The Art of War and the Bhagavad Gita

When it comes to learning management wisdom from the ancient texts, the Art of War by Sun Tzu is perhaps the most trendy. This hip is slowly changing as Bhagavad Gita is becoming more and more popular among management scholars.

Bhagavad Gita is a dialog between the warrior prince Arjuna and his counsel Krishna that took place more than five-thousand-years ago in the ancient India. The wisdom of the Gita (as referred to in short) has lived for thousands of years in the Indian subcontinent as a work of divine philosophy. In the west, it has been viewed mostly as a work of literature. Prominent literary figures, such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, have quoted the Gita in their writings. When Albert Einstein read the Gita, he concluded – “everything else seems so superfluous.” In the field of management, the renowned management guru Peter Senge cited the Gita in his popular The Fifth Discipline and Presence.

The Gita has been mostly confined to the fields of philosophy, theology, and literature. This is why its applicability has not been fully explored yet. If one pays closer attention to the wisdom of the Gita, there are several leadership lessons embedded within it. The book Bhagavad Gita on Effective Leadership: Timeless Wisdom for Leaders explores this leadership lessons.

There are subtle differences between the Art of War and the Gita. The wisdom of the Art of War was more suitable for the industrial age when controlling people was a common practice. The industrial age brought changes to productivity by introducing machineries and factories, but the management mindset did not change a lot from the preceding agricultural age. The traditional master-and-slave relationship between managers and workers continued in the industrial age. Managers could manipulate productivity by controlling people.

There were significant changes in the information age when knowledge and knowledge workers became dominant over machines and factories. The information age empowered the workers. The advent of information technology made it possible for the workers to be more knowledgeable than the managers, which brought a shift in the way people looked at the field of management. To manipulate productivity in the information age, it became important to inspire the workers than controlling them.

Inspiring people is the central idea of the Gita, which makes it the most enduring and timely leadership and management text of all times. According to the Gita, leadership is about inspiring people with ideas, actions, and compassion. Popular leadership concepts, such as servant leadership, is also explained in the Gita. It preaches on rising up for the greater good to serve people instead of pursuing selfish goals. Other popular management concepts are also explored in the Gita in a philosophical way, as management science as we know today did not exist then. Thousands of years before ‘work’ and ‘workers’ were defined by Frederick W. Taylor and ‘knowledge’ and ‘knowledge worker’ were defined by Peter Drucker, the concepts of work, knowledge, and workers were already defined and discussed in the Gita.