27Timeless Leadership

Debashis Chatterjee, Timeless Leadership: 18 Leadership Sutras from the Bhagavad Gita, Wiley, 2012

Linked to 11 chapters: supports 3 · contradicts 2 · mechanism 3 · same claim 5 · pairing 2

Chatterjee taught leadership at the Indian Institutes of Management and at Harvard, and this book is his reading of the Bhagavad Gita as a manual for people who run things. He calls it a transcreation rather than a translation, made after a decade with some two hundred interpretations, and he organises it by the Gita's own eighteen chapters, each compressed into a sutra, a thread, one aphoristic statement about leaders. The reading is consistent throughout. The battlefield is the mind; Arjuna, the archer who lays down his bow at the sight of his kinsmen in the opposing army, is a leader in a performance collapse, and Krishna, his charioteer, is the coach who talks him back to his feet. The kinsmen he cannot bring himself to fight are the thoughts and habits he is most attached to. On that reading the Gita's advice about action without claim on its fruit, about the three forces of nature, about faith, devotion and surrender, becomes advice about running an organisation, and Chatterjee supplies the cases, Gandhi, Mandela, the Tatas, Infosys, Bank of America's founder, and a series of unnamed chief executives from his own consulting. The book's power is the consistency of that reading; its weakness is that it settles the Gita's hardest question, whether Arjuna should fight, by turning the war into a metaphor and then ending the story with a kingdom won.

The fighter and the warrior

The first sutra is The warrior's journey: leaders embrace discontinuity and death, and it draws the book's central distinction. A fighter has unfinished business with himself; a warrior has finished it, and acts without inner drag. All wars are first fought in the mind and must first be won there. Arjuna's collapse, the dry mouth, the shaking limbs, the bow slipping from his hand, is the collapse of an ego that has been organising his world, and Krishna's first work is to displace it, as Copernicus displaced the earth, so that the self behind the ego becomes the centre. Discontinuity, the death of forms, is not the enemy of the leader but the condition of his work, and Chatterjee's practical instruction is to make one's own restless mind the object of study, to give up voluntarily what must be given up, and to stop dying in the mind many times before one's death. The second, Invincible wisdom: leaders create alternative reality, names the moods that had set Arjuna's mental model, grief, pity and shame, and has Krishna replace the model rather than argue with it: a leader creates an alternative reality by changing the filter, not the facts. From the Gita's second chapter he takes the verse on the right to work but not to its fruits and turns it into four rules, that full attention to the work produces the results, that worrying about them does not, that results come from many hands and not from the doer's motive, and that nobody can choose inaction. Motivation, he adds, is a kind of slavery to whatever motivates; leaders do not motivate their people but let them inspire themselves.

The third sutra, Karma yoga: leaders enter the timeless cycle of action, takes up work itself. Arjuna wants one path and Krishna refuses to give him one, offering two that reach the same place, contemplation and selfless action, suited to different temperaments. Nobody can rest for an instant, since nature compels action, and restraining the body while the mind dwells on its objects is pretence; so inaction is a decision, and a worse one. Diligent work leads to effortless work, as a gardener labours all season and then watches the flower grow by itself. Chatterjee coins a word for work done in the spirit of worship and illustrates it with three history teachers, one who just teaches history, one who is in the business of education and one who is shaping the nation's destiny, all doing the same job. He defines swadharma, the law of one's own being, as acting from one's strengths, and yajna, sacrifice, as the wheel of giving before taking; the leader's actions, not his speeches, are what followers copy.

Power, undoing and the mind

Sutra 4, Timeless leaders pursue purpose as the source of supreme power, answers Arjuna's demand for precedent with lineage. The teaching was given to the sun, to Manu and to the first kings, and lapsed; the royal sage, raja and rishi together, power and wisdom in one person, is the principle by which power serves human development. Power that exceeds the holder's wisdom damages the organisation, and Chatterjee attributes corporate collapses and the recent recession to the divorce of the two. His cases are Alexander at the Indian border, told by a sage that the enjoyment he plans to reach after all his conquests is what the sage is doing now, and two questions drawn from it: how much more do I need to be happy, and how much less could I have and still be happy. J. R. D. Tata died in a rented house; Matsushita kept his workers through the postwar depression and said afterwards that he had only held up an umbrella while it rained. Power is impersonal, like electricity, and serves each leader in the form invoked, money, fame, control or the empowerment of others; sensory power obeys diminishing returns, which is what turns a leader inward.

