Business Ethics ... Spiritual Values in Action.

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1.8.2007...... h-h Business Ethics - Spiritual Values in Action “The best way to look at success is to look at the quality of your effort. Have I followed my inner conscience? Have I given my best effort? What was my underlining motivation? This is what is most important.” - Ananth Raman as

Chairman of Graphtex, Inc., USA Ananth Raman was the Chairman of Graphtex, Inc., USA when he was interviewed for the research project. He is of Indian origin and a true product of his multi-cultural background, moving with equal ease in the globalized world of big business and the villages in his native India. Both of these environments have exerted a strong influence on his spiritual development. As Dr. Raman related, “I was taught by my mother that ethical values were the way to maintain order in society, so I naturally used them in my working experience over the last 30 years. The ethical guidelines that my corporation set up guided me in the right direction. Once I started thinking along the lines of spirituality, these kinds of ethical

policies became a part of me. I discovered deeper values within each one of them. I realized that it is not just a good business practice to be ethical. We all have a duty, a role to perform, that has been given to us by God. “For me, spirituality is more of a matter of self-inquiry. I think that different people must take different routes. Some people do a lot of service to foster their spiritual growth. I prefer the path of knowledge, to learn more and to read more, has always been my path. Being a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba is largely responsible for my thinking in this way. In all activities, in all actions, whatever happens – whether I am successful or not – I can sit back and realise God’s guiding hand through all of it. Even when I feel He is pushing me into despair or into problems, I can see He is guiding me in all of it. I think that all of my self-inquiry has come about because of this spiritual teacher, Sai Baba. I can very easily see

this. “ My spiritual development has helped me to institutionalize the principles of having a purpose, adding value, and setting an example. As a business leader I must set an example which others can follow. There is no point in me trying to get my organization to be truthful, unless I am truthful. “There was a time when we were introducing ISO 9000, which was a system of quality control measures for our company. One of our companies was a job shop where we do specialty items for our customers. Since these products are made for specific applications it is extremely difficult to standardize things and is a very complicated process. This made it a difficult environment to introduce these types of quality measures, since they involve a lot of rigid procedures. “The expert said, ‘This is all very simple. All you need to do is write down each of the procedures that you are already doing. You don’t have to make any improvement; you don’t

have to say anything else except exactly the way you are doing it. This has nothing to do with right or wrong; you simply say what you are doing and do what you say.’ Even after he said all of this, my staff was still completely worried. "Initially, I followed these ethical values because this was what I was taught. When I began thinking more

spiritually, it gave me the reasons for why to behave this way... Now I think of ethical values as nothing but a reflection of my spiritual values." “One evening I was thinking about this while attending a study circle with my spiritual group. I saw that all of this was simply talking about unity of thought, word, and action. So, I called in my employees and told them, ‘This is nothing but the concept of having what you feel, what you write and how you act to be the same. This is all that ISO 9000 is about.’ “So we went all over the company and said, ‘The Company’s objective with ISO 9000 is to have unity of thought, word and action.’ If I had used the word spiritual to describe the basis of this concept, I would have probably gotten some negative reaction. To me it was truth and honesty. When I explained what unity of word, thought and action meant, they understood the

concept very easily. “They started raising all kinds of questions throughout the departments; I was amazed at the chain reaction that began. So I told them, ‘Let’s have a monthly meeting where we can discuss these problems where you find it difficult to be totally truthful.’ I tried to help them see the difference between telling a customer, ‘no, it won’t go tomorrow, we are having difficulties,’ which is the truth, versus ‘it will go the day after tomorrow,’ which is a lie. In this way they could still buy some time without promising something which was not going to happen. We continue to have these monthly meetings where we examine these difficult situations and look to see how we can solve them with a unity of thought, word and action. “In a business sense, I like to talk about spirituality as ethical values. When I was in one of the West African countries, the country was full of corruption, and you couldn’t do anything without bribing

someone. We were losing contracts and losing business. But the policy in my corporation was that you could not give bribes. At first, I wondered how I was going to get along without giving bribes. Ultimately, I chose to stay with the ethical values that the company ascribed to. Initially, I followed these ethical values because this was what I was taught. When I began thinking more spiritually, it gave me the reasons for why to behave this way. “Values such as justice, truth, and respect for others, equanimity, ability to take decisions, honesty and integrity are the core values that became very strong for me when I went into business. These are more on the ethical side, rather than on the spiritual side. Somewhere along the line however, these two kinds of values began to link. Now I think of ethical values as nothing but a reflection of my spiritual values. For instance, in business you must respect yourself, your feelings, your customers, your

employees. But then when you go deeper into spirituality, your self-respect begins to include respecting the inner Self. Then you try to understand: “What is meant by Self?” Self means ‘I’, it means awareness.” Dr. Raman is now semi-retired and spends much of his time in his native India, where he has recently built a home in Bangalore, and where he is Honorary Professor at the Sri Sathya Sai University. With Spirituality, Business Can Flourish! Each of the spiritual-based business leaders you have met here is a product of their own unique experiences, and every one has developed a distinct spiritual perspective on life and, in particular, on leadership. Each has their own unique way of expressing this spirituality in words and in deeds. And every leader has

developed their own way of leading from their spiritual basis. When presenting our research results to audiences of MBA students and business leaders, however, we have at times met scepticism about leading from a spiritual basis. In particular, we have met two types of fears and doubts: "Politics without principles, Education without character,Science without humanity and Commerce without morality are not only useless, but positively dangerous." - Sathya Sai Baba The first is the fear that one cannot be both spiritual and a successful leader. A reply to this fear is that all the executives that were interviewed for the research project have achieved their leadership positions while being spiritual. This in itself provides strong evidence that spirituality and obtaining a leadership position do not have to be mutually exclusive. Note that in saying this we are not implying that spirituality is the royal road to the top of the corporate pyramid - that the path is smooth and that personal success is ensured if

you are spiritual. Some of the executives we, and our two research partners, have interviewed met great challenges. For example, one had to put his wealth at risk in order to stop harm, another had to deal with a painful downsizing, and the third had to face the challenges owing to business failure. Just as jogging and eating organic food do not provide a guarantee of a long and healthy physical life, neither is a spiritual perspective on leadership a guarantee of a long-lived and healthy organization or a long-lived and successful career. But the stories presented here clearly demonstrate that it is possible to draw upon both rationality and spirituality in successfully leading a business and oneself. The second source of scepticism we have met is the belief that in order to be spiritual one must renounce the world and its material wealth. If this were so, it would clearly be impossible to be a spiritual-based leader. This fear can be dispelled by the fact

that some of the executives we have interviewed lead rather affluent lives, to put it mildly. Others live in modest dwellings with a simple lifestyle, all according to their values and aspirations. However, none of them indicated that wealth is an impediment to living a spiritual life or leading from a spiritual basis. In fact, many of the leaders we interviewed told how they had used their wealth to initiate humanitarian service projects – some even on a grand scale. So the bottom line is faith - the strong conviction and belief that business can be successfully developed from a spiritual basis; and that you can be a successful leader if you practice your leadership from your heart, mind and soul... where success transcends traditional economic rationality and includes loving and serving all. This is what was so convincingly demonstrated by each of the ten spiritual-based business leaders you met above, all of whom were inspired by the

teachings of Baba. Ram ChuganiKobe, Japanrgcjp

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