over the past three thousand years and have become embedded in our ways of living and speaking today.¹¹ For example, there are eight forms related to the verb to be in English, more than those for any other verb. In truth, Being is relevant to anyone interested in what it means to be a human being.

The Upanishads

If the search for Being was the first philosophical quest, then ancient India was the place where this quest reached the peak of its early development. Insights on Being, our real identity or sense of self, and many other topics were explored in a series of texts, of which a group of philosophical books called the Upanishads is the most important. While hundreds of Upanishads have been written over time,¹² twelve to thirteen are considered the most important.

The Upanishads are also called Vedānta, or the end of the Veda. This is because they are the essence of the wisdom contained in the Vedas, the sacred works of ancient India that were foundational to Vedic religion and its later variation, Hinduism. However, because the Upanishads deal with Being, they are meant to transcend Hinduism itself and be relevant to all religions and cultures.

Many of the principal Upanishads were composed during 800–600 BCE, before the time of the Buddha. Although the authors of the Upanishads are unknown, they describe sages whose purpose was to educate disciples through instruction and their life’s example. The Upanishads convey their wisdom through stories, assertions, imagery, exhortations, descriptions of procedures, and other forms of instruction. They were composed in Sanskrit, the language of the learned classes of ancient India and one of the oldest Indo-European languages.

While the imagery and language used in the Upanishads are often culturally grounded (and sometimes anachronistically male oriented), the underlying meaning is universal. For example, the Upanishads used the image of two birds in a tree to describe the inner struggle between selfish and selfless interests that we all face. I will use this metaphor and the journey of bringing these birds together as the book’s overarching vision of how business leadership can restore the larger context of business while pursuing corporate-specific interests.

The stories in the Upanishads may sometimes appear simplistic and even repetitive, much like Aesop’s Fables or other folk tales. But this very simplicity and repetition of truths are what lead to a deeper illumination. The core truth the stories convey is that Being is the foundational reality of this world and is accessible to everyone. Moreover, this realization is the best of all human knowledge.

While different ancient religions and cultures have resonated with the central concepts of the Upanishads,¹³ for me, there is a personal reason. As a person of Indian origin, I have developed a particular fascination with and understanding of the Upanishads in the last twenty-five years. In the process, they have become “the consolation of my life, and will be the consolation of my death,” as the German philosopher Schopenhauer wrote. My own experiences in applying the Upanishads have given me a direct perspective on leadership approaches. I will draw on them throughout this book as I outline the journey to Being-centered leadership.

Being-Centered Leadership

Being-centered leadership is the effort to lead from a place of seeking to realize Being. Because this realization is never complete, Being-centered business leadership is an ongoing effort to apply one’s sense of Being to business life—it is a vision of leadership at its highest level.

A key part of Being-centered leadership is to realize that we are damaging ourselves when we damage the larger context that is foundational to business. Moreover, a sense of shared purpose in restoring these foundations is not at odds with individual purpose. It is central to its realization.

Given that Being has preoccupied millennia of religious thinkers, philosophers, and cultures, it is not too much to ask that it be included in business thinking and action too. It has been a central quest of our species, especially when we faced existential crises, and it is what helped us reconnect to our world.

As such, Being is the inspiration for making the contextual foundations of nature, humanity, and institutional credibility central to business leadership. With the help of the Upanishads, my own experience, and examples of many CEOs of our time, I hope to illustrate the importance of an awareness of Being for business leaders.

Who Should Read This Book?

While this book is about business leaders in corporations and investment firms, it is really for all people who are interested in playing a leadership role (regardless of their position in an organization) in enabling the better world that is the promise of real capitalism.

The purpose of this book is to inspire inner change in aspiring business leaders. This book is therefore about how to be an entrepreneur of the inner world in order to fundamentally transform the way business operates.¹⁴ Since everyone has an interior, every person associated with business has the potential to be a business leader. More important than job title is the sense of curiosity, caring, aspiration, and search for meaning in the reader.

If this book is meant for every aspiring leader, then why focus on stories of CEOs? The first reason is pragmatic: more than anyone else, the CEO is the person most responsible for managing the relationship between the company, its stakeholders, and the world at large. As a result, CEOs have the most opportunity for integrative leadership and the most influence on a company’s journey toward real capitalism. The second reason is vicarious: we are all curious about what it is like to be a CEO and to face the challenges that CEOs face. CEOs are the showbiz celebrities of the modern world where the main show in town is business.

The third reason is motivational: we repeatedly hear about CEOs behaving badly and losing the trust of society, but we hunger for stories of CEOs who can inspire us with their values, beliefs, and actions. And the final reason is exemplary: despite the difference in influence, CEOs have experiences that are relevant examples for our own settings since they deal with changes to an interior world where we are essentially similar. We are all human and subject to similar internal struggles.

How to Read This Book

Though we have much in common with one another, no two journeys are the same in the exploration of Being. Just as even a well-embellished road map does not reveal the specific distances, the pitfalls and shortcuts, and the stops and starts along the way, this book too may not give you all the details you may want. It is important to keep in mind that the goal is inspiration, not detailed practices.

I have provided a four-stage road map—the REAL road map—as a way to organize what can be something of a messy topic. But it is best to think of the book as a broad narrative that embellishes the road map, sometimes taking detours to see interesting wonders, often describing ancient and contemporary stories along the way, occasionally encountering strange sights that need another visit to understand, and frequently pointing out personal experiences that deepened my own journey.

A great deal of this cultural landscape may be new, as if the road map were now suddenly written in a strange language and marked with strange names, symbols, and other references that your cultural upbringing cannot interpret readily. You’ll need to remind yourself that you don’t have to understand every sign and conversation or pronounce every name well, that you are only passing through to get a feel for the place and region.

During this exploration, you may become impatient and want to be told what to do: Which specific road should I take and where should I turn and where should I stop for nourishment? I’m afraid I’ll not have many of these answers because this is only a road map. You will have to create the guidebook yourself because this is your own unique journey, after all. Two helpful pointers are the “Tweets and Seeds” sections at the end of every chapter—the former lists the key conclusions in tweetable form (less than 140 characters each), while the latter provides food for deeper thinking. Together, they provide an easy way to grasp the many ideas in this book.

Despite this help, if the concept of Being remains relatively unfamiliar even at the end of this journey, you are in good company. Being has continued to remain elusive even after the best minds, storytellers, and sages in history have tried to explain it. This is because Being is (by definition) beyond the reach of our ordinary senses. Yet it is something we also grasp intuitively since it is the essence of our own beingness. So near, yet so far—this is the irreducible mystery of Being.

Why then should you even attempt this exploration, if all you have is a high-level road map with some interesting scribbles? For the same reason that hundreds of millions before you have: to understand themselves better, to know who they are and where they came from as they make this inner journey.

In exploring this oldest of questions there is the opportunity to change business, and through it, the world itself. In the poet T. S. Eliot’s memorable phrase, there is the hope that “we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all the exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

This is the promise of Being-centered leadership.