Negotiations Skills Clinic - Indian Institute of Management ...

Programme Coordinator: Prof Jerome Joseph
Managing by Inspiring
August 17-19, 2011
Swami Vivekananda has said in one of his many inspired moments – “If you don't let a person be a
lion/lioness, the person ends up being a fox/vixen”– suggesting that every human being is born with
enormous talent only waiting to be recognized, canalized, nurtured and unleashed for the larger as
well as one's own good as the person manifests herself/himself to the world. The phrase “if you don't
let” suggests that the narrative underlying the context in which a person's talent unfolds becomes
critical to the nature of development as well as deployment of the talent.
One kind of a context is the context which diminishes individual and collective aspirations for
excellence and simultaneously stifles talent. It is this kind of context which makes Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi exclaim – “It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves
honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings”, Mahatma Gandhi, My Experiments with Truth, Part II
Chapter XXII. In the same breath, we can also join Gandhi in observing, “It has always been a mystery to
us how human beings can feel themselves honoured by subjecting themselves to the humiliation
inflicted on them by their fellow beings in the name of higher performance in workplace relations”. The
conception underlying Gandhi's lament refers to the not so uncommon context which leashes
individuals and teams by utilitarian, instrumental, opportunistic, command and control orientations
towards the exploitation of human talent in order to maximize rents and returns. The effect of this bleak
world view more often than not is just the opposite of what is intended which ostensibly is to get the
best out of human beings.
Is there then an alternative narrative to the one depicted above? Is there a more human, a more
respectful, a more sensitive, a more sublimating way of designing contexts for inspired talent nurture
as indeed portrayed by the poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Hymn XXXV, Gitanjali, Rupa 2002?
WHERE the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
It is the search for the alternative narrative to the nurturing of talent which is the driving force behind
this new offering – Managing by Inspiring – based on work which we have been doing over the
years…The alternative narrative has been christened “Theory M” and will be the subject matter of this
3 day programme. Theory M will translate into a Theory M “Ten Skills Framework” which will help
managers to inspire talented individuals and teams towards ever-widening thought and action in the quest
for perfection while at the same time upholding personal dignity, collective humanity and public respect.