Venkat R. Krishnan
Short Writings

Gravity: The Great Lakes Magazine, No. 4, April 2007, pp. vi-viii.

"Attitude towards human beings: Key to business success"
--Venkat R. Krishnan

Human resources are a special kind of resource for any organization, and they cannot be meaningfully compared with other resources. When human beings are considered to be just like any other resource, the tendency is to use the human resources as means to achieve business goals. Nothing could be more destructive of long-term business success than treating human beings as means to be used. Human beings are not pawns in the game of corporate chess, but they are beings whose dignity is to be respected. Using other human beings to achieve our goals, in any manner whatsoever, is Machiavellian and is the exact opposite of authentic leadership.

The primary difference between power and leadership is that power-holders treat other human beings as things or inanimate objects and use them to achieve their own goals, while leaders treat followers as human beings and aim at achieving followers' goals besides achieving their own goals. Leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain motives and purposes mobilize resources to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers. This is done in order to realize goals mutually held by both leaders and followers. Leadership is inducing followers to act for certain goals that represent the values, wants, needs, aspirations, and expectations of both leaders and followers. Moreover, the genius of leadership lies in the manner in which leaders see and act on their own and their followers' values and motivations. To control things is an act of power, not leadership, for things have no motives. Power wielders may treat people as things. Leaders may not (Burns, 1978, "Leadership," pp. 18-19).

It is often argued that organizational goals are higher in priority and that individual goals should be subordinated to organizational goals. It is sometimes even claimed, perhaps ignorantly, that when individuals join organizations, they accept the organizational goals as their goals. But, no one works for another person's goals. Striving towards achieving one's goals is part of one's motivational process. Hence, goals of human beings are always personal goals only. Goals of individuals in organizations could comprise money, status, meaningful work, enjoyable social relationships, providing good education for their children, etc. Achieving organizational goals could be a means for achieving one's personal goals, but human beings strive towards only their personal goals. Superior leadership requires addressing followers' personal goals as well as leader's own goals or organizational goals, both as equally important ends in themselves. If there is a forced trade-off between followers' goals and organizational goals, followers' goals should get a higher priority. Human beings cannot be used as means, no matter what. Some degree of farsightedness may be needed to comprehend this though. As Swami Vivekananda said (Complete Works, Volume 1, p. 32), "Unselfishness is more paying, only people have not the patience to practice it."

O'Toole (1995, "Leading change: The argument for values-based leadership," p. 37) said: "Contrary to received wisdom, when leaders fail to bring about change, the fault seldom lies in a mistaken choice of how-to manuals. Our review of the Rushmorean approach to leadership prepares us for a different conclusion: leaders fail when they have an inappropriate attitude and philosophy about the relationship between themselves and their followers. Those who do not respect and trust their followers cannot lead them. Conversely, those who succeed at bringing about effective and moral change believe in and act on the inherent dignity of those they lead -- in particular, in their natural, human capacity to reason."

Burns claimed that moral leadership emerges from, and always returns to, the fundamental wants and needs, aspirations and values, of the followers. It is a kind of leadership that can produce social change that will satisfy followers' authentic needs. Such leadership is not to be confused with the too common practice of pandering to the base wishes of the lowest common denominator -- promising whatever the masses think they want, even if that might be inherently evil. Instead, leaders must discern followers' true interests from their stated desires and learn to address the underlying needs that followers are unable to articulate. An effective leader must refine the followers' views in a way that transcends the surface noise of pettiness and contradiction. All values-based leaders illuminate their followers' better sides, thereby revealing what is good in them. In the end, the leader's vision becomes their vision because it is built on the foundation of their needs and aspirations. Leaders appeal to the minds and hearts of their followers and the leadership goal is to change the beliefs and behavior of the followers to make them better human beings.

Leading change does not depend on circumstances, but rather it depends on the attitudes and values of the leaders. In complex settings, effective leadership will entail the dimensions of vision, trust, listening, authenticity, integrity, hope, and especially, addressing the true needs of followers. Without these factors, the likelihood of overcoming the ever-present resistance to change is minimal. If this is correct, what is required to guide effective change is not contingency theory but, rather, a new philosophy of leadership that is always and at all times focused on enlisting the hearts and minds of followers through inclusion and participation. Such a philosophy must be rooted in the most fundamental of moral principles -- respect for people. In this realm of morality, there are no contingencies. Values-based leadership, by definition, cannot be situational or contingent.

Evidence indicates that leaders who understand why change is resisted and are willing to make personal investment required to overcome that resistance are likely to achieve the goals they seek. Leaders overcome the chronic and inevitable pattern of resistance in only one-way -- by building an alternative system of belief and allowing others to adopt it as their own. That is the essence of values-based leadership. Value-based leadership is an attitude about people, philosophy, and process. To overcome the resistance to change, one must be willing, for starters, to change oneself.

