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2 Management Insights from Motivational Slokas i

3 Publishing-in-support-of, EDUCREATION PUBLISHING RZ 94, Sector - 6, Dwarka, New Delhi Shubham Vihar, Mangla, Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh Website: Copyright, Authors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, magnetic, optical, chemical, manual, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consent of its writer. ISBN: Price: ` The opinions/ contents expressed in this book are solely of the authors and do not represent the opinions/ standings/ thoughts of Educreation or the Editors. The book is released by using the services of self-publishing house. Printed in India ii

4 Management Insights from Motivational Slokas Dr Karanam Nagaraja Rao Dr Bharathi Devarakonda EDUCREATION PUBLISHING (Since 2011) iii

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6 For copies contact Dr K. Nagaraja Rao No. 8, 15 th C Cross, 8 th Main, Bandappa Gardens, Mutyala Nagar, Bangalore E Mail: karanam.rao@gmail.com & drbharathiayur@gmail.com Ph.: Or You can order from Educreation Publishing House, Shubham Vihar, Mangla, Bilaspur, CG Info@educreation.in First Publication, December, v

7 Why This Book? Why should we read Sanskrit slokas for understanding the intricacies of management when there are umpteen number of management books? This is a question many people put forth before us when we shared our thought of writing this book. Yes, this is a genuine concern only when we are not exposed to the pearls of knowledge imbedded in our traditional ocean of wisdom. In ancient days, a person to qualify as a king has to be proficient in sixty four arts of knowledge popularly known as catushshashti kalas. We have a popular story of Pancatantra wherein we find a king finding his sons so ignorant about the nuances of ruling the country. A popular guru by name Vishnu Sarma was entrusted the task of teaching the students and prepare them worthy to be the rulers of the country. Vishnu Sarma had chosen the path of teaching raj niti (the rule code of kings) through stories which are now popularly recognized worldwide as Pancatantra stories. Here the pedagogy was the story. Now a day, in all business schools, we take the route of case studies and simulation games to impart management education and a few elite universities have multiple other approaches. It is ultimately the imagination of the professor and the receptiveness of the student that decide the flow of knowledge and pedagogy in the class room. Thus the imagination and the receptiveness are the key in the learning process. These two key components flow from the learning of liberal arts like psychology, sociology, history, music, literature, political science and the like. A manager of a company cannot work in isolation. He works amidst the society with a team of human beings. The art of dealing with humans decide the style of his managerial functioning. Hardcore management subjects give insights in vi

8 theoretical constructs but they have be decoded and developed with human face for wider acceptability and willing cooperation. Liberal arts enlarge the vision of the manager in this direction. Motivational slokas are gems of literary knowledge and fall in to the category of liberal arts. Perhaps this has made Shakespeare to comment like this: The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music. The importance of liberal arts in a man s life is enormous. They make a man a gentleman and refine his character. One who has no wit may be less effective in inspiring his team. Steve Jobs was right when he said, The reason that Apple is able to create products like the ipad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. All innovations of the world could not have happened without creative insights of the entrepreneurs. A leader of a team needs to develop as much wit and wisdom as the theoretical knowledge. You cannot just retort your critic with arguments. Consider these two small cases for better appreciation. Churchill was the Prime Minister of Britain and when the World War II was at its peak, a man criticized Winstin Churchill a fool. Immediately the police arrested the man and put him behind bars. The entire opposition party was at its toes and blocked the parliament for suppressing the freedom of speech and expression of the common citizens. Churchill came to parliament and he defended the arrest of the person. He stated, The man is arrested not because he called me fool but because he revealed a State secret when the war is going on. The opposition could not know how to react to the wit of the Prime Minister and the matter subsided. See the second case of humorous talk of Samuel Johnson. It is said that somebody approached Samuel Johnson for his critical comments on a manuscript. Samuel Johnson, after reading vii

