Leading Consciously

Debashis Chatterjee, Peter Senge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136014970
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Leading Consciously addresses the issues of motivation, decision-making, communication, time management, effective learning, work psychology, organizational development, and self-mastery. The author weaves together the insights of some of the most remarkable leaders of the world whose lives embody great truths about leadership and self-transformation, masters such as M. K. Gandhi, Edmund Hillary, Mother Teresa, and Albert Einstein. Debashis Chatterjee is an international management thinker, Fulbright scholar, corporate philosopher, mystic, and writer. He is a member of the faculty in Behavioral Sciences at the Indian Institute of Management in Lucknow, India. An immensely popular speaker on the themes of spirituality and modern management, Chatterjee organizes frequent leadership retreats for diverse audiences of executives, doctors, scientists, political leaders, and social service workers in India and around the world.

His own Self must be conquered by the king for all time; then only are his enemies to be conquered.

…RISHI VYASA, The Mahabharata, 1000 B.C.

1

Leadership and Personal Mastery

The Art of Seeing

Personal mastery is a function of the quality of our seeing. Great masters in ancient civilizations were known as seers. Those great seers saw nothing magical. The uniqueness of their vision was that they possessed not only sight but also insight. The masters saw the world around them perceptively, not passively. Most of us would look at a falling apple and soon forget about it. It takes a Newton’s insight to see through the event and discover the force of gravity. We all see suffering all around us. Yet it takes the insight of a Buddha to go to the root cause of human suffering and identify it as desire.

We are visual ragpickers. In the ordinary state of consciousness, we passively pick up fragmented visual impressions of objects or events. This is a low-energy activity like mechanical picking up of bits and pieces from our environment. High-energy seeing involves not accumulating objects or events but something more. It involves the discipline of seeing through events to the invisible processes that shape those events.

Three Zen masters are walking across afield. The youngest among them notices a flag tied to a pole. He draws the attention of his two companions and says, “Look, how the flag moves.” The middle-aged master pats the younger one on the back and says, “My boy, can’t you see it is not the flag that moves, it is the wind that moves.” The old master who had been listening to the other two in silence softly says, “If you have insight, you will see that it is neither the flag nor the wind that moves, it is the mind that moves.”

True seeing is not merely glancing the visible surface of objective reality. True seeing involves perceptive vision of the invisible potential of objective reality.

An ordinary salesperson visits an island where nobody wears shoes and says, “You can’t sell shoes here. Nobody wears shoes on this island.” This is low-energy seeing. Compare this with the high-energy seeing of a market leader who goes to the same island and exclaims: “Look at that! Nobody wears shoes here. What a potential market to get these people to start wearing shoes.”

Seers are therefore not only mystics and sages. They abound in all walks of life—business, politics, science, and sports as well as in religious institutions. Learning to see is the foundation of all disciplines. In India, which is the cradle of the most enduring civilization of the world, the word for seeing is darshan. The Sanskrit word darshan has more than one meaning. It also means “world view” or “philosophy of life.” Darshan captures the essence of seeing in its multiple meanings. It lends to the act of passive seeing a quality it lacks—a perspective. Sight as well as insight constitute a perspective. From a clear perspective we get clarity of vision. It is vision that provides guidelines for our actions as leaders.

To see is also to know and to understand with clarity. In the middle of a counseling meeting with a nonperforming employee, a team leader stops for a while and says to the employee, “Oh, now I see your point.” In this “seeing” the leader begins truly to understand the follower. This kind of seeing has the same effect as a gentle human touch. High-energy seeing enables you to touch events or persons with the quality of awareness. In this act a certain energy or vitality works between the seer and the seen. There is a subtle communication, a communion between the seer and the seen. When a leader undergoes this communion with her followers, empathy is established. Empathy is the glue, the very substance that enables the leader and the follower to stay together on the same path.

Seeing is not only receiving images on the retina. It is an act of interpretation. Seeing is creative reconstruction of our universe. Leaders are not content with facts. They have immense energy to reorganize facts toward new ideals and newer visions of truth. In day to day life we do not understand the difference between facts and truth. Yet depending on the quality of our seeing, facts and truth emerge as different entities. Facts are frozen forms of truth in a certain space and time. Facts are not the whole truth, although they may contain certain elements of truth. You may take a photograph of the ocean and give us facts about the ocean. But can such a fact encompass the whole truth of the ocean?

