“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

Abraham Lincoln

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

John Acton

Looking around society today - the consequences of the abuse of power are incredibly stark. There are vast gaps between the rich and the poor - many live in luxury while others starve. Even amongst those who are doing well, almost everyone has an experience of being treated poorly by someone who has power over them in a particular situation. Beyond large societal problems, all the way to small personal interactions, the corrupting nature of power seems quite clear.

The problem of power is this: “Power leads people to act in impulsive fashion, both good and bad, and to fail to understand other people’s feelings and desires.”1 Gaining power tends to corrupt even people who start out with good intentions.

The story of the Ramayana, one of the great epics of Hinduism, illustrates the problem of power and how to solve its problems. The Ramayana narrates the life of Lord Rama, the prince of Ayodhya. The Ramayana is a central epic of Hinduism but also has a place in the Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh traditions as an illustration of the path of Dharma. It has deep roots in India but also across Southeast Asia.

The central villain of the Ramayana is Ravana, the king of Lanka, who kidnaps Lord Rama’s wife Sita. Ravana is the son of a great sage, Vishrava, and though he becomes a villainous character by the time of the events of the Ramayana - he does not start out that way.

Ravana is initially a great, intelligent, ambitious person. He was well versed in the Vedas and described as a great devotee of Lord Shiva. He gains his power by doing great penance and prayer. With this great power, he defeats Indra, the king of the Devas, and asserts himself as the most powerful in the cosmos. However, his power causes him to lose perspective and, ultimately, his downfall.

Though Ravana ruled a great kingdom, he used his power for selfish means rather than for the welfare of his people. All of the wealth that he gathered was plundered from others. And ultimately, as narrated in the Ramayana, he steals away Sita against her wishes.

Eventually this last part is what leads to his downfall. When Lord Rama finally arrives at Lanka, after many travails, with his army he still gives Ravana a chance to repent. However, at this point Ravana’s arrogance takes over, and ultimately he is killed in battle with Rama.

Ravana’s life is a clear illustrative parable about the dangers of power. Despite his intelligence and devotion, once he is powerful he acts impulsively without regard for others. Many politicians have gone down this route, they see themselves as ruling rather than serving the voters who grant them their powers.

Research shows power erodes empathy, which is what can lead to acting without consideration for the rights or feelings of others.2 Those in power actually show neurological differences based on the experience of power.3 In fact “people with power tend to behave like patients who have damaged their brain’s orbitofrontal lobes (the region of the frontal lobes right behind the eye sockets), a condition that seems to cause overly impulsive and insensitive behavior.”4

This might have been the process to blame for Winston Churchill diverting grain causing the death of more than three million people in the Bengal famine of 1943.5 While lionized in the western world for standing up to Hitler, Churchill is regarded differently in India. He had no empathy for Indians starving to death, shipping grain from India to well-stocked British troops and as a contingency for Europeans “if and when they are freed”. He regarded Indians as “beastly people with a beastly religion” and in language mirroring Hitler’s regarded them as “superfluous eaters”. Indeed Leopold Amery the British Secretary of State for India wrote in his private journal that he did not “see much difference between [Churchill’s] outlook and Hitler’s.”6 Churchill’s wife was asked to intervene with him by his cabinet because he had been acting “so contemptuous” toward subordinates in meetings that “no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming”.7

So if the experience of power can even affect even one’s brain, and can push some who are regarded as heroes in one part of the world to cause the death of millions in others, how does one avoid being corrupted by power?'

It turns out the Ramayana has the answer as well. While Ravana is presented as the main antagonist in the Ramayana, his brother Vibhishan presents a clear contrast. Vibhishan counsels Ravana through the build up to avoid a needless war based on his impulsive desires. When Ravana refuses to listen to his counsel, Vibhishan leaves Lanka to serve Rama. After the death of Ravana, he rules Lanka at Rama’s behest and governs with care.

In Śrī Rāmacarita-mānas, during the final battle between Ravana and Lord Rama, Ravana arrives at the battlefield in a sophisticated chariot with many weapons. Lord Rama confronts him standing on the ground with no armor, and a simple bow and arrow. Vibhishan, fearing for Lord Rama’s chance of victory, asks him how he can win.

In response Lord Rama gives a wonderful analogy that contains the essence of how one can align oneself with the principles of Dharma:

सौरज धीरज तेहि रथ चाका। सत्य सील दृढ़ ध्वजा पताका॥ बल बिबेक दम परहित घोरे। छमा कृपा समता रजु जोरे॥

sauraja dhīraja tehi ratha cāka, satya sīla dṛḍha dhvajā patākā. bala bibeka dama parahita ghore, chamā kṛpā samatā raju jore. – (Rāmacaritamānasa - VI-79-iii)

The wheels (cākā) of this chariot (tehi ratha) are valour (sauraja) and fortitude (dhīraja). Steadfastness in truthfulness and good character (satya sīla dṛḍha) are its flags of victory and safety (dhvajā patākā). The horses (ghore) of the chariot are strength, discrimination, self-control and caring for others (bala viveka dama parahita). Its reins are made up of the ropes of forgiveness, compassion, and equanimity (chamā kṛpā samatā raju jore).8

He further explains:

ईस भजनु सारथी सुजाना। बिरति चर्म संतोष कृपाना॥ दान परसु बुधि सक्ति प्रचंडा। बर बिग्यान कठिन कोदंडा॥ अमल अचल मन त्रोन समाना। सम जम नियम सिलीमुख नाना॥ कवच अभेद बिप्र गुर पूजा। एहि सम बिजय उपाय न दूजा॥

īsa bhajanu sārathī sujānā, birati carma saṅtoṣa kṛpānā. dāna parasu budhi sakti pracaṇḍā, bara bigyāna kaṭhina kodaṇḍā. amala acala mana trona samānā, sama jama niyama silīmukha nānā. kavaca abheda bipra gura pūjā, ehi sama bijaya upāya na dūjā – (Rāmacaritamānasa - VI-79-iv & v)

Devotion to God (īsa bhajanu) is the intelligent charioteer (sārathī sūjānā); dispassion (birati) is the shield (carma) and contentment (santoṣa) is the sword (kṛpānā); charity (dāna) is the axe (parasu); understanding (budhi) is the powerful missile (sakti pracaṇḍā); knowledge of the Self (bigyāna) is the bow (kaṭhina kodaṇḍā); a pure and steady mind (amala acala mana) is the quiver (trona samānā); the arrows (silīmukha nānā) are peacefulness of mind (sama), the five noble values of life (jama) and the daily disciplines (niyama); the unbreakable armour (kavaca abheda) is devotion to the guru and to learned people (bipra gura pūjā). There is no other means to gain everlasting victory (ehi sama bijaya upāya na dūjā).9

Unpacking and explaining the whole of this analogy is beyond the scope of this article, but let’s focus on the points relevant to combating the corruption of power. The horses of the chariot are what move it forward - these are what allow one to progress. By including concern for others (parahita) here it is intended to be understood as a motivation and means of progression.

For Ravana the point of his power is self-aggrandizement. He is motivated by selfishness. Vibhishan, by contrast, is concerned about the death and destruction that would be caused by the needless conflict based on Ravana’s selfish desire. Furthermore, it is due to Vibhishan’s concern for others that he eventually leaves Ravana’s side and avoids destruction. Because of this, he progresses to become king himself.

The reigns of the chariot are also relevant, as these are what control the direction and pace of progress. Here forgiveness, compassion, and equanimity of the mind are prescribed. If power erodes empathy, the active practice of forgiveness and compassion is what helps preserve it.

Framing a perspective that helps one grasp the limits of one’s power also helps defend against the corruption that comes with power. Here Lord Rama advises devotion to God (īsa bhajanu) and devotion to the guru and to learned people (bipra gura pūjā). Finding respected mentors can help reframe one’s sense of power, and the realization that we only control so much can also help do so.

In this regard the philosophy of Karma that we discussed in the earlier article, “The Secret of Work”, can be very helpful. Realizing that while you can control your own effort, often the results are out of your hands can be a moderating factor on your sense of power. Keeping a sense of humble acceptance can be a great tool for keeping perspective when you are granted power.

Modern psychology also prescribes these activities - recommending active gratitude and appreciation. Taking actions that show empathy cultivates empathy, thus counteracting the erosion power brings. Getting feedback from mentors and executive coaches that help return you to a state of empathy and value-driven decisions also helps.

