Management principle for life

• Ancient shloka offers a roadmap to finding focus
• Being engaged meaningfully in the process is as important as the final product or goal
• Fragment, polish each piece and reassemble them to make something, perhaps bigger and/or better

“Yatho Hasta thatho Drishti, Yatho Drishti thatho Manah
Yatho Manah thatho Bhaava, Yatho Bhaava thatho Rasa”

“Where the hands(hasta) are, go the eyes (drishti); where the eyes are, goes the mind (manah); where the mind goes, there is an expression of inner feeling (bhaava) and where there is bhaava, mood or sentiment (rasa) is evoked.”

This verse from the Natya Shastra, the ancient Sanskrit treatise on performing arts by Bharata Muni, is as relevant to modern life as it has been to classical dance. Our ancient scriptures offer modern guide maps for anyone willing to seek and implement. Think about it.

Today’s biggest challenge, including for a corporate or business, is the need to constantly strive for and retain focus that is relevant to the task at hand, to the space (scope/stage) of its execution and to sincerity of attempt.

It is  focus that delivers desired, transcendental/long lasting, results. If you read the verse one more time, it would not be difficult or incorrect to extrapolate its reference to a possible solution for attrition in actions, hence attrition of thought process, eventually leading to attrition of mind-body connect.

This is the literal sequence as follows the translation. But the reverse is as true in reality. This concept lends itself beautifully to every facet of work/play simply because it rises above linear interpretation while offering just that! It delineates the sequence of cause-effect profoundly, making sense from every perspective.

The underlying tenet of connectivity between the physical elements with the resultant ‘bhava’ (sentiment) is what one is instinctively seeking in performance of all life roles (personal and professional) and which is more often than not elusive, leading to conflicts, poor ideation, inefficient execution and not surprisingly, sub-par performance. If performance exists, it invariably comes at a high cost – for business, among other reasons,  in terms of people engagement and allegiance to the cause or organization.

Seems far fetched? Not really. Good management is about designing and implementing better processes, then further breaking down tasks/ processes into smaller streams of executables and addressing them with required attention to detail. Quite like the dancer – who is taught that for dance to be spell-binding, exalting and an uplifting experience not just for oneself but also for the audience, management too strives for a similar connect in its chosen domain. People at the helm are constantly challenged to discover the missing links in the chain and then building/fixing them in a manner that could possibly serve as a blueprint for the future.

It’s about fragmenting a whole into pieces, polishing each piece and reassembling them to make something, perhaps even bigger and/or better.

Read the shloka (verse) one more time. It’s about the dance of life really, of which work is a part. It emphasizes that being engaged meaningfully in the process is as important as the final product or goal. It’s this engagement that will determine the quality of the output, whatever it might be. Is it not a simple and powerful management principle to be understood in its depth?