Facts may resemble truth in a certain context, but when the context changes, facts also change to accommodate the truth. For example, most people at a certain time in our civilization believed that the earth was as flat as a pancake. Ancient mariners were afraid to sail too far because they feared their ships would topple over to an unknown underworld. This was so because the facts that they saw around them gave them an impression of the flatness of the earth. As soon as a leader was brave enough to take his ship over what was thought to be the edge of the earth, he saw new facts. These facts contradicted the earlier facts, and the earth came to be regarded as a solid round ball. Soon enough, new facts in the shape of photographs of the earth taken from space told us that the earth was not round but that its geometric shape was an oblate spheroid. This meant the earth is less like a ball and more like an orange—slightly flattened at the poles and slightly swollen at the equator. But truth, which has new ways of slipping through our prison of facts, now gives us new facts about our earth. Today’s new leader, the quantum physicist, will tell you, “You know, this earth is not solid at all. It is a huge energy soup rippling like a bubble in empty space.”

We may therefore say that the quality of our seeing shapes our perspective of truth. When we see with uncreative, low-energy vision we see disconnected facts and often miss the truth. This is because our attention devoid of energy becomes frozen in the outer shell of facts, and truth passes us by. We do exert ourselves in our quest for the inner truth about our many assumptions about life. Most of us remain content with what appears obvious. Reality based on static models or established procedures gives us the security of being a part of the herd. But that reality is not what a conscious leader rests with. It is an insult to her intelligence if a leader is unable to process reality creatively to meet new challenges. As I was glancing through the 1991 annual report of the Coca-Cola Company, a couple of very insightful statements made by Roberto C. Goizueta, the chief executive officer, and Donald R. Keough, then president of the company came to my notice:

As an organization, we are not wasting our energy forecasting what the future of the soft drink industry will be like in the many countries around the world in which we operate. And neither are we spending our time forecasting what the future holds for this Company. We will use our resources to construct today the foundation of our future.… The future we are creating for ourselves … will be built.

We don’t view the future as preordained, but as an infinite series of openings, of possibilities. What is required to succeed in the middle of this uncertainty is what the Greeks called “practical intelligence.” Above all else, this “practical intelligence” forces adaptability and teaches constant preparedness. It acknowledges that nothing succeeds quite as planned, and that the model is not the reality.

The Greek notion of practical intelligence comes from a certain depth of insight conveyed by the Indian word darshan. Practical intelligence is a function of integral vision—the ability to integrate sight with insight. Darshan penetrates the veil of static models of life and looks at the dynamism of life itself. Darshan is the awareness of the depth and magnificence of the moment. When we pay total attention to the reality of the moment, we become one with the moment. The wall between us and reality comes down. We become the reality itself. A great degree of energy is released as a result of our participation with reality. Personal mastery is the embodiment of the energy of this participation. The great Greek philosopher Archimedes expressed this energy as eureka, which signified the great triumph of a new discovery.

The Play of Energy

We understand, therefore, that personal mastery is an energy phenomenon. Every action of ours, every gesture, every thought, every intention, every emotion, and even the faintest flicker of our consciousness is a constant play of energy. Whereas the Statue of Liberty and the Taj Mahal are objective manifestations of creative energy, the general theory of relativity and Paradise Lost are subjective impressions of the same energy.

When we look at the source of this energy from the point of view of raw materialism, we find that the same molecule of sugar that released the energy for Einstein’s conceptualization of the theory of relativity is responsible for Buddha’s realization of nirvana as well as Hitler’s aggression on the world. Yet we know that merely studying the structure of a sugar molecule will not yield to us the secret of an Einstein, a Buddha, or a Hitler. It is not mere energy but energy combined with awareness that gave birth to those figures of history. Personal mastery comes not from merely accumulating energy but through processing this energy in the light of our awareness. Personal mastery is the science and art of channeling energy from that which we consider purposeless to that we hold as purposeful.

Mastery of our energy therefore lies in bringing the fullness of our being to our task. In simple words, it is the bringing together of the sum total of who we are to what we do. The classical Indian word for energy work is tapas. The Japanese have a similar word, shugyo. Both tapas and shugyo imply the discipline of self-mastery. Ancient civilizations understood the importance of cultivation of energy through rigorous discipline. This consisted of being aware of the nature of our energy body. It was the first step toward what the ancients called self-knowledge.