Ultimately the full analogy of the Dharma Ratha in the context of power and leadership paints a powerful picture of a true servant leader. Servant leadership is a leadership philosophy whereby an individual interacts with others to achieve authority rather than power.10

This is important to understand because the truth is that power is given, not strategically acquired. In the context of management, a company is not a democracy, but your customers vote with their wallets, and your employees vote with their time. Without either of those you have nothing, and Machiavellian tactics eventually lead to one or both of these forsaking you.

Empathy, compassion, cooperation, modesty, and service to others are the heart of avoiding corruption by power and maintaining your perspective. They are also valuable skills for those who seek positions of power and want to hold onto them. Remember Lord Ram’s advice to Vibhishan, and be a transcendent leader.

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The Rishis of the Vedas observed this, and much of Vedic philosophy is based on self-inquiry, and conscious observation both internally and externally. While most of us go through life reactive and not conscious of why we do what we do, and why we think what we think - they deeply delved into these topics to create a better understanding of the self.

While this knowledge was available and transmitted from time immemorial, many directly applicable lessons have not been understood by the mainstream today. In the modern era, observing these mechanics of thought and how we make decisions earned noted Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman the 2002 Nobel prize in Economics. In his bestselling book Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman describes the different modes or systems in which we think:1

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

System 1 as Kahneman describes operates automatically and generates impressions, intentions, intuitions, and feelings. Think of the simple associative image tests where a response to an image is asked for before one has time to consciously think through the implications. In this case System 1 is mobilized. We have little control over the operation of System 1 most of the time, and it encompasses some activities that we are born with, and others that become fast and automatic through practice. For example, orienting to the source of a sudden sound is an innate function of system 1, while understanding simple sentences or association with stereotypes are learned.

By contrast, System 2 requires active engagement and requires effort and attention. System 2 is engaged when we are performing more complex, effortful mental activity, for example solving a complex problem or proving a theorem. System 2 also arbitrates the impressions from System 1 - System 2 turns System 1 intuitions into beliefs, and impulses into voluntary actions.

One of the tasks of System 2 is to overcome the impulses of System 1. In other words, System 2 is in charge of self-control.2

This fascinating interplay and systemic division of labor in the mind was captured by the Vedic Rishis in their explanation of the antahkarna or “inner instruments”. The inner instruments are manas, buddhi, ahankara, and cit. Of these inner instruments, manas and buddhi coincide with Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2. In the system of antahkarna, the manas receives sensory information from the senses and coordinates perception. It is the instinctive mind that coordinates motor and sensory organs, delivers sensory impressions, and is the seat of emotions. If not actively coordinated by well-developed buddhi, intellect or System 2 as discussed here, it simply acts on the wants, wishes, desires, and aversions stored in memory, cit.

By contrast buddhi, the intellect or System 2 in this case, is the determinative faculty of the mind that actively makes decisions. Buddhi is seen as the higher functions of the mind in Vedic thought, but requires active efforts to develop while the other antahkarna simply develop naturally.

Recognizing this helps us understand the implications in our own daily lives. Immediate, unconscious behavior is shaped by manas, or System 1, and deliberate, conscious behavior is shaped by buddhi, or System 2. It is important for us to understand this because much of what we do is shaped by manas without our direct conscious thought.

The automatic functions of manas are important and useful. If everything required direct laborious conscious thought, we wouldn’t be able to function. Things like basic motor functions or simple understanding of language happening unconsciously allow us to direct conscious thought on other things. And in many situations it is important to train reactions to happen quickly. A hunter-gatherer in the wild may require such trained instincts for survival. An athlete competing at the highest level needs to train themselves to react quickly and automatically to perform at the highest levels. Pausing to reflect on a decision, or thinking through the optimal reaction, may lose the hunter-gatherer their life, or the athlete the match.

However, there are many times we fall back to the automatic, reactive components of manas when we actually need to engage our buddhi. In these cases, it can lead to many problems. It is critical to understand what we get wrong with unconscious, reactive behavior, to understand why and how to engage our buddhi to lead to better outcomes.

One of the key ways that unconscious behavior and following the whims of manas create a problem is through unconscious bias or cognitive bias. Today unconscious bias is a major topic because it leads to discrimination and unequal outcomes in the workplace and beyond - across society. An example of this is implicit gender and racial bias leading to women and minority workers earning less than others for working equivalent jobs. This unconscious bias is made up of a number of cognitive biases - shortcuts the manas takes to answer things quickly and efficiently for us. For example, Kahneman describes how System 1 jumps to conclusions without appropriate consideration of data:3

The measure of success for System 1 is the coherence of the story it manages to create. The amount and quality of the data on which the story is based are largely irrelevant. When information is scarce, which is a common occurrence, System 1 operates as a machine for jumping to conclusions...

And later:4

Jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence is so important to an understanding of intuitive thinking, and comes up so often in this book, that I will use a cumbersome abbreviation for it: WYSIATI, which stands for what you see is all there is. System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.

A related point, beyond simply jumping to conclusions, is that sometimes instead of evaluating the actual question at hand, which would require engaging our buddhi, we instead choose an easier route:5

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.

This is another place where biases may come in. For example, instead of asking a question that requires deeper thought like which candidate for a job best matches the characteristics that will lead to success in the role, we may unconsciously favor someone who looks like or sounds like they are trustworthy - ie. basing the decision on familiarity rather than an objective decision criterion.

A related way manas can act automatically to carry us away from acting on the good judgment of buddhi is by making judgments on pre-existing likes, dislikes, and stereotypes as opposed to seeing things clearly as they are. In the Bhagavad Gita Lord Krishna explicitly warns against this, speaking of raga-dvesa vimuktaih - one who is free from attachments and aversions is the one who attains the best outcome. These attachments and aversions (raga-dvesa) are the shortcuts one stores to avoid engaging one’s buddhi in effortful mental activity. They preclude objective decision criteria. In practice it may be a long journey to becoming completely free from one’s attachments and aversions, but by actively engaging one’s buddhi one can attempt to loosen its hold over one’s judgment.

Another example of reactive thinking explained in the Bhagavad Gita is given in Chapter 2, verses 62-63, where Lord Krishna describes how attachment leads to reactive emotions like anger, which eventually leads to the loss of buddhi as one’s mediating factor in behavior. Eventually, this leads to one’s downfall.

ध्यायतो विषयान्पुंस: सङ्गस्तेषूपजायते |
सङ्गात्सञ्जायते काम: कामात्क्रोधोऽभिजायते ||

क्रोधाद्भवति सम्मोह: सम्मोहात्स्मृतिविभ्रम: |
स्मृतिभ्रंशाद् बुद्धिनाशो बुद्धिनाशात्प्रणश्यति ||6

One point upon which the wisdom of the Vedic Rishis diverges from modern observers is our ability to correct these mistakes and exercise our buddhi in situations where the manas provides automatic responses. In this regard, Kahneman is pessimistic about our ability to correct these mistakes. This is partly due to experimental evidence showing that even many experts may fall prey to these same cognitive biases and mistakes of system 1 in their respective fields. One aspect of system 2 that Kahneman discovered is that because its activity is so effortful, it is often lazy and rubber stamps impulses from system 1 as decisions. This is why, despite having a system that is able to exert self-control, we so often fall prey to lazy unconscious thinking.

However, in the Vedic system, a whole set of meditation and mindfulness techniques have been designed to teach us how to deliberately engage our buddhi, or system 2. Without regular exercise and deliberate engagement, of course it becomes lazy! This also explains why even an expert in a field may fall prey to reliance on the impulses of manas. This is because much of the effort of acquiring expertise in a field often comes from acquiring knowledge and storing this in memory, rather than constant active engagement of buddhi. Once one has encountered many of the typical problems in a field, solving issues may not even require much active effortful engagement of one’s buddhi. However, in the system of Vedic study, Patanjali’s system of ashtanga yoga, and many other forms have exercises that regularly and actively engage buddhi and thus keep this system exercised.

