A quest for inner vision

A clutch of consultants are now dishing out desi
management recipes

Location: Dharamshala with the snow- capped Himalayas in the background. Venue. Glenmoor Cottage, a beautiful British-style summer residence, stone and white, topped by a red roof. Event. A transformational workshop facilitated by Peter Block, author of Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-interest and other hot management books and Dinesh Chandra, a Florida-based management consultant. Seventeen top business leaders are seated on a mattress with a flickering candle' in the corner. Anu Agha, CEO of Thermax, speaks about how everything has changed since her husband died of a heart attack en route to the airport to receive her. The organizers figured she would not come to the conference as the sorrow was too recent. She figured attending the work- shop would give her needed time to come to terms with her loss.

M.K. Jalan, an entrepreneur from Calcutta in the steel business raises the Issues of transparency and honesty. 'If I am transparent, I lose," says he candidly. "How can you manage a business with love and hold back?' asks K.V. Mathew, chief executive, L& T McNeil Ltd. Geshe Sonam Rinchen, a Buddhist monk, arrives with his Oxford-educated translator. Fie talks serenely of the impact of our actions on ourselves, our spiritual growth and our company, our country and our planet. His message Is work with sincerity, with love for all; then work itself becomes a spiritual practice.

Susana Barciela, editorial board, Miami Herald, one of the participants, is a Harvard Business School graduate who quit working for Fortune 500 companies to write on issues ranging from bozo bosses to end of lifetime Employment. She is writing an article entitled Dharmshala Dreaming; A Travelers Search for the Cleaning of Work. 'I wanted to know how we could create more humane workplaces. For no good reason, I thought I might find better answers in the Himalayas. What I found was 17 other business people as perplexed as me."

Words like 'nishkama karma' (work without desire for the fruits of action) are intermixed freely with western concepts of management. Guiding these workshops are three types of consultants. The first variety are home- grown pioneers like A.K.Chakravorthy, Mrithunjeya Athreya, or Anil Sachdeva of Eicher Consultants. Also belonging to this category are the Ramakrishna Mission's Foundation of Integral Management and the Chinmaya Institute of Learning. The second are Western management consultants like Peter Block, Peter Senge, Verna Allee, who openly admit allegiance to Indian philosophical ideas. The third are the flying-in gurus, non-resident Indians like Prasad Kaipa or Dinesh Chandra, who spend nine months abroad and three months in India.

If 'Cerebral' is the one word that describes Kaipa, 'Soul healer' describes Dinesh Chandra, President, Global Quality Systems, Florida. His forte is Personal Transformation workshops where high-flying CEOS, Indian and Western, bare their souls. The underlying assumptions of both these management consultants are, however, the same: align the manas, vaacha and karma; personal alignment leads to unfolding of creativity within and transformational leadership which then leads to company transformation, willy nilly.

A mechanical engineer with an MBA In finance, Chandra worked for 25 years conducting total quality management workshops. This preoccupation with quality began in 1969 when Chandra was given the task of finding out what the management needed to Improve quality of work in the face of cutthroat competition, at Coulter Corporation. Innovative Ideas had to be brought in; so Chandra began synthesizing management concepts with basic Indian values. He took the executives gradually from a process where their individual ambitions were paramount to the level where they began thinking about each other's welfare too. Coulter Corporation got back on the rails and Chandra realised that this experience could be duplicated successfully in other Western companies. Vikram Lal of Eicher, who had beard of Dinesh Chandra's work, invited him to join the company. Says Chandra, 'I asked Lal just one simple question 'Are you willing to change?"' So he moved with family back to India, helping set up successfully the Eicher total quality management programme to introduce the quality concept and increase productivity.' Enter management workshops colored with a new hue - where management gurus dip into the seemingly unending potpourri of the Vedanta, Upanishads, Theosophy, Dharma Pada or the Gita, to work on transforming companies.