The source of our knowledge about our energy is our being or our self. If we pay attention to the state of our being from time to time, we experience that energy flows through us in a certain pattern. During sunrise the quality of our energy is different from that during sunset. In the morning our energy pushes us to action; in the evening the same energy mellows toward contemplation. We can sense the state of our energy merely by remembering ourselves as a regular discipline. If we practice the discipline of remembering ourselves, we will become amused witnesses to the folly of many of our actions.

A busy executive driving toward his office in the morning is caught in a traffic jam. His precious energy, ready to engage itself in the affairs of the work, is boiling over. He knows he cannot move ahead unless the jam eases. Yet the executive honks away like a man possessed. If he had remembered himself during his insane moments of honking, he would have known that he was wasting energy that could be used in productive thinking.

Many of us fritter away our energies in negative emotions. We become irritable. We are gripped by unpleasant emotions that cause undue tension in our muscles. All of these eat away our vitality. I have often observed people contort their faces and frown during brainstorming sessions. My knowledge about human anatomy tells me that our brains do not have muscles. Yet how much of our energy do we unnecessarily lock into our facial muscles as we “storm our brains”?

Great masters were adept in conserving energy over time only to release it at those precise moments that changed the course of history. Frederich Nietzsche expressed this phenomenon in brilliant language:

Great men, like great epochs, are explosive material in whom tremendous energy has been accumulated; their prerequisite has always been, historically and physiologically, that a protracted assembling, accumulating, economizing, and preserving has preceded them—that there has been no explosion for a long time.

From Capability to Copability

Personal mastery is a function of both capability and “copability.” When one”s self acts on the environment we demonstrate our capability. However, when our environment begins to act on one’s self, what is tested is our copability (ability to cope).

A bright engineer who was among the several thousand employees who lost her job during downsizing by the telecommunication giant AT&T found out that what mattered during her sudden unemployment was not her capability but her copability. She was still a capable engineer, bright and efficient. But her engineering skills alone were incapable of steering her through the crisis with which the loss of job brought her face to face. In short, what mattered now was how she could cope with the emotional trauma of living with her present condition.

Our capabilities are measured in terms of our skills in negotiating the outward environment. Capability is the visible, tangible aspect of our competence. It is the outbound energy that shows up as our work, track records of achievements, our credentials, and all that we did to carve out a niche in the environment. On the other hand, copability is the energy that the self gathers together to face an unpredictable environment. It is a discernible niche of experience and expertise in one’s inner environment. The mechanism of copability enables the body to shoot out a surge of adrenaline when we face a hostile enemy.

The way we deal with pain and losses also demonstrates our copability. In encountering pain and losses in the context of our life and work-life, we often falter. A man who is unable to get along with his spouse becomes an alcoholic. A fast-track executive misses a promotion and nurtures her sense of loss in the form of an ulcer. When the environment behaves in a manner that seems unpredictable to us, we find it difficult to cope. We fail to realize, however, that the environment “out there” is merely our interpretation of it. If we did not interpret loss of a promotion as the end of the world for us, we would not be so miserable.

To a great extent our copability depends on the way we interpret the reality of our environment. As the top man at Chrysler, Lee Iacocca, then 65 years of age, interpreted the reality of the leader’s position in the following words: “The CEO’s job is yours to lose.” These words were addressed to Gerald Greenwald, who at 54 was then vice-chairman at Chrysler. For Greenwald, Iacocca’s words could mean two things: The CEO’s job is full of insecurity, and the CEO’s job is a constant challenge to perform. Greenwald interpreted Iacocca’s words as: “Look, you gotta perform.” A financial manager by profession, Greenwald not only enabled Chrysler to stave off bankruptcy in 1979 but also went on to become chief executive officer of United Employees Acquisition Corporation.

Pains and losses are apparent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Prelude
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Leadership and Personal Mastery
• Chapter 2. Leadership and Consciousness
• Chapter 3. Leadership and Work
• Chapter 4. Leadership and Organization
• Chapter 5. Leadership and Communication
• Chapter 6. Leadership and Human Values
• Chapter 7. Leadership and Love
• Chapter 8. Nature’s Manuscript: The Leadership Manual
• Chapter 9. Epilogue: The Sacred Path of Leadership
• References