In the Bhagavad-Gita, Arjun asks Lord Krishna about this very problem. He explains how difficult it is to corral the mind and marshal its efforts towards the activities that Lord Krishna prescribes. Here Lord Krishna responds:

असंशयं महाबाहो मनो दुर्निग्रहं चलम् ।
अभ्यासेन तु कौन्तेय वैराग्येण च गृह्यते ॥ ३५ ॥

It is undoubtedly very difficult to curb the restless mind, but it is possible by practice and by detachment7

The first part of this acknowledges that curbing the automatic unconscious thought of the manas is indeed difficult, as we have described earlier. Here the ancient wisdom diverges from the modern opinion, however, as two things are prescribed to solve this problem. Abhyas or repeated practice and vairagya or detachment through understanding. In the yoga sutras Patanjali echoes this:

abhyāsavairāgyābhyāṃ tannirodhaḥ ॥1.12॥

By practice and detachment the fluctuations of the mind are restrained.8

The practice of yoga is about the repetition of the basic exercises. While there is a range of meditative practices, the most important aspect emphasized here is the regular repetition of them, and repeatedly striving to bring the mind under control. Which meditative technique is used is less important than diligently and regularly practicing the method. This repeated effort is what is important in quieting the manas. Kabir, the 15th-century saint famously said, “करत करत अभ्यास के जड़मति होत सुजान” - through repeated practice, even a dull mind becomes perfected.

We are all familiar with the virtues of repeated practice, but the second part prescribed here is less common in the west. Vairagya is frequently translated as detachment or dispassion, though these English words fail to properly capture the meaning of the Sanskrit term. Detachment or renunciation can seem like an application of raga-dvesa or one’s attachments and aversions. However, what is being asked of us here is not to develop an aversion for certain things. Vairagya is about understanding the true nature of your likes and dislikes. For example, if there is a drink in front of you, you may be inclined to drink it if you are feeling thirsty. However, if you are informed the drink is poisonous, you will not be inclined to drink it anymore. This is the ‘detachment’ from the drink, the understanding of its true nature which causes you to take a wiser approach to determine what to do.

A great deal of Vedic teachings are devoted to uncovering the true nature of ourselves and the world around us, so that we may understand our relationship and act accordingly. An example we discussed in an earlier article is karma yoga. We discussed realizing that while you can control your own effort, often the results are out of your hands. Realizing this, you may develop vairagya for the results, and thus focus 100% of your energy on your own efforts, leading to a better potential outcome.

It is the combination of practice and detachment, abhyas and vairagya, that allow us to avoid many of the problems of reliance on manas - it allows us to make better, more objective decisions. As we discussed earlier, this self-mastery helps us become better leaders. The practices underpinning such a move to more conscious behavior may provide even broader benefits, such as more broadly enhanced cognitive function. For example neuroscientists found that pandits practicing the chanting of Sanskrit mantras exhibited 10 percent more grey matter across both cerebral hemispheres as compared to the normal population in structural MRI scans.

There is still much to explore from a scientific perspective in these fields, but we can easily take some practical lessons for our daily lives from the inquiry of the Vedic Rishis into these subjects. Starting some meditative or mindfulness practices can help us exercise our conscious discriminative intellect, and help prevent us from falling into the many traps of unconscious thinking and cognitive bias. Deeper self-inquiry can free us from reliance on unconscious impressions. The combination of these two can unlock our buddhi and lead us to a more awakened life.

Elon Musk described entrepreneurship thusly: "Creating a company is a very difficult thing. A friend of mine has a saying: 'Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.' You have to do lots of things you don't like. You have to put in incredible amounts of effort and huge amounts of stress--and it's much more painful than most people realize."

The imagery of eating glass and staring into the abyss is quite stark. And yet on that entrepreneurial journey when I face tough times, my perspective comes from people who have survived even tougher times. My grandmother while traveling via train during the partition of India with my infant father and his brothers and sisters, with devastation all around them, faced adversity with poise and a smiling face. Her example showed her children how to be strong enough to face any adversity in life. Later in his life, when my father was hitchhiking across Europe to get back home to India and got stranded in Turkey without money or possessions, his calm demeanor and smiling face made even strangers his best friends that helped him out.

One thing stands out about the way my father and grandmother approach problems. A calm mind, steady hands, and always ready to laugh and smile through problems greater than those that have crushed many an entrepreneur.

I remember taking my father to the hospital when he was having a heart attack. As they were preparing him for the operation, he smiled and joked with me. The doctor was worried because he thought someone so relaxed must not understand what is going on. In fact, he was relaxed because he knew he had done everything he could, he was there at the hospital on time, and now it was out of his hands.

This reflects the attitude of karma yoga, the secret of work or philosophy of action, we talked about a few weeks ago. Indeed, an attitude of karma yoga is certainly part of surviving difficult times. But while this helps a great deal in day-to-day problems, there is a deeper mentality needed to face those great tribulations life throws at us from time to time.

In the Mahabharata, as we discussed previously, the Pandavas go through many trials and tribulations. Their cousins the Kauravas, jealous of their virtue and Yudhishtir's status as crown prince, put them through many difficulties. In the Bhagavad Purān Queen Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas, prays to Krishna after he saves them from the last of the tribulations - an attack on their last surviving descendant after the conclusion of the war. She says:1

viṣān mahāgneḥ puruṣāda-darśanād  
asat-sabhāyā vana-vāsa-kṛcchrataḥ
mṛdhe mṛdhe ’neka-mahārathāstrato  
drauṇy-astrataś cāsma hare ’bhirakṣitāḥ

My dear Kṛṣṇa, Your Lordship has protected us from a poisoned cake, from a great fire, from cannibals, from the vicious assembly, from sufferings during our exile in the forest and from the battle where great generals fought. And now You have saved us from the weapon of Aśvatthāmā.

vipadaḥ santu tāḥ śaśvat  
tatra tatra jagad-guro
bhavato darśanaṁ yat syād  
apunar bhava-darśanam

I wish that all those calamities would happen again and again so that we could see You again and again, for seeing You means that we will no longer see repeated births and deaths.

An average person, when faced with such terrible experiences, would wish to stay as far away from such things as possible in the future. Yet here a remarkable fearless attitude is shown by Kunti. Instead of running away, or even bearing through such events, she actually invites more. In each of these calamities she sees not just a silver lining, but an opportunity to serve a higher purpose, and thus embraces events rather than shunning or even passively accepting them.

If you recognize that much of the world is not under your control, then you also must recognize that trials and tribulations are inevitable. Having a mentality to face these challenges and relish the ability to improve yourself through them is incredibly transformative in how you approach such challenges.

It was not just in ancient India, but even in ancient Greece and Rome, philosophers recognized the importance of this attitude. In Stoicism, the concept of amor fati, or embracing fate, was a core tenet. The Roman Emperor and Stoic Marcus Aurelius famously wrote in his private journal published today as Meditations, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." In his book built off this concept, The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday writes:2

Great individuals, like great companies, find a way to transform weakness into strength. It’s a rather amazing and even touching feat. They took what should have held them back—what in fact might be holding you back right this very second—and used it to move forward. As it turns out, this is one thing all great men and women of history have in common. Like oxygen to a fire, obstacles became fuel for the blaze that was their ambition. Nothing could stop them, they were (and continue to be) impossible to discourage or contain. Every impediment only served to make the inferno within them burn with greater ferocity.

This idea that the great trials you face are not storms to be weathered but just more fuel to the fire of self-improvement is incredibly powerful. Oftentimes we speak of resilience, which is the ability to bounce back from setbacks. But this is deeper than bouncing back, it's the concept of anti-fragility coined by prominent author and professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In explaining this concept in the prologue to his book Antifragile, he writes:3

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

If you think of resilience as the ability to weather a storm, anti-fragility is riding the storm to your goal. This is a very important lesson to learn in the context of business and management as well. Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, famously said, "Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them." This goes towards founding companies as well. Airbnb was founded during the financial crisis of 2008, Netflix was founded shortly before the dot com bubble of 2000, even Disney was converted from a cartoon studio into Walt Disney Productions during the Great Depression.

Problems and limitations require innovation and force out greatness. One important point to understand is that a lack of limitations leads to excess, which forms the seeds of the destruction of the enterprise. One example is the OTT platform Quibi. Buoyed by very successful founders, the company raised $1.75 billion. However, it shut the same year it opened and was sold for $100 million in January 2021.4 This is one of many such stories.

Next time you are faced with a major problem or great difficulties, remember the attitude of Queen Kunti in the Bhagavad Purān. Embrace your problems, and remember that difficulty is the seed of your opportunity - to improve yourself and your organization. Treat crisis as an opportunity to forge yourself into something greater and stronger.

