RAMAYANA ON MANAGEMENT

A world conference had been organised on Ramayana at the South Pacific island state Fiji this month. Its basic theme was scientific value and relevance of the book. A noble effort certainly because Ramayana does offer many lessons for living and society. We can thus say that Ramayana is a good reference material for applied social sciences. In fact, it can offer many useful lessons for management practitioners and researchers too.

The discipline of management is of rather recent origin when we compare it with other social sciences, but the practice of management is as ancient as civilisation. The ancient civilisations like the Indian, Egyptian, and Chinese all bear testimony to the fact that the practices that were adopted during those days for managing the affairs of society were quite akin the modern day elements of management function.

The literature of the yore contain copious concepts of modern management theory. Even the scriptures that are said to be eternal contain many of the ideas that management literature claims to be contemporary. Modern management literature talks about effective management practices through many theories and principles, which at time seem to be at cross purposes to one another, often confusing scholars and practitioners of management. Ramayana, on the other hand, succinctly offers lessons on management which are clear and easy to understand and the beauty lies in their universality.

It is commonly believed that managers need to act differently in different ethos, underscoring the need for culture-specific management paradigms. However, there is a need to find out whether there are management practices that can work across cultures, beyond countries and even ages. In other words, is there a management practice that would transcend time and space and be effective at all places and all times — a truly cross cultural and time tested management paradigm?

The answer to this is in the affirmative and the Ramayana offers such a paradigm. It was more than five centuries ago that Sir Thomas More had raised the question why enterprises failed to operate efficiently and concluded that it was due to poor management. Ever since the search for an answer to poor management is on. Theories galore have been propounded but rather than clearing the air, they have added to the confusion. Yet, there is wide agreement on one concept that effective leadership is the antidote to poor management. And what is that effective leadership? There may be as many answers as definitions.

However, Ramayana offers several cues on effective leadership through the descriptions of the actions of Rama. The various roles he played and the way he did justice to those roles. The way Rama handled role conflicts may be worth emulating by many CEOs.

We seem to have come a long way since the first management school gave its first degree some 116 years ago at the Amos Tuck University of USA. Those were the times when the focus was on productivity and efficiency through the use of human ingenuity popularly referred to as IQ or Intelligence Quotient. As we now realise that it is not the IQ that is crucial and Morality Quotient or MQ is the critical factor. Ramayana seems to provide fair enough cues for management practitioners to understand MQ. The eternal leadership values that have always found favour for leader success are humility, integrity, commitment, righteousness and the ability to get along with people. Ramayana has several lessons for leader-managers on these attributes.