The following are some characteristics of values-based leadership:

1. Integrity. Leadership requires integrity. Integrity has two aspects. Firstly, it is synonymous with truth telling or honesty. A true leader must behave with integrity in this sense by being an honest individual, someone whose words and deeds are consistent. Secondly, the leader needs that related type of integrity that has to do with the integration of one's personality. Integrity in this sense refers to the much-admired trait of wholeness or completeness that is achieved by people who have healthy self-confidence and self-esteem. People with integrity know who they are. Their self-esteem allows them to esteem and respect others. Such leaders' ease with themselves allows others to esteem and respect them. In spite of odds, they never lose sight of their goals or compromise on their principles. They are simultaneously principled and pragmatic. The long-term courses they adopt are based on what is morally right. They are pragmatic, as they are willing to lose on this or that immediate issue because they would not be distracted from the ultimate objective. Successful completion of one's short-term mission is not the clearest sign of effective leadership, but lifelong consistency of high moral purpose is.

2. Vision. Values-based leadership is based on an inspiring vision. The only course for the leader is to build a vision that followers are able to adopt as their own because it is their own. In the end, the leader's vision becomes the vision of the followers because it is built on their needs and aspirations.

3. Trust. Values-based leaders inspire trust and hope in their followers, who in turn become encouraged to serve, sacrifice, persevere, and lead change. They win the loyalty of followers through deeds and by example. The trust in the leaders also grows out of leaders' manifest integrity, willingness to serve, and respect for followers.

4. Listening. Values-based leaders listen to their followers because they respect them and because they honestly believe that the welfare of followers is the end of leadership. While values-based leaders listen to the opinion of the people they serve, they are not prisoners of others' opinions.

5. Respect for followers. The sine qua non of morality is respect for people. Effective leadership of change usually begins with commitment by leaders to the moral principle of respect for followers. Those who succeed in bringing about effective and moral change believe in and act on the inherent dignity of those they lead -- in particular, in their natural, human capacity to reason. In bringing about change, these leaders include the people affected in the change process. All human beings have certain inalienable rights; particularly all are entitled to be treated with respect and as ends and not means.

6. Clear thinking. The leaders are clear about their own beliefs. They have thought through their assumptions about human nature. They listen to the needs, ideas, and aspirations of their followers, and then, within the context of their well-developed systems of belief, they respond to these appropriately.

7. Inclusion. Values-based leadership requires full inclusion of followers. Inclusive leaders enable others to lead by sharing information, by fostering a sense of community, and by creating a consistent system of rewards, structure, process, and communication. They are committed to a principle of opportunity, giving all followers the chance to contribute to the organization (O'Toole, pp. 9-34).

Values-based leadership is the best prescription for long-term business success. Values-based leaders believe in the principles of liberty, equality, and natural justice. They bring about change by pursuing moral ends that their followers would ultimately adopt as their own, ends that are derived from the real needs of followers. The standard of excellence for a values-based leader is to lead change both morally and effectively. Values-based leadership is founded on an inviolable moral principle -- that followers are human beings who are not to be used as means, but whose dignity is to be respected.

Management Compass, Vol. 5, No. 11, Oct-Nov 2006, p. 148.
LIFE AT B-SCHOOL
'Lakhs sound too small'
Brace up for a paradigm shift in learning if you get admission to a B-school, cautions the faculty

"Real world resembles football"
--Venkat R. Krishnan

How should students make a headway in the first few weeks in a B-school?

The first few weeks in a B-school are extremely crucial. Others' first impressions of us are lasting and they cloud their subsequent rational thinking since human beings are rationalizing rather than rational beings. The initial relationships that are formed tend to affect self-esteem, facilitate academic performance, and make the educational process more enjoyable.

There are two factors that can influence the process of making headway in the first few weeks in a B-school. The first factor is to understand the realities of the social world. We live in an interdependent world and the real world resembles football rather than golf; our success not only depends on how we perform, but it also depends on how others perform. Human skills are more useful than functional or technical skills. Considering that human beings are rationalizing beings, focusing on understanding others' perspectives, prejudices, and stereotypes is crucial. Ensuring that others have desired impressions of us (called impression management) pays rich dividends and cannot be ignored.

The second factor is to develop the skill of taking care of your interests: Waking up from inertia-addiction (putting up with everything); doing something rather than doing nothing; avoiding hypocrisy; replacing self-absorption with desire to influence others; spending time thinking about others than first about ourselves; dealing with others skillfully and strategically, never forgetting our goals; identifying friends and enemies and their strengths and weaknesses; building allies; and always remembering our long-term interests, and using appropriate means to take care of those interests.

Sapphire Newsletter, Vol. 5, Mar 2001, pp. 1-2.

"Should Indians be Mere Copycats?"
--Venkat R. Krishnan

Extending this line of thinking to management, can a mere imitation of Western management practices by Indian managers result in superior performance? Geert Hofstede in his article "Motivation, leadership, and organization: Do American theories apply abroad?" (Organizational Dynamics, Summer 1980) questioned the extent to which "theories developed in one country and reflecting the cultural boundaries of that country apply to other countries" (p. 50). He defined culture as the collective mental programming of people in an environment and claimed that it has become crystallized in the institutions these people have built together: their family structures, educational structures, religious organizations, associations, forms of government, work organizations, law, literature, settlement patterns, buildings, and even scientific theories. All of these reflect common beliefs that derive from the culture (p. 43). When some of the beliefs that are part of Indian culture are fundamentally different from those on which the Western management prescriptions are based, does it make any sense at all to simply imitate the practices of the Western world?