Have you faced crises before? How did you respond? What resources do you turn to, and what has helped you face difficulties in the past?

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As a leader, it is critical that you master yourself in the process of leading others. After all, if you can't marshal yourself to a task, are you worth being followed?

A while back I described the story from the Katha Upanishad, about the boy Nachiketa and how Yama, the lord of death, came to be his guru. We explored Yama's first teaching to Nachiketa, about the sreyas and preyas, the good and the pleasant. We looked at the importance of choosing sreyas over preyas, and the impact this makes in our lives.

Later we talked about the differing mindsets shown by Duryodhana and Arjuna in the Mahabharat when they asked similar questions about why, despite knowing what is good, we still sometimes choose the easier path.

Let's return to that question, this time going back to Yama's teachings to Nachiketa, which are very closely mirrored by Krishna's teachings to Arjuna in the Gita. These teachings, and the analogy given by Yama, which appears in Buddhist teachings as well, give us a guide to self-mastery.

Yama helps Nachiketa understand the inner self and the reason for impulses through an analogy. In the following verses from the Katha Upanishad, he explains the relationship of the inner world to the outer by comparing it to a chariot. Your consciousness is the passenger of the chariot, while your mind is the charioteer. Your senses are the horses of the chariot, and objects of perception that the senses perceive are the road.

आत्मानꣳ रथिनं विद्धि शरीरꣳ रथमेव तु। बुद्धिं तु सारथिं विद्धि मनः प्रग्रहमेव च॥ ३॥

ātmānam̐ rathinaṁ viddhi śarīram̐ rathameva tu, buddhiṁ tu sārathiṁ viddhi manaḥ pragrahameva ca. (3)

Know the Ᾱtman as the Lord of the chariot, and the body as the chariot. Know the intellect as the charioteer and the mind as the reins.

इन्द्रियाणि हयानाहुर्विषयाꣳस्तेषु गोचरान्। आत्मेन्द्रियमनोयुक्तं भोक्तेत्याहुर्मनीषिणः॥ ४॥

indriyāṇi hayānāhur-viṣayām̐steṣu gocarān, ātmendriyamanoyuktaṁ bhoktetyāhur-manīṣiṇaḥ. (4)

The senses (and the instincts) are the horses, and their roads are the sense objects. The wise call him the enjoyer (when he is) united with the body, the senses, and the mind.1

If your mind does a good job of curbing the senses from getting attached to objects, then all is well, the chariot runs smoothly and you reach your goal. The problem is that when the mind is unrestrained and disorderly - when a charioteer cannot control the horses, chaos ensues and the goal may not be reached.

यस्त्वविज्ञानवान्भवत्ययुक्तेन मनसा सदा। तस्येन्द्रियाण्यवश्यानि दुष्टाश्वा इव सारथेः॥ ५॥ yastvavijñānavān-bhavatyayuktena manasā sadā, tasyendriyāṇyavaśyāni duṣṭāśvā iva sāratheḥ. (5)

One who is always of unrestrained mind and devoid of right understanding, his sense organs become uncontrollable like the vicious horses of a charioteer.

यस्तु विज्ञानवान्भवति युक्तेन मनसा सदा। तस्येन्द्रियाणि वश्यानि सदश्वा इव सारथेः॥ ६॥ yastu vijñānavān-bhavati yuktena manasā sadā, tasyendriyāṇi vaśyāni sadaśvā iva sāratheḥ. (6)

But he who has the right understanding, and has a mind always controlled, his senses are always controllable as the good horses of the charioteer.2

Our senses, and the attachment to objects perceived by the senses, can run us in all sorts of directions. If we return to the question of sreyas and preyas, the good and the pleasant, it's easy to see how this might be the case. For example, you might develop an attachment and desire to the sweetness of a soda, and so make a choice that might be unhealthy for you. Even anger, which we discussed earlier as a destructive impulse, arises from these same attachments.

The disordered mind is like the uncontrolled chariot, it runs away from its goal and makes poor choices. So how do we counteract this? Lord Krishna explains in the Bhagavad Gita:

असंशयं महाबाहो मनो दुर्निग्रहं चलम् । अभ्यासेन तु कौन्तेय वैराग्येण च गृह्यते ॥ ३५ ॥ 

asaṁśayaṁ mahā-bāho mano durnigrahaṁ calam abhyāsena tu kaunteya vairāgyeṇa ca gṛhyate 

It is undoubtedly very difficult to curb the restless mind, but it is possible by practice and by detachment.3

The way to bring a disordered mind into control is by constant practice. (We'll leave out the part about detachment or vairagya for now, as this is nearly as misunderstood as karma that we discussed last week.) This shouldn't come as a surprise to us! After all, this is how one gains the motor skills necessary to control one's body as well. As a child through constant effort, we learn to walk, talk, and move around. We constantly practice this on a daily basis. Some who need even more fine control, like athletes, go above and beyond on this training.

The mind, like the body, needs training. If we wish to be able to bend our will towards a particular aim, we need to practice doing so. Yoga and the various meditation practices across religions and traditions were created for this end. We need to cultivate a constant mental practice to develop that level of control of our minds. The way we work each day to maintain our bodies, we need to do so with the mind as well.

These days there are nearly as many meditation apps as fitness apps, and many different types of meditation courses available online. It matters less which we choose, what matters is that we choose. As with fitness, there are more and less effective methods, but the most effective is getting started and sticking with it!

In a Harvard Business Review article, Matthias Birk shares:4

Practicing meditation has been shown to reduce anxiety, calm the amygdala, increase our ability to think creatively and empathetically take other people’s perspective. Steve Jobs... described his experience like this: “You start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.”

Take the step, begin a regular daily practice. It's necessary if you want to master yourself, and be worthy to lead others.

What do you think? Do you have a daily practice that helps you master yourself?

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On the other side though, how do you keep centered in good times? We've all heard the stories of those who became too successful too fast. Things rocketed upwards, and then inevitably plummeted downwards.

Sometimes it's a roller coaster - up and down, up and down. Facing each part may help, but somehow doesn't provide enough context to fully learn the lessons. Roger McNamee tells the story of how he tried to sound the alarm at Facebook on election interference. Though he had a strong relationship with both Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, they didn't heed his warnings about what was happening on the platform. As he tells it, they had been right so many times when others thought they were wrong, that it was hard for them to understand their blind spot here. Whether you agree with Roger's view about Facebook's role or not, it certainly affected public perception of the company and lost public trust as a result.

Tough times have their problems, good times have their problems, and even the combination can sometimes still leave us blind on how to approach things. So where do we look to understand how to approach these problems and how to learn from them?

The philosophy of karma helps us solve these problems!

If we want to understand this philosophy, there is one thing we must settle first. The Sanskrit term karma is one that has been widely used in common parlance, but is equally misunderstood. Because of this use and misunderstanding, there are a lot of wrong associations. The popular perception is that it's exclusively related to reincarnation or the effects of an action returning back to you over time or in a subsequent birth. In reality, it's incredibly practical, and focused on the here and now.

Let's unpack what it really means for us, and why the perspective it gives is so critical. The word karma comes from the Sanskrit root kri, which means to do. In the simplest sense, it's just action. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna explains the philosophy of action, or karma yoga:

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन ।
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भुर्मा ते संगोऽस्त्वकर्मणि ॥1

Karmanye Vadhikaraste, Ma phaleshou kada chana,
Ma Karma Phala Hetur Bhurmatey Sangostva Akarmani

You have a right to perform your actions, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.

You have the right to perform your actions, but you are not entitled to the fruits of the actions. This framing in English may make it a bit difficult to understand, but what's being communicated here is just an acknowledgment of reality.

Oftentimes we put in work, achieve a result, and think “I did that”. Sometimes we put in work and don't get the desired result. We may blame ourselves, or blame our circumstances. But rarely do we take a moment to acknowledge the reality: though we can control our effort and actions, the results are not in our hands. There are many other factors depending on the type of action taken. Nature, with its unpredictability, could be uncooperative with our ends. Other people could be helping us, or be at a cross purpose.

The reality is that while you can control your own effort, often the results are out of your hands. Sometimes this happens subtly and sometimes it's immediately apparent.

