Dharma of Business Leadership

The dharma principle gives the organising rule for maintaining balance among the different subsystems that describe business’s connections. But it doesn’t tell a business leader about which kinds of capital should be emphasised when. To make such decisions, Beingful leaders consider the macro level stage of business leadership they are working within and whether their business work is promoting the shared purpose of this stage.

These macro level stages are different from the stages of the REAL road map for Beingful leadership. The macro level stages refer to the historical evolution of business leadership since the Industrial Revolution, while the REAL road map refers to the inner journey of an individual business leader. From the viewpoint of Beingful leadership and the stages of evolution (āśramas), the macro level external trajectory of business leadership since the Industrial Revolution has included preparation, growth, and restoration of balance.

Preparation:

• The 1800s was a preparatory period as the Industrial Revolution picked up momentum from the previous century, first in England and then in the rest of Europe and America. Business leadership was in its student stage, when it was learning the lessons needed to organize production and labor and to distribute goods and services to customers. Material capital was low at this stage because of the poor pay, benefits, and physical conditions of work. Human and social capital was low because of the relatively low industrial employment and poor social conditions in Western societies. The dharma principle with regard to material, human, and social capital was close to the lower bound.

• Natural capital was high because humanity and the economy had low impacts on nature because of their small scale. Being-related capital was beginning its decline as philosophy (and its offshoot, science) increasingly became an intellectual effort or a way to solve particular problems, rather than a way to live one’s life, which is how it had been interpreted in ancient Western philosophy. Business leadership’s primary purpose in this stage was to learn the lessons for growing material, human, and social capital above the lower bounds.

Growth:

• The 1900s was a period of tremendous growth in material capital in the West. Business leadership moved into its householder stage, where its chief purpose was to acquire material wealth and pleasure and distribute it to society’s members. Techniques of mass production and distribution were perfected, and the modern business organisation took shape in the early 1900s. The use of technology accelerated in the second half of the century. Information technology drove this growth even further in the last two decades, and the availability of material goods and services rose sharply, especially after 1950.

• Human and social capital rose rapidly throughout much of the century, creating economic and social well-being for many. However, its growth began to slow and even flatten in the last three decades of the twentieth century as economic and social disparities in society began to increase. The chief challenge of this stage was the violation of the dharma principle with regard to natural capital.

• Creative destruction had resulted in huge growth in material capital, but this burst of wealth had come at the cost of natural capital. By the end of the century, the stock of natural capital was declining rapidly to levels below their lower bounds. The public’s trust in business and its integrity began to decline as markets got hyper competitive, the financial sector rose to dominance, and questionable business practices had increasingly large and systemic impacts.

Restoration of Balance:

• At the beginning of the twenty-first century, business leadership finds itself in a crisis. Increases in material capital continue to destroy natural capital, and many of the natural limits are approaching irreversibility. Of the nine kinds of planetary limits identified by the Stockholm Resilience Institute, we seem to have crossed three of them (climate change, biodiversity loss, and interference with the nitrogen cycle) already and are rapidly approaching the limits for four others (freshwater use, changes in land use, ocean acidification, and interference with the global phosphorus cycle).

• Human and social capital has continued to decline steeply as business and capitalism’s ability to distribute wealth equitably is eroding. Being capital has declined as business and capitalism’s integrity is under threat. Business leadership is often seen as encouraging individual self interest even at the cost of humanity and nature, and at the cost of integrity and trust.

For a Beingful leader, if business leadership is to be rejuvenated, its shared purpose must no longer be to focus overwhelmingly on material capital but to restore economic balance (dharma) among business, the economy, humanity, nature, and Being. In other words, the focus on growing material capital, which could be justified when other kinds of capital were available, is not compatible with the dharma principle in this century.

All other purposes are secondary to this shared purpose of restoring the larger systems (or foundations) that is the higher reality in which business is embedded. Every purpose that damages this shared purpose is not dharma.