Modern management ideas are becoming more and more mystical in a sense. Rather than cut and dried approaches, opaque to any subtleties, the modern approaches in management talk about the roles of follower and sub-servient participation. To make this approach more scientific, management science can wed the 'seshatva' approach as clarified by the Visishtadvaita-sage-reformer of the 11th cent CE, Sri Ramanuja. 'Seshatva' talks about the intellectual understanding of obedience in a group activity. Traditionally it was discussed in the context of one's spiritual progress. But adapting it to the modern management theory will go a long way in enriching the toolkit bag. Even cross-disciplinary meditations on various concepts in parallel will freshen up, I think, both fields of study.
What I am about to write here is just a small venture in this direction, so to say, testing waters.
One idea in management is about goal-setting vs task management or you may have it as 'and' instead of 'vs'. What is the most important thing in a venture, in management? Is it setting the goal? Who will say no? Yea. Goals are the important part. But setting the goals itself, will it enable the enterprise to reach the end-result? Can goal-setting itself vouchsafe that the end-result will be the very goal of the start? If not, who determines or what, the rationality of the difference between goal and end-result? Who or what rationalizes the difference? Who or what reviews the rationality or irrationality of the goal initially set?
If the goal can be compared to the map of the place to be reached, who or what makes it reached or approached? In management of an enterprise, simply sitting everyday and clearly visualizing the goal in all its details will not move you near the realisation. To move ahead you require a running machinery, a functioning company. To keep the machine running, to keep the company afloat for goals, a standard procedure of tasks repetitive, recurring and sometimes adapted to altered situations has to be kept up and alive. So task-management provides the body for which the soul is provided by the goal-setting.
In Sri Vaishnavism of Nammalwar, the goal-setting was done by Nathamuni and the task-management was done by Sri Ramanuja. The goal was the prapatti marga of Nammalwar as propounded in Tiruvaimozhi. How Sri Ramanuja did task-management and made the goal a realisation or sinching the end-result with the goal, is the whole history of the path.
Srirangam Mohanarangan
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