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a top boxer, was wrongfully accused and convicted of triple homicide, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He spent 19 years in jail for a crime he did not commit, much of the time spent in solitary confinement. To survive such an ordeal, Carter first accepted the circumstances around him. He could not control that he was imprisoned. Then he focused on what he could control - his own actions.

All of these actions were connected—training my body through the discipline of denial, training my intellect through writing a book and studying the law, training my Spirit through the struggle with desire, through daily meditation, and through studying the works of the world’s great minds. These actions or disciplines were steps along the way toward an idea of freedom that I could then just begin to imagine. It was a process in which I eventually learned that even while inside a prison there was no barrier in my life too great to ascend, too wide to get around, and that we live in a universe of unlimited possibilities.2

For Carter, accepting that results were not under his control, and focusing his thoughts and energy inwards to himself sparked what he describes as an amazing transformation. Of course, realizing that results are not under our control does not require something as dramatic or unjust as what Carter had to bear. Examine your own experiences critically, and you might realize this fact.

What karma yoga asks you to do is not to sacrifice the fruits of your labor, but to give up the illusion that you control results. It is a philosophy of acceptance, of giving up the concept of doership, and understanding that results are not truly in your hands. They may depend on your actions, but also many other factors not under your control.

This acceptance can be a powerful tool for directing one's energy to the work at hand. Acceptance prevents wasting energy fretting results. Let's say you are working on an important task, and are stressed out because the outcome is uncertain. That stress saps a portion of your energy that could be additional effort put into making the task successful. Perhaps, despite your best efforts, the outcome was different from what you sought. Acceptance prevents us from wasting energy mourning the result, and allows us to channel our energy towards fixing or recovering.

Acceptance and separating ourselves from doership also prevents us from deluding ourselves based on the results of our efforts. Annie Duke, the former poker champion, author, and decision strategist writes of this in her brilliant book, Thinking in Bets. At the outset, she talks about a famous decision by football coach Pete Carroll that resulted in his team losing the Super Bowl:3

Carroll got unlucky. He had control over the quality of the play-call decision, but not over how it turned out. It was exactly because he didn’t get a favorable result that he took the heat. He called a play that had a high percentage of ending in a game-winning touchdown or an incomplete pass (which would have allowed two more plays for the Seahawks to hand off the ball to Marshawn Lynch). He made a good-quality decision that got a bad result.

Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: “resulting.” When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn’t turn out well in the short run.

Later she shares:4

Drawing an overly tight relationship between results and decision quality affects our decisions every day, potentially with far-reaching, catastrophic consequences.

Understanding life is probabilistic not deterministic, i.e. it's more like poker than chess, is key to making better decisions and not getting caught up in results. This understanding is key to karma yoga - "Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities."

While this acceptance can be powerful - it can also sound incredibly passive and helpless. In reality, it's far from it. Firstly, one might think "if I can't control the results of my actions, and I'm not the cause of the results, does that mean I should just do nothing?" The final part of the verse from the Gita directly contradicts this - "never be attached to not doing your duty".

Karma yoga does not entreat us to abstain from activity. The Bhagavad Gita itself was delivered by Lord Krishna on a battlefield, inviting Arjuna to act. Instead, it helps us to form a healthy relationship with our activities and results. It is not negating our intentionality or purpose of activity. The purpose of your activity, or the goal of your activity is important. But no matter your purpose or your goal, the result may be positive or negative. You could make the right choices and get the wrong result. You could also make the wrong choices and get the right result. Either way, you cannot get wrapped up in the result that you cannot control. Focus on making the right decisions, focus on your intentions and your efforts. It does not mean you cannot learn from results, it means you should weigh your learnings with the understanding of what you could control, and what you could not.

This is an ultimately freeing approach, that allows you to lead unconstrained, with a clear view of the world. A leader who acts in accordance with karma yoga focuses on inputs and right processes, and quality of decisions, more so than simply hammering their team over results. Doing so builds psychological safety, a trait Google identified in a two-year study as the top indicator of a high-performing team.5

Ultimately karma yoga frees us from stress, anxiety, regret, and empowers us to focus our energy on our work, see things with a clearer view, and make higher quality decisions. It's something that can free you even within a prison, or keep you going after a high profile mistake. It's an approach that can keep you strong when things are down, and keep you level headed when you are succeeding. It helps us the most, which allows us to be of service to those around us as leaders.

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There are other reasons we might make the wrong choices. Conscious and unconscious divisions, rules, and lines drawn can significantly impact what we perceive as the truth. Our choices can be wrong even with good intentions, if our vision is clouded and our information limited.

Sri Ramakrishna, the 19th-century saint, illustrates this in a beautifully illustrative parable. He was remarkable in many aspects, but I especially admire his ability to distill complex concepts into a simple story.

Parable of the Elephant and the Blind Men1

Four blind men went to see an elephant. One touched a leg of the elephant and said: “The elephant is like a pillar.” The second touched the trunk and said: “The elephant is like a thick club.” The third touched the belly and said: “The elephant is like a huge jar.” The fourth touched the ears and said: “The elephant is like a big winnowing-basket.” Then they began to dispute among themselves as to the figure of the elephant.

A passer-by, seeing them thus quarrelling, asked them what it was about. They told him everything and begged him to settle the dispute.

The man replied: “None of you has seen the elephant. The elephant is not like a pillar, its legs are like pillars. It is not like a big water-jar, its belly is like a water-jar. It is not like a winnowing-basket, its ears are like winnowing-baskets. It is not like a stout club, its trunk is like a club. The elephant is like the combination of all these.”

This story is enacted again and again in our modern world. Here Sri Ramakrishna uses the story to illustrate the futility of sectarian quarrels in religion. Each sect having an incomplete view quarrels with others as to the true nature of reality. The true teacher sees the partial nature in these individual truths and can unify with such a vision.

However, it’s just as applicable to organizations and is becoming much more prevalent as the world becomes complex. Our world is more complex and interconnected than ever in human history. The sheer deluge of information produced every day dwarfs any individual’s ability to process. To deal with increasing complexity, we subdivide and specialize until problems seem manageable again. As our organizations grow, we specialize to be efficient. Unfortunately, this leads up to the situation in the parable, where like the four blind men, we primarily perceive parts of various problems and issues. This leaves us at risk of missing the importance of the full picture.

In modern parlance, this partitioning and isolation within an organization is called siloism. In her insightful book, The Silo Effect, journalist and anthropologist Gillian Tett describes this problem:2

But while the world is increasingly interlinked as a system, our lives remain fragmented. Many large organizations are divided, and then subdivided into numerous different departments, which often fail to talk to each other—let alone collaborate.

She goes on further to say:

It can also be a state of mind. Silos exist in structures. But they exist in our minds and social groups too. Silos breed tribalism. But they can also go hand in hand with tunnel vision.

You’ve probably observed these silos in action. Any organization that grows beyond a certain size has divisions of labor to get the job done efficiently. For example, you may have departments for R&D, engineering, operations, marketing, sales, finance, etc. In larger companies, these may be sectioned off further by business lines.

To build accountability into these groups, we develop key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure what is being accomplished. Unfortunately, this often leads to systems where people are incentivized to choose their own gain over the good of the collective organization - despite times when the organizational good would be better for them in the long term anyways.

Fred Kofman describes this situation in his book The Meaning Revolution:3

Because individuals work to achieve their own KPIs (key performance indicators), they optimize their subsystems, disregarding the system. They consider those who contribute to their individual goals as collaborative, and those who don’t as uncooperative. True collaboration disappears because nobody is willing to consider the best way to help the team win—regardless of whether doing so means pursuing their KPIs or deferring their own tasks to help someone else achieve a more important goal. And so it is that organizations stumble along, behaving inefficiently, incoherently, and self-destructively.

This behavior can have major consequences for the organization, its members, and the world at large if the impact of the organization is significant enough.

One of the first HBS cases I read at Stanford was on Sony, the Japanese conglomerate. Sony, as Tett also chronicles in her book, is one of the most clear cases of silos overtaking a company’s ability to innovate and stay relevant. The company that defined a decade of portable music with the Walkman ended up missing the digital revolution because internally three different groups released competing music players without an overarching strategy. This was a consequence of leaders seeking to organize the diverse businesses that Sony entered over the course of many years. This led to more individual efficiency in the short run for each department but much more difficulty collaborating in the long run.