Take for example, the Western model of motivation. Almost all human resource practices in India including compensation and reward systems are based on that model. There is evidence to show that such a wholesale imitation is probably not conducive to improving corporate performance. The Western assumption that individuals are solely driven by their individual rights and personal needs may not be very relevant for India. Indians consider discharging their duties to be more important than doing as they wish. Duty is conduct that maintains order and balance in an otherwise fluid universe. What is most important is meeting one's social obligations toward relevant others such as family members, relatives, friends, and even strangers. Hence, duty within an organization is interpreted as appropriate role behavior towards others, like respecting and obeying superiors, and loving and caring for juniors and dependents (J.B.P. Sinha, 2000, "Patterns of Work Culture," Sage, pp. 29-30). Human resource practices in India should therefore revolve around the various duties of employees and how best to help employees discharge those duties.

S.K. Chakraborty ("Wisdom leadership," 1999, Wheeler, pp. 158-160) claimed that emphasis on duty is perhaps the natural corollary of the Indian temper which has always seen the individual in the context of the whole--both societal and cosmic. Not just living off, but living for the whole, without contradicting individual perfection, has been the persistent Indian ideal. Duty-based modeling of social relationships has therefore, evolved as a practical scheme to fulfill this ideal. Egoistic individualism, on the contrary, can only result in pitting the individual as an adversary of society. Rights imply an exchange process whose direction is from others unto us. Duties, on the other hand, reverse the flow in terms of from us unto others. The concept of duty is one of the basic pillars of Indian culture. An Indian is born with several debts to others, and the purpose of human existence is to evolve into something higher by discharging one's obligations or duties toward those various beings. Human behavior in organizations could therefore be best managed by providing a conducive environment for such fulfillment of obligations.

Being a copycat can never enable us to bring out our best potential. Knowing what others do is different, and simply imitating them blindly is different. It might be useful to know the causes and effects of human behavior according to Western management models, but without understanding the moderating role of culture, such knowledge might be nearly useless. Corporate India cannot afford to ignore the basic assumptions of Indian culture like duty-orientation, if it is interested in achieving organizational excellence. It is time we gave more attention to empirically testing whether Western management prescriptions work in India, before embracing them without any modification. One person's food could even be another person's poison.

Sapphire Newsletter, Vol. 3, Sep 1999, p. 3.

"How to Ensure that Power is not Abused"
--Venkat R. Krishnan

Abstract. People who have power over others abuse it only because the latter are not aware of the nature of power and the ways in which it can be exercised. Understanding the sources and uses of power would help prevent one from being at the receiving end of power abuse. This would also result in a win-win situation by ensuring effective use of power.

James MacGregor Burns (1978, "Leadership," New York: Harper & Row) defined power as a relationship in which power holders, possessing certain motives and goals, have the capacity to secure changes in the behavior of a respondent, by utilizing resources in their power base relative to the target of their power-wielding. The resources in the power base must be relevant to the motivations of the respondent. Even the strongest of power devices like imprisonment or denial of food may not affect the behavior of a martyr.

Power is exercised in order to realize the purposes of the power-wielders, whether or not the goals of the respondents are satisfied thereby. Power-wielders simply use resources to achieve their own goals. The resources, however, should be relevant to the respondent's needs or values, but only as necessary to exploit them. Abuse or unethical use of power takes place when power is exercised to achieve power-wielders' goals at the expense of the respondents (Daniel Sankowsky, 1995, "The charismatic leader as narcissist: Understanding the abuse of power," Organizational Dynamics 23(4): 57-71). The respondents are then treated as things, and not as human beings. They are merely used as instruments to be manipulated for achieving the goals of the power-wielders. The boss who creates an excessively demanding workload, pushes subordinates to the point of burnout, and sacrifices them at the altar of his or her personal mission is abusing power.

Abuse of power needs to be distinguished from force. Force is a form of induced change in a target that occurs without the target's volition (Bertram H. Raven, 1993, "The bases of power: Origins and recent developments," Journal of Social Issues 49(4): 227-251). Threat of force may be used to exercise power, but volition is the crucial variable. The target has no choice in the case of force, while abuse of power gives some choice to respondents. The subordinates of the excessively demanding boss could choose to quit their job, or do much less than what is demanded and face the consequences. Force, on the other hand, is seen in the case of a psychiatric patient who does not respond to anything else and is physically strapped to his or her bed.

Every human being can always find some relevant resources that form part of his or her power base. Abuse of power arises because of the fundamental assumption that respondents do not have any power and are also unable to perceive the goals of power-wielders and the means they adopt to achieve those goals. Abuse of power on the part of power-wielder is a direct consequence of the respondent being ignorant of power dynamics. Understanding the strategies and