Sutra 5 states that leadership is the art of undoing, and its subtitle is the state of detached engagement. Renunciation and performance mean the same thing once action is unselfish; the doer detaches from the illusion of doer-ship while remaining fully engaged, as a driver ignites and steers a car that moves by its own design. The anchors that hold an organisation are likes and dislikes, which followers read as bias, and an organisation tethered to its past is a cruise ship celebrating on deck with the anchor never raised. Detached engagement is reached by regular reflection and produces equality of vision, which the Dalai Lama's exercise tests: picture someone you like intensely, someone you dislike intensely, and someone neutral, and notice when the three feelings become the same. The chapter's exemplars are Mandela's rainbow nation and Muhammad Yunus lending to the poorest women where bankers brought lawyers; its measure of a leader is what has been undone in his own and his followers' mindsets, not only what has been done. Sutra 6, Leaders are masters of their minds, turns to the mind. The source of self-made trouble is mistaking the self-image, the cluster of roles one defends with anger or conformity when reality contradicts it, for the real self, which has nothing to defend. Arjuna calls the mind as hard to control as the wind, and Krishna prescribes practice and dispassion; Chatterjee's own workshop asks leaders who they are, who knows that, and who knows they have a mind, at which point the room goes quiet. Concentration, detachment and transcendence follow, and the exemplar is Mandela on Robben Island walking slowly while the guards who ordered the prisoners to run were made to walk behind him.

The integrator, the source and the secret

Sutras 7 to 9 move from psychology to something closer to theology. Sutra 7 states that leaders are integrators, and its subtitle is the freedom of I am. Krishna declares himself the taste of water and the light of the sun, and Chatterjee reads the declaration as the journey of the words I am from the body to the essence of life. The leader is an integrator, the thread holding the pearls rather than one of them, the ignition without which the car is a static structure; he does not take sides but brings sides together, and dharma is the invisible light behind the prism's colours, lived rather than spoken. Four kinds of follower suffer in four ways, and the leader pitches to the plane each is on, since a person in financial distress will not hear a message about self-realisation. Sutra 8, Timeless leadership: decoding the meaning of life, asks what work means, and answers that meaning requires breaking through perishable motivators to the imperishable, which he lays out as three dimensions of life, the objective world, the inner psychological world and the governing principle that regulates both. Understanding is thought converted into silence; creation sacrifices the smaller for the greater, as the split atom does; and the leader sacrifices ambition for aspiration and career for calling, the unnamed Apple founder being the case. Sutra 9, The sovereign secret: timeless leaders live in a self-organising universe, holds that the leader's presence shows in his absence, the ice cube that melts and is present as the coolness of the water, and that the body's trillion cells show what a self-organising system looks like. The ego's board of directors is guilt, fear, pride, shame and self-pity; modern organisations have kept the horizontal relationships of task and role and lost the vertical relationship to an ideal; and the leader holds power in trust, does his best and leaves the rest.

Attention to surrender

The second half of the book runs from attention to surrender. Sutra 10, Leadership is an adventure of consciousness, makes undivided attention the whole difference between a leader and a follower whose days are outwardly the same; silence, the secret of secrets, is unspoken intelligence, conserved by not speaking, and choices are made in the gap between stimulus and response. His examples are a hotel-chain chief who will not nod in strategy meetings so that nobody concludes early, and an insurance underwriter who, with five minutes to decide and every datum studied, closes her eyes. The whole is the relationship among the parts, which for an organisation is its ethos, and excellence is a quality of mind that is never finished; Darwin Smith at Kimberly-Clark never stopped trying to be qualified for the job. Sutra 11, Timeless leaders have integral vision, gives Arjuna the divine eye and reads the vision of creation and destruction together as the removal of the fear of death, from which every other fear descends; the warrior fights with insight rather than sight, moving off the line of attack as in aikido and using the opponent's energy, and the best instrument, like a telescope, draws no attention to itself. Sutra 12 states that love is the leader's essence and love is the leader's presence: work is love made visible, and prefers devotion to a form over the formless because Arjuna's mind is still bound to the senses; its practice is to listen for two weeks to every word a difficult colleague says and then for two weeks to what is left unsaid.