In the case of Sony, this just had an impact on the company and its future. In the 2007-2008 financial crisis, silos and siloed thinking at financial institutions led to disastrous results for the entire world. Once again from Gillian Tett:4

One of the reasons the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 erupted, for example, was that the financial system was so fragmented that it was almost impossible for anyone to take an interconnected view of how risks were developing in the markets and banking world. Gigantic financial companies were split into so many different departments, or silos, the leaders who were supposed to be running the groups did not understand what their own traders were doing.

We have established that when silos lead to narrow vision, the scenario described in the parable of the elephant and the blind men, it can have disastrous comparisons. So how do we avoid this? How do we break down silos that form, and how do we prevent them from forming?

Sri Ramakrishna’s story has one clear example of how we might break down silos. By appealing to someone outside of their group, who had a clear view of the situation, the four blind men resolved their dispute.

These people can informally pursue the root of a problem and stumble into the issues of silos, or have designated roles that must cross silos by necessity. Product management, for example, has to attempt to bust silos by necessity to accomplish its goal. To produce a successful product, it’s necessary to take the holistic view of the business into account, working with marketing to ensure desirability of the product, working with engineering, r&d, and operations to ensure the feasibility of the product, and with finance to ensure the viability of the product.

Cross-functional teams and initiatives can also help reduce the formation of silos. Typically the holistic view of the business comes top down through management. The idea is that those at the top in a company have the holistic view, and this should be propagated through the management to the grassroots. However, this often doesn’t work in practice because the same management teams are often holding departments and individuals accountable to individual KPIs. This divergence between actions and rhetoric is what we discussed in the post on values and living your culture.

What can sometimes be an effective solution to this is to build up direct grassroots collaboration. For example, in Molekule, the company I co-founded, we have a core team process, where cross-functional core teams work together to realize an initiative. Though the individuals on the team are made up of people from different departments, their goal is shared and central to company success.

Of course, there is no one systemic solution to the problem of silos. Even if you have roles responsible for holistic success built into your company, both top down and bottoms up, silos and more importantly siloed mindsets, can form.

This is not just the case in companies, but for individuals as well. Too often, we are too sure of our individual perspective and fail to consider whether our experiences and information really cover the extent of what we are judging. Like a volcanic island with an ever expanding coastline, as our knowledge grows, so too should our sense of the vast ocean of knowledge we have not yet assimilated.

Ultimately to defeat this limited vision in ourselves and be the seer of the elephant, we must cultivate humility, openness, and a sense of higher purpose. Humility helps us realize that we may be like the four blind men, seeing only a part of the truth. Openness allows us to be like the four blind men in resolving their dispute, by being willing to listen to those with an outside unifying perspective.

It’s the higher purpose, however, that truly enables us to see beyond our silos, our individual gain and loss, and seek the common good. In the case of an organization or company, this is the mission of the organization. For Molekule, for example, our mission is to deliver clean air to everyone, everywhere. This, alongside values, and a clear strategy, communicated through the organization and lived up to by the leaders, will be what allows us to realize the mission together. You can defeat silos by giving everyone clarity on the real goal.

Take a sports organization, like the Golden State Warriors basketball team. There is a clear transcendent purpose for each player, to win the game and eventually the championship. Players can individually chase personal success since their pay on the open market is generally tied to this. However, sometimes we see them choose collective good over maximizing individual success. Andre Iguodala was a former all-star, and would command a starting position on most teams in the NBA. However, in 2014, he was asked to come off the bench for the good of the overall flow of the team.

Here are a few excerpts from his memoir about this situation:5

“You’ve played well, Andre. You’ve earned the starting spot . . .” 

I knew right then that there was only one reason he was telling me that. There was going to have to be a “but.” 

“But I think it’s best for the team if you come off the bench. If we don’t bring you off the bench, we’re just not going to get as much from our second unit.” 

I had never, in my entire NBA career, come off the bench...

Was this the beginning of the end for me? I didn’t want to think so, but every player knows that his days are numbered, and when a starter is turned into a bench player, it’s just one of those moments when you begin to wonder if the end is coming sooner than you think…

But I had to trust Steve. And I had to trust the organization. He and I saw the game the same way. If he said that the team would do better with me playing with the second unit, then I had to believe him. And most of all, I knew that whatever my personal feelings were about it, there was no conceivable way that starting a big ruckus over this was going to be anything other than terrible for the team.

Ultimately this trust proved well placed. Iguodala won three championships with the Warriors, a finals MVP, and was a key figure in the Warriors posting the most wins by any NBA team in history. By sacrificing metrics well known to deliver money in free agency contract negotiations, Andre Iguodala became even more successful personally by delivering organizational success. Notice from his dialogue, he demonstrated humility (rare for someone so publicly successful), openness, and commitment to a higher purpose. He did not do so naively either; he saw that Steve Kerr and the organization demonstrated these values and was willing to reciprocate because of his trust.

You have to decide what that purpose is for yourself or your organization, to help break the bonds of limited narrow vision. Swami Vivekananda, the famous disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, expressed this purpose communicated in the teachings of his guru thusly:

The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him—that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free.

This week we dove deep on a subject that is key for organizations, especially as they scale: silos. Next week we will talk about a key realization for the individual: understanding the philosophy of karma. This is a philosophy very commonly misunderstood in the west, but understanding the reality of it is key to interacting with the world and others in a healthy manner.

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Despite knowing this, we don't always make that choice.

This is what we discussed last week: the lesson from Dharmaraj Yudhishtir's youth was to help us see that for us to really understand Yama's lesson, we need to live it. Unless we are consistently choosing the sreyas over the preyas, we should not say we have yet comprehended the lesson.

This week let's take it a step further, if it seems so obvious to choose the sreyas, why don't we always do this? Why isn't it easy to make good choices, and why do individuals so often choose short-term personal gain over long-term societal gain?

To begin to answer these questions, we look again to the Mahabharata, and especially the Bhagavad Gita. We will analyze certain characters through the lens of mindsets. The central conflict in the Mahabharata is between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. The Pandavas are the five sons of King Pandu, and the Kauravas are the many sons of King Dhritarashtra. Duryodhan, the eldest of the Kauravas, becomes jealous because Yudhishtir, the eldest Pandava and his cousin, is appointed as the crown prince to inherit the throne due to his keen judgment, knowledge of Dharma, and valor.

Over the course of the Mahabharata, Duryodhan, possessed by jealousy, consistently makes the wrong choices in an escalating manner. He tries to have his cousins murdered, cheat them out of the kingdom, exile them, and eventually attempts to wage a destructive war to deny them any recourse.

Duryodhan, the antagonist, is powerful, valorous, and educated - but constantly makes the wrong choices. When Krishna tries to educate him on dharma, he replies that knowing right and wrong is not his problem.

Duryodhan says: 1

जानामि धर्मं न च मे प्रवृत्ति र्जानामि पापं न च मे निवृत्तिः । केनापि देवेन हृदि स्थितेन यथा नियुक्तोऽस्मि तथा करोमि ॥

jānāmi dharmaṃ na ca me pravṛttir-jānāmi pāpaṃ na ca me nivṛttiḥ ।
kenāpi devena hṛdi sthitena yathā niyukto'smi tathā karomi ॥ 57॥

"I know what is dharma, yet I cannot get myself to do it! I know what is against dharma, yet I cannot prevent myself from doing it! O Lord! You dwell in my heart and I will do as you impel me to do."

This is the familiar problem we are discussing - sometimes despite knowing what is best and knowing the consequences, we still choose something easier or more immediately desirable for ourselves.

Despite the relatability of Duryodhan’s statement, we should still view him with skepticism for how he articulates it. Notice how he gives up agency and responsibility for his choices. He frames the problem as unsolvable. There is some impulse that dwells within him that impels him to do these things, and he has no control over it.

Arjun, Yudhistir's younger brother, and the middle Pandava, expresses a similar problem but with a critical difference in his dialogue with Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita.

Arjuna asks: 2

अथ केन प्रयुक्तोऽयं पापं चरति पूरुष: | अनिच्छन्नपि वार्ष्णेय बलादिव नियोजित: ||

atha kena prayukto ’yaṁ pāpaṁ carati pūruṣaḥ anicchann api vārṣṇeya balād iva niyojitaḥ

"O Krishna, by what is one impelled to wrong acts, even unwillingly, as if engaged by force?"

