A CEO or leader of any business has to finally solve the single most important problem – the problem of impersonal-ism. Rest all are fall outs or transformation of the core problem.
For a small business, the problem is not manifest. Leader, Owner, Staff all rolled into one. Consider a grocery shop.
Now consider a large FMCG. As a customer, you may not be at all aware of the leader /owner and only interaction will be with a Call Centre Agent who is at the bottom layer separated by labyrinths of command chain and hierarchical layers. The Agent may not know even who the leader (CEO) is although he is connected to the grand organizational matrix headed by the CEO.
As organization grows, impersonal-ism grows proportionately and following things happen
- The energy of the leader or successive leader gets diffused and finally become feeble. This causes disintegration, rebellion and apathy. Empires and monarchies are classic examples.
- The employees now consider the organization as an impersonal machine driven by chance or happen-stances. Changing an organization becomes an act without any emotional impact. Think of urination or defecation – a highly complex biological act performed as a duty or for lessening pain. A release.
- Reward-Punishment catches the immediate cause and overlooks the prime cause. Immediate boss becomes the centre of attention and in the impersonal fabric, the boss also has not much of authority to justify his/her act. The deepest need of a person to have a personal relationship remains unfulfilled.
- Verbal Jugglery, Semantic deception, Neuro Linguistic Programming follow in the name of training, motivation, damage control, quality checking programs but impersonal-ism pervades and all of these exercises remain more or less a farce. Everybody attends or seems to join but the core disease remains and remains untreated.
- The best human talent lacks all conviction and worst follow with passionate intensity.
- The top-most leaders, now entrapped in their own impersonal net retreat towards the only token of personal relationship they know – their own skin, that of their family and that of their close group of friends. If you examine the most talked about management frauds, abuses and criminal acts in India and elsewhere for last two decades, the motive remains – personal safety, gain for their children, gain for their friends. In short, the motive was personal – strictly personal.
- Nobody asks the question which is the door to the solution – Is there any person or personality available who can control a huge organization without falling prey to the ill-effects of impersonal-ism ?
I started asking this question absent-mindedly while I became a freelancer. When I was a corporate worker, I had my CEO as the leader although I had seen him only once. As a Freelancer, I reasoned that I have no direct leader and without a direct personal leader, all talks of leadership is impersonal-ism. I asked – Who is a Freelancer’s CEO ?
A Freelancer is something like a cosmic bee – he has no specific garden to feed but has the whole cosmic manifestation open. He is traveller in the vast steppes with no leader directly.
Then, in a flash, the thought, a life-changing thought came that the Leader of the Cosmic Manifestation is my Leader or CEO.
Who has made and maintains this Cosmic Manifestation including each one of us ? Our large corporations nor our scientists have neither created nor managing the thermo-nuclear power plant in the sun. It is not Google that has designed my brain. Rather a brain has created Google. Who has created this Google-creating brain ?
Is this entity impersonal, personal or void ?
If this is void, then there is no point talking of any leadership at all. In the absence of an absolute CEO-standard, all are relative and the most-tainted CEO now inside the jail can claim to have the best leadership standard for the time.
If the entity is impersonal, then the question is how can there be ever a relationship. I am a person and I have never met anybody called ‘Government’, ‘citizen’, ‘humanity’, ‘knowledge’, ‘leader’, ‘leadership’. All I have met since I knew the world was persons – with name and form.
There is nothing in this mortal world but the Vedic Literature which can solve this problem.
Srimad-Bhagavatam, one of the ancient Sanskrit text begins (SB 1.1.1)
janmādy asya yato ‘nvayād itarataś cārtheṣv abhijñaḥ svarāṭ
Srila Prabhupada, one of the foremost acharyas of our time explains in the purport
In Vedic literatures, it is said that the Absolute Truth, Personality of Godhead, is the chief amongst all living personalities. All living beings, beginning from the first created being, Brahmā, down to the smallest ant, are individual living beings. And above Brahmā, there are even other living beings with individual capacities, and the Personality of Godhead is also a similar living being. And He is an individual as are the other living beings. But the Supreme Lord, or the supreme living being, has the greatest intelligence, and He possesses supermost inconceivable energies of all different varieties. If a man’s brain can produce a space satellite, one can very easily imagine how brains higher than man can produce similarly wonderful things which are far superior. The reasonable person will easily accept this argument, but there are stubborn atheists who would never agree. Śrīla Vyāsadeva, however, at once accepts the supreme intelligence as the parameśvara. He offers his respectful obeisances unto the supreme intelligence addressed as the para or the parameśvara or the Supreme Personality of Godhead. And that parameśvara is Śrī Kṛṣṇa, as admitted in Bhagavad-gītā and other scriptures delivered by Śrī Vyāsadeva and specifically in this Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam. In Bhagavad-gītā, the Lord says that there is no otherpara-tattva (summum bonum) than Himself. Therefore, Śrī Vyāsadeva at once worships the para-tattva, Śrī Kṛṣṇa, whose transcendental activities are described in the Tenth Canto.
Conclusion
The greatest problem or lack of a CEO is not taking knowledge from the CEO of all that is and all that be. We are talking of the Supreme Absolute Truth or the Supreme Leader whom in English we call God and Vedic Literature calls him Krsna – the all attractive supreme controller. Controller of all Controllers or Chief of all the Chiefs of past, present and future.
Whatever is been written. I appreciate the Article. The missing behind every logic is not any pious book or pious relationThe miising behind every concept is knowing yourself. Once someone know with experience” Who Am I”. Once we get this experience. Each and every concept is complete in itself. Each and every person, post or pious things are right.
The moment we ask this question ‘Who am I ?’, it means that there is something lacking and we are not complete. Now, to achieve completeness, we may either speculate for endless years or lives without reaching any conclusion. This is the status of all empirical philosophy and material sciences. Or we can approach an authority (a teacher) who is above mental speculation. The ‘pious’ book draws its authority not because many pious people endorse it or accept it but because it is beyond mental speculation.
To get a firm, eternal and non-speculation based answer of the question ‘Who am I’ is self-realization – perfection of one’s life.
“Once someone know with experience” Who Am I”. Once we get this experience.”
What is the value of our experience ? Our experience changes constantly. People interpret experiences differently at different stages of their lives. Our or anyone’s experience cannot be the authority to judge the answer to the question ‘Who am I’
There are many doctrines who propound a faith of ‘As many opinions and so are paths’. Why ? Because I experience it. This is ridiculous.
Even in material sciences, one needs to have bona-fide authority and what to speak of the greatest science of human life – to self-realize.
Revealed scriptures or pious texts are exactly those authorities which are ‘re-vealed’ in each age, eternally. Without this quality of revealed scriptures, why should I waste my time with them ?