Sutra 13, Leaders command their field with the eye of wisdom, defines the leader's field as everything knowable, the facts on the table and the mind that views them, so that true knowledge is subjective as well as objective and a leader must watch his own distortions, like the manufacturer who counts himself market leader only because his rival left. Since a leader cannot be everywhere, his people are extensions of his awareness, corrected without criticism; empathy is defined as detached, objective appraisal, not the wish to please, and the film-goer who weeps with the actors and walks out neutral is the model of engagement followed by detachment. Sutra 14, Leaders harness the dynamic forces of nature, names the three forces, inertia, dynamism and illumination, and maps them onto rock, plant, animal and human, onto laziness, ambition and clarity, and onto three ways a leader's mind fails, veiling reality, projecting onto it, and seeing it. Each is needed, and a chief executive who lets nine problems in ten resolve themselves is using inertia deliberately. The sutra's parable, from Ramakrishna, is the three robbers: one would kill the traveller, one binds him, and the third frees him and leads him to the road but will not come home with him, because illumination too is a robber, a golden cage of the desire for knowledge. Sutra 15, Timeless leaders discover their invisible source, draws the Gita's inverted tree, roots above and branches below, to say that the sensory world is obsessed with effects and incurious about causes; one can count the seeds in an apple but not the apples in a seed, and the knowledge that matters comes by removing false notions rather than by adding information. Its craftsman is the woodcarver who calms his mind for a week, forgets reward, praise, his body and his audience, and walks the forest until he finds the tree already ready to be the statue.

Faith, the crossroads and the two wills

Sutra 16, Leaders negotiate the crossroads, sets the fork between the divine and the devilish. The divine and the devilish are two directions of consciousness, expanding to include others or contracting to the ego's appetites; the devilish path comes from not knowing who one is, and its chant is more. Chatterjee's cases at the crossroads are Mandela choosing forgiveness and James Burke recalling thirty-one million bottles of Tylenol in 1982, which he reads entirely as honesty rewarded. He borrows Barbara Kellerman's seven types of bad leadership and Eknath Easwaran's observation that leaders do not feel the consequences of their acts because consequences arrive late; the rider on a bullet train mistakes its speed for his own. The Gita's list of divine qualities he reads not as a moral code but as the inward return after the outward journey of acquisition. Sutra 17, Leaders follow their faith, makes faith the deep structure of everything a person does, so that a corporate culture grows from what its founder had faith in, Wrigley in the product and Narayana Murthy in data. Faith comes in three kinds, and shows in speech: lies, inflammatory speech, and speech that passes three checks, is it true, is it pleasant, is it useful to the hearer, the three airport security officers who let nothing through that fails one. A. P. Giannini, who built Bank of America and gave his money away each time it approached a million dollars, is the case of austerity inside the material world, and the purest gift a leader can give a follower is self-reliance.

The last sutra, Leadership is transcendence, unites two wills. Spirit is source and matter is resource; when you are a source the world exists in you, and the first step, surrendering the whole of one's energy to the source, sets the direction of every step after it, like the first button of a shirt. Attachment is an algebra of a constant, the self, and a variable, the ego's story, which feels real because the self underwrites it: the anxious passenger cannot fly the plane, and the man with indigestion says that he is sick. Renunciation is regeneration, pruning, and Chatterjee gives it three modern forms, breaking a habit, holding an outburst, and declining credit for what one did not do. Reality is reached through facts, then truth, then something that escapes the mind, and his formula for the order that results is that evolution equals discipline plus freedom, the tree disciplined by soil and freed by sky. The fighter cannot win and the warrior cannot lose; the warrior surrenders his will before drawing the arrow, and the leader's last act is to free the follower even from himself. The book closes with four practices in place of eighteen, to be quiet and watch thoughts as images on a screen, to treat one's own preoccupation as the persistent problem, to question mental models in discontinuous times, and to convert wishing into willing by investing will in a purpose beyond oneself, and with Arjuna's victory, the kingdom restored and order established.

Since 2012

The book belongs to a genre that grew in Indian management education from the 1990s, the Gita read as a text for executives, and it is among the most fluent examples. It has held its place on the shelves of the institutes its author has led. Read beside the Gita itself, its liberties show. Every verse is his own rendering, and several insert the vocabulary of his argument, self-image, alternative reality, work as a cosmological principle, into lines that do not carry it; the final sutra cites no verse at all, and gives Krishna a closing line, that he would set the one he loves free even from himself, which the Gita's eighteenth chapter does not contain. A few of the science claims are wrong, day and night are not a matter of distance from the sun, and the triune brain has been abandoned, and a good deal of the corporate evidence is anonymous and cannot be checked. Some of the named cases have moved since the book appeared: the cheapest car that stood for Ratan Tata's trusteeship failed in the market, and Yunus was removed from the bank he founded the year before publication. The book's internal tensions are real, between the instrument who is told the outcome is already settled and the leader of will who wins the kingdom, between illumination as the goal and illumination as one more robber, and Chatterjee flags some of them himself. What has held is the reading, not the apparatus. Taking the battlefield as the mind, the collapse as an ego event, and the fruit of action as the thing to release is a way of using the Gita that predates this book and will outlast it, and the distinctions it draws, fighter and warrior, doing and undoing, ambition and aspiration, motivation and inspiration, are the ones its readers have kept.