Arjun is expressing a similar sentiment to Duryodhan here: that there is some impulse within that sometimes overrides one's judgment and impels one towards making the wrong choices. The major difference here between Arjun and Duryodhan's dialogues with Krishna is that while Duryodhan expresses this as a certainty, Arjun asks a question. He asks "By what?", "Why", and later "how may I overcome it?"

This difference in mindset is what allows Arjun to seek the help and build the discipline he needs to overcome the impulse, while Duryodhan is doomed to repeat mistakes over and over until his ultimate defeat. In the modern context, this difference is synthesized by Stanford Psychology professor Dr. Carol Dweck in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

Professor Dweck, through her research, explains the difference between the fixed mindset, where one views oneself as static - either born with talent and intelligence or not, and the growth mindset, where one views oneself as capable of development and progression. A person with a fixed mindset like Duryodhan leads with a desire to look great and accomplished. Because of their desire, they ignore critical feedback (Krishna's advice) and feel threatened by the success of others (Yudhishtir's coronation). By contrast, a person with a growth mindset leads with a desire to learn and therefore accepts and learns from criticism and finds lessons and inspiration in the success of others.

Arjun exhibits growth mindset in his approach to asking questions of Krishna in the Gita. He expresses his concerns and sorrows but does not stop there. Instead, when faced with the greatest obstacles, in a life filled with many tribulations, he asks Krishna how to overcome them.

Another story from Arjun's childhood illustrates his rapacious desire to learn, which led him to be the favorite of his teacher Dronacharya. One night Arjun woke up late in the night to some strange sounds. He quietly crept out of his bed and made his way to the kitchen to discover his elder brother Bheem eating in the kitchen in the pitch dark. He thought to himself that if his brother could navigate the kitchen and eat in the dark, why couldn't he practice his archery and learn to shoot in the dark? He began practicing that night, and when his teacher Dronacharya observed his diligence, he was moved by his dedication and approach. Later this ability to shoot in the dark was key in his battle with the warrior Jayadratha in the Mahabharata war.

By approaching life as a series of lessons and opportunities to test oneself and grow, we gain the capacity to improve our choices continuously. This mindset of continuously questioning and improving is the key to overcoming the inertia and desires that lead us to the wrong choices. This is the first critical step on the path to being a leader who embodies the values and principles they espouse and lead with. These are the types of leaders who ultimately inspire others to follow, and accomplish great things.

Whether you are focused on simply improving yourself, or teaching growth mindset as a part of your company’s approach and culture, it will pay dividends. Satya Nadella credits this mindset and its conscious spread through the organization as a key to his success in revitalizing Microsoft's business. Under his leadership, Microsoft's market capitalization has grown from $330 billion to nearly $2 trillion.

More importantly, as an individual, going beyond a fixed view of oneself where outcomes rather than learnings determine your self-worth can profoundly impact your ability to absorb setbacks and bounce back from failure.

There is more to answering the questions I posed at the outset of our discussion. After all, we discussed the understanding and mindset posed by Arjun's question, but we haven't even gotten into Krishna's answer. These are deep questions, and though we won't be able to answer these in one sitting comprehensively, we can progressively approach the answer. In the future, we will discuss the internal influences on these decisions, and the techniques used for conscious control. Next week, though, we will take a break from this line of discussion. We will try to understand a parable of the 19th-century Bengali saint Sri Ramakrishna and how it relates to the formation of silos and politics within an organization and how it can lead to greater self-awareness in decision making.

What are your thoughts on fixed and growth mindset? What are your experiences making choices between sreyas and preyas?

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When I am advising founders of companies, one of the things I emphasize the most is company culture. According to Fred Kofman in his great book Conscious Business, "Culture is as essential a part of the organization's infrastructure as its technology; perhaps it is more essential." I would agree that it is more essential, and that it is likely the one sustaining competitive advantage because of how difficult it can be to get it right. Most people agree on its importance. According to a survey by Deloitte, 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a distinct workplace culture is important to business success.  It’s not just businesses, of course, organizations of any kind need the right culture to be effective.

The reason I say it's difficult, however, is because of how easy it is to get it wrong. The same survey shows that executives have an inflated sense of their workplace culture when compared to employees based on significant differentials in their responses to questions about how culture is actually expressed in their organization. In many ways, the idea of organizational culture has become derided because of how ill-formed it is in some organizations. Vague platitudes like 'teamwork' and 'integrity' put up on walls or handed out on flashcards, completely divorced from the reality of working in the organization.

With that as a backdrop let's take a lesson from the Mahabharata, one of the great epics of ancient India. One of the central characters of the Mahabharata is the eldest Pandava prince, Yudhishtir. Yudhisthir was known as "Dharmaraj'' or Lord of Dharma, for his deep understanding and embodiment of Dharma. This story I learned from my father while growing up, describes how he came to be that way.

Once in the gurukul (like a Vedic boarding school) of the teacher Dronacharya, there was a lesson being taught on speaking truth. Dronacharya told his students the Kauravas (sons of King Dhritrashtra) and the Pandavas (sons of King Pandu) "Always speak the truth." He then asked each student to attest to their understanding of the lesson. One by one each said they understood, "Always speak the truth." That was, until he got to Yudhishtir, who was known as typically the most intelligent. Yudhishtir reported to the teacher that he did not yet understand the lesson.

Dronacharya then excused the class, asked them to come back the next day, and they would try again. Once again the next day he said, "Always speak the truth," and asked each student to explain. Again Yudhishtir said that he had not yet learned the lesson. On and on this continued for a week. At this point his cousins, the Kauravas were mocking him for his inability to comprehend this very simple lesson. Finally, after a week, he told the teacher he understood. Dronacharya asked him to explain to everyone how he had come to understand the lesson.

Yudhishtir explained, "When Guruji (teacher) explained 'always speak the truth', there were still many lies coming to mind. I determined that in order to only speak the truth, I should not even think of a lie. So each day I focused and fewer lies came to my mind, and since yesterday not a single lie has come to mind. So now I will be able to always speak the truth."

While the other students took the value of speaking the truth as a platitude and simply understood it on an intellectual level, Yudhishtir took it as a value that must be lived to be truly declared understood. This critical distinction is why he became known as the Lord of Dharma, because he didn't just intellectually understand right and wrong, he practiced it in his life.

As a leader in any organization, you have to absorb this lesson from Yudhishtir's youth. In order to build a culture in your organization, you can't just tell people values, you have to live them. They must become your decision-making compass, and become the decision-making compass of your organization. You have to hold people accountable to the culture to the same extent, or even greater than that of financial performance. 

When leaders don’t embody their culture and don’t hold accountability for their culture, a culture still forms.  However, in this case, it is unconscious culture - people respond to the values you embody in your actions, not your words.  Because this is not consciously shaped, it can lead to dire consequences for the organization.

That same survey by Deloitte put this point in stark terms: in companies with a history of strong financial performance, 75% of employees said leadership acts in accordance with the company's core values and beliefs, while only 49% of employees said this in companies without a history of strong financial performance. The fate of your organization depends on living your values.

The American poet and student of the Vedas, Ralph Waldo Emerson once said:

Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

This phrase has been adapted many times since into the common wisdom, "actions speak louder than words." This is normally used in reference to interpreting the values of another. But like Yudhishtir, if we hope to be leaders who inculcate positive culture, we must hold ourselves accountable first, and then spread that through our teams.

Regularly evaluate yourself on your values. Make sure you reference your values for the decisions you make and ask others to reflect on how each decision is made based on values. If you find there is a disconnect, you need to either re-evaluate your process or your values. Part of showing how these values must be lived is by incorporating values and modeling values in your performance management or regular check-ins with your team. And like Dronacharya, make sure you find out whether everyone has understood before proceeding.

Finally tying back to our previous post, this is the difference between intellectually understanding why you should choose the sreyas (the good) instead of preyas (the easy/pleasurable), and actually making the choice. In our next post, we will talk about the difficulties encountered in the process of living your values, and the difference mindset makes in doing so. And again, we'll feature a story from the Mahabharata.