9 it thoroughly, commented, Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good". Everyone may not have the diplomatic niceties in their talks. But this is worth to be cultivated to tell the unpleasant truths. How can a manager or leader cultivate the diplomatic niceties of speech if he is not sufficiently exposed to liberal arts? Of late, people begin to realize that to tackle the present day technological and social challenges, we need to develop critical thinking process on human construct. Learning things is not for job alone. It is to enjoy while working and working while enjoying. The gen Z millennial that is born with a smart phone in his hand is not expected to write a hardcore theory paper for qualifying an entrance test. A few elite companies have already realized the psychological trends of these gen Z students and started spotting the talents through gamification technologies in virtual office environs. The trend is to widen and not narrow the brain s horizon. Interdisciplinary education has become the hot topic of discussion in many universities. According to a study, there are long list of tech leaders who hold degrees in humanities, for example, a few CEOs like Stewart Butterfield (Flickr, Slack) is a student of Philosophy. Jack Ma (Alibaba) is an English teacher. Susan Wojcicki (Youtube) studied History at Harward. Brian Chesky (Airbnb) is again an English teacher. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Face Book studied Economics. Parker Harris, co-founder of Salesforce studied English at Middlebury. Former COO of Snapchat, Emily White studied Fine Arts at Vanderbilt. Peter Theil co-founder of Paypal studied Philosophy and Law. Linkden founder Reid Haffman is a student of Philosophy at Harward. Hewlet Packard s former CEO Carley Florina studied Political Science at Yale. Thus the list of top managerial brass from fine arts is endless. For the successful managing of an enterprise, skills are important but they are to be applied in human context which needs exposure to literature, art and humanities. In May, 2017 two great professors, Gary Saul Morson & Morton Schapiro have published a book, Cents and Sensibility (Princeton University Press) strongly arguing the need of a dialogue between economists and novelists. viii

10 Economists can understand more of people sensibility from novelists than from social scientists, they argue.they stressed the need of interdisciplinary approach to learning. We have been observing in the last one decade millions of jobs being displaced by robots and artificial intelligence. The skills that are required now are automation resistant skills and emotional skills. A manager needs to know how to correct an employee who is erring and at the same time with pleasing words. Emotions of teams are to be understood and time specific wit is to be applied. All the above trends motivated us to go ahead with this book of Management Insights from Motivational Slokas. Here the manager learns the streams of management through literature and liberal arts. In India, the Sanskrit literature is an abundant ocean of knowledge and the more we explore, the more we get. In this book, there are around 108 beautiful slokas many of which are from Bhartruhari Niti Sataka, Vidura Niti, Kautilya s Arthasastra, Maha Bharatha, Pancatantra and few others. All these were meant basically for the rulers of the kingdoms. These slokas (poems) are also known as Subhashitas (literal meaning is good words of advice). In olden days these Subhashitas were viewed with great respect. Kautilya views that Subhashita is on par with other basic requirements like water and food (ऩ थथवमय त र णण यत नयनन जरभन नभ व बयषऴतभ ). There are many books in English and all other regional languages giving the literary meaning of these Subhashitas / slokas. But, in this book, we attempted to interpret them from leadership and managerial perspectives. And again for the question, why from ancient wisdom, we feel that people who want happiness in life are increasingly looking towards spirituality as an alternative to materialistic culture. For this they need theoretical base of spirituality. Knowingly or unknowingly they try to justify their actions from their own psychological and philosophical perspectives. They need some spiritual hooks or skyhooks to cling upon. The slokas provide the ground on which spiritual thoughts can propel and proliferate. For those who cannot read Devanagari script, an English version of the sloka in I-Trance format is provided. ix

11 This book may be of highly useful for practicing managers, leadership coaches, mentors and the CEOs. Though the title of the book refers managerial insights, it has taken care to include psychological, sociological, and human centric perspectives of the business environment. Dr Karanam Nagaraja Rao & Dr Bharathi D x

12 Acknowledgements This book is a culmination of almost one year effort. Initially, there was not much encouragement from anyone as it is ultimately a compilation of Sanskrit slokas which are anyway available in the net. To test whether there would be readers, we started uploading a few slokas in the Facebook with the heading, Management Insights from Motivational Slokas. Luckily we got good number of likings for the posts. Some sort of encouragement has enthused us. The oft quoted Vivekanda s quote, each work has to pass through these three stages ridicule, opposition, and then acceptance. Those who think ahead of their time are sure to be misunderstood, reminded us to pursue our project. The biggest hurdle was to present error free slokas with grammatical structure and meter. The source of the slokas is from books and also Internet. The reliability of their correctness is always suspected. Our close relative, Astavadhani Bramhasri Madgula Anil Sharma, PhD in Sanskrit consented to give correct versions of all slokas. He is a renowned Sanskrit scholar and he has to his credit many Avadhanas in Sanskrit. He checked the correctness of slokas and their meanings. We sincerely thank Bramhasri Madgula Anil for spending time for our sake and for providing the slokas in correct form. The second hurdle was presenting slokas in English by transliteration. Here we got very good suggestions from Professor, Kum Sirivaram Srilakshmi, PhD in Sanskrit, Dr Praphulla, PhD in Sanskrit, Satya Sai University, Anantapur and Dr Saila, PhD in Sanskrit. We sincerely thank all these academicians. The aim of the book is to draw management insights from ancient wisdom. To develop suitable cover page requires lot of imagination. Smt Deepti, my sister s xi

13 daughter, who is an animation specialist, has provided a prototype and then the main cover page. We acknowledge her efforts and we are greatly indebted to her. We are deeply indebted to Sri Dr D.V. Guru Prasad, IPS, former Director General of Police, Karnataka for writing a foreword to the book. We are also indebted to two towering personalities in Banking and Insurance industries, Sri Y.V. Ramana Murthy, General Manager, state Bank of India and former Executive Director of LIC, Sri R.Venu Gopal for writing in depth forewords. Two elite academicians, Dr Sri T.Siddaiah, PhD in Management, Former Registrar of SV University, Tirupati and Dr Dr. M V S Peri Sastry, B.E, Ph.D (BITS-Pilani), Professor, Xavier Institute of Management, Bangalore advised us and also took interest in correcting a few passages and gave suggestions. We acknowledge their contributions with thanks and also thank them for their forewords for the book. Our special thanks to Dr Gowravaram Mohan Rao, PhD, Professor in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore for reading the entire book and for writing a critical evaluation by way of foreword. Our well-wisher and guide, Dr G.Sreeramulu, PhD, Professor & Chairman, Department of Political Science & Coordinator, Dept of History, Director, Sri Maharshi Valmiki Tribal Studies and Research center, Gulbarga University, Karnataka has written foreword and we sincerely thank him in this regard. Our sincere thanks to Dr Anubha Singh, PhD, Pro Vice Chancellor, Alliance University, Bangalore, Dr Sunil Shukla, PhD, Director, Entrepreneurship Development Institute, Ahmedabad, Dr D. Nagendra, Phd (Sanskrit), Dr Aswathi Nair, PhD in Management, Dr Prof Meena Rani, Phd in Management and Dr NMK Bhatta, PhD in Management, Professor, IIM, Indore who directly and indirectly motivated us in writing this book. Our special thanks to Sri Mallikarjuna Rao and his sister Miss Prameela for neatly arranging the book in print ready form. Dr Karanam Nagaraja Rao & Dr Bharathi xii

14 Dedicated to My beloved brother Sri Dr K. Aravinda Rao, IPS, Phd (Sanskrit) Retd Director General of Police, (Undivided Andhra Pradesh) & a Scholar par excellence in Sanskrit and English and an author of innumerable books both in English and Sanskrit xiii

15 Dr D.V. Guru Prasad, IPS, Former Director General of Police, Karnataka There are umpteen Management books and hundreds are added every year. But what is unique about this book is that it is truly Indian. Though certain Management principles are universal, we Indians have our own ethos and our way thinking and doing things. Our interpersonal relations are also based on various practices that we have imbibed from generations. Therefore for the Indian Psyche, Management principles enunciated by our own predecessors would be more relevant and more appealing. Our ancient scriptures abound in wise sayings. Some ancient Sanskrit shlokas have captured the essence of Management and such gems have been culled out by Prof Nagaraja Rao and Dr Bharathi in this book, Management Insights from Motivational Shlokas. Herein lies the appeal of this book. The book takes up various Management related problems & issues and identifies a relevant ancient verse or shloka to bring home what our philosophers thought about the Management issue. The authors first quote a Sanskrit shloka, give meaning of each Sanskrit word in English and later on makes comments on the entire shloka. Thereafter they relate the Management principle enunciated in the shloka. xiv

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