Managers need to keep their eye on the ball, not the target

Let us start with the following premise. In any company, the relationship with people is fundamental.

If you have 30–40 people in a company, the manager can watch them when they come in at 9 or 9.30 in the morning, how reluctantly, how enthusiastically. See how they sit at their desk – how many of them are really enthusiastic. Some people sit with their heads in their hands. Then there’s a problem – the CEO of a small company can see that. The CEO can talk to that person, talk to them nicely, ask what’s wrong. He knows, for instance, that this guy got married six months earlier. That implies some natural consequences – perhaps, there is an uneasy relationship between the mother and the wife. This is not unknown in India, and maybe other parts of the world. So the CEO talks to him – it’s part of caring, taking care.

A subject farmers talk about is sowing the seed. When the sowing season starts, you must sow the seeds. The good farmer can feel the quality of the seeds at the time of buying them in the market. At the time he buys the seeds, he can feel the potency of the seed by touching it. He doesn’t want to waste his time; if you plant poor quality seeds, you wait for six months and then nothing of great value happens. It’s a waste of time. That applies to management also. When you take some new initiatives, recruiting new people, you must have a feel for the people and the project.

In our book The Enlightened Manager, we ask what can and cannot be taught about management. We go beyond business schools, we hope, but not by being more ambitious, rather by being more modest. We use the tool of negation – first of all, establishing what management is not – before coming to some understanding of what the core of it might be. We also delve into relationships as management is about managing people, not about doing the work yourself. But at a deeper level, it is about the state of the mind. So I must understand my state of mind first. In management, the real soil is the state of mind. You must care for your state of mind first.

Let’s say you’re provoked by somebody, somebody upsetting you, or you feel jealous or angry: the seed of anger takes root in the soil of the mind. Our book is about understanding the operation of the mind using the tool of negation and the mirror of relationship. In the same way, for the farmer, the soil is a way of living, not a means of living. The soil is the state of mind.

So it is in this spirit of feeling things directly that our book was written. The first-hand spirit. How this can be approached by someone with this farmer-like approach to management.