For those of you who do not know, a severe second wave of COVID-19 is sweeping across India and the country’s healthcare system is overwhelmed. Please consider making a donation for oxygen concentrators below:

https://www.sewausa.org/Covid-19-Support-Bharath-Fundraiser

https://www.facebook.com/sewainternationalusa/posts/4078689285522256

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The Katha Upanishad, an ancient Indian scripture, and a part of the Vedas dates at least three thousand years old. The name Katha means "story", and the story being told here is of a young boy named Nachiketa. Nachiketa's father was performing ritual donations of his wealth to accrue merit. However, Nachiketa noticed that his donations were of the poorest quality, the worst of what he had. Feeling ashamed, and believing his father would not accrue any merit, he went to his father to ask who he would be given to. Irked by this strange question from his son his father responded angrily that he would give him to Yama (the god of death).

Nachiketa took his father's command seriously and departed for the realm of Yama. When he arrived he found it empty. For three days and nights, he waited at the gate of Yama, until he arrived. Impressed by the boy’s diligence, Yama offered Nachiketa 3 boons - one for each of the days he had waited.

For his first boon, Nachiketa asked for his father's rituals to be successful and all the good results to accrue to him. For his second boon, Nachiketa asked for the knowledge of the yagna (fire ritual) to be transmitted for the good of all humanity. For his final boon, Nachiketa asked for the knowledge of what is beyond death, and the true nature of the self.

Yama agreed to the first two boons readily but asked Nachiketa to choose something else for the final boon. He offered him great material wealth, kingship, fame, and admiration of his fellow people, but Nachiketa turned all of these down. Seeing that the boy would not be deterred by any of these temptations, Yama took the role of the guru, to teach Nachiketa the knowledge of what is beyond death.

Most of the Katha Upanishad is these teachings and this dialogue between Yama and Nachiketa. We're going to focus on one small part of it, Yama's first bit of teaching to Nachiketa. Here Yama explains the concept of sreyas and preyas: sreyas are what is ultimately good for a person or society, while preyas are what is easy and pleasurable. Yama explains to Nachiketa that sreyas may require discipline, but they ultimately lead one to the good, while preyas may be pleasurable, but they lead one towards ignorance.

This concept of the choice between what is easy and pleasurable, and what may be more difficult but ultimately beneficial was also the subject of study in the Stanford Marshmallow experiment initially performed in the 70s. Researchers placed a marshmallow in front of children and informed them that they would be back with another after some time. If the child waited for them to come back, they would get both, but if they ate the one in front of them before then, they would not get the second. The researchers were seeking to understand delayed gratification. What they found over the years was that the children that waited longer for the greater rewards tended to have better life outcomes on measures as diverse as SAT scores and BMI.

The results of the experiment were consistent with Yama's teachings from the Katha Upanishad. This concept of delayed gratification echoes that of sreyas and preyas, building discipline and willpower to seek the better outcome as opposed to the easier less rewarding path that is more readily available.

These choices are a constant in life from choosing to wake up early to work out vs sleeping in, choosing something healthy to eat vs drinking a soda, or choosing challenging work that forces you to grow vs taking it easy with what you already know. Yama actually tests Nachiketa's fitness to be his student by offering him such a choice; all the wealth, fame, and power in the world on one side, and the knowledge he is seeking on the other.

It may seem obvious to see how such choices may impact our lives, and yet we still often make the choice to go with what's easy vs what's good. On the individual level, this has an impact on us, and is a limiting factor on achieving our potential. On the level of a business, or our society, the consequences are even more dire.

In business, there is a constant tension between producing short-term results and investing in long-term strategies & sustainable growth. In order to build support for long-term strategies, executives must persuade investors to believe in their long-term vision. They also sometimes have to stay the course when investors or markets balk at the short-term sacrifices needed to pursue the long-term strategy. However, most management teams pursue strategies designed to maximize the near term, to beat their earnings estimates for the quarter. Doing so not only takes the pressure off, but it also maximizes the short-term value of their awarded stock or options, and thus makes them money.

However this pursuit of the preyas over the sreyas, creates boom and bust cycles for companies and the economy. Instead of steady sustainable growth, the sacrifice of the long-term health of the company for short-term profitability has created a great deal of volatility, and economic pain that requires government bailouts to salvage when things go too far wrong. Warren Buffet and Jaimie Dimon touched on this in their Wall Street Journal Op-ed, "Short Termism is Harming the Economy."

While they speak of some specific recommendations in this opinion piece, they also talk about what they see as some of the consequences: "The pressure to meet short-term earnings estimates has contributed to the decline in the number of public companies in America over the past two decades. Short-term-oriented capital markets have discouraged companies with a longer-term view from going public at all, depriving the economy of innovation and opportunity. Fewer public companies has also meant fewer opportunities for retail investors to create wealth through their 401ks and individual retirement accounts."

On a higher societal level, our embrace of continuing the fossil fuel economy is driving us towards the precipice of climate ruin. A transition to renewables will require significant investment and potentially some short-term disruptions. It will not be as easy as continuing to enjoy our existing infrastructure. But we have to recognize we are choosing what's easy in the short term, to the detriment of our own long-term good.

The good news is that we can reverse course, both collectively and individually, by embracing Yama's teachings to Nachiketa, and focusing on the long-term good. Like the distinction between sreyas and preyas though, this will require us to take the more difficult path.

On a personal, practical level, take some time out from your daily cadence to reflect on the choices you are making. Not just the direct choices you face, but also where you are investing your time. Oftentimes the implicit choices are the less examined ones. Where are you choosing to do what's easy as opposed to what would be best? It is easy in the bustle of life and work to fall into the path of choosing what's easy, because you are "too busy" to take a step back and reflect on what is easy versus what is good.

Lord Yama might argue you have too little time not to reflect.

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While building Molekule, I learned a lot about building and managing teams. I had some major successes, and many, many failures to learn from. I got to work with and learn from some of the best in Silicon Valley.

I also learned that oftentimes some of the most valuable insights came from outside startup culture. And that some of the people I admired within startup culture were pushing back against the growth at all costs mentality, and bringing more sustainable models of management and leadership into practice.

One important thing I learned is that effective leadership is authentic to the person leading. My style of leadership stems from my own values and beliefs. These values and beliefs have been shaped by the Vedic tradition and philosophy.

This lead me to realize that though management and leadership have been studied from time immemorial, most of the modern thought in this field comes from the western perspective. The dharmic worldview embodies diverse thoughts and practices, and has something unique to say about management and leadership.

It was then that I began thinking more deeply of the concepts I had grown up with - the meaning of Dharma: 'dharyate iti dharma' "that which sustains is dharma" and I began to relate it to business and economic cycles of boom and bust. These cycles stem from short-term & narrow thinking. Prioritizing quarters and shareholders rather than decades and stakeholders. The accumulated cost of these decisions over time drives the economic boom and bust cycles of expansion and recession. This lack of sustainability is not just economic, but environmental as well.

This leads us as a society to a position where we have historically great prosperity, but also low security, and a historically great crisis in climate change to face.

The driving force behind this endeavor is to look at the dharmic perspective and values, and take lessons on how to lead and govern leading to sustainable growth and prosperity - in both the long and short term.

This means looking at macro concepts like sustainability and economic cycles through a dharmic lens. But it also means looking at practical day-to-day challenges like how to meet the challenges of rapid growth, how to deal with threats to your business, how to run effective performance management, and how to manage yourself as well.

As we dig in, you will find that the ancient wisdom from dharmic traditions has a lot to say about how to be an effective leader today. And you'll have the advantage of learning from my mistakes, successes, and the access I've been provided on my journey.

What does ‘dharmic’ perspective mean?

I defined Dharma from a Sanskrit phrase above, but let me talk a little more about its meaning, and what perspective that lends us in understanding leadership and management. Sometimes in modern discourse, the term is erroneously taken as meaning religion, but this is not the context under which it was introduced or used here. The phrase "dharyate iti dharma" means "that which sustains is dharma". Here it is meant as a sort of cosmic law of nature - the laws that sustain both nature and society. In the Vedic culture, these laws are discovered by the Rishis, not established but existent in nature waiting to be discovered - and evident. This concept of Dharma is shared among the various religions originating in India - Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc. It is also found in other cultures and religions, for example, as the Dao in Daoism or Logos to Heraclitus and the ancient Greeks and later Stoics.

My background is primarily from the Vedic tradition, but while that may be the primary focus, we will look at lessons from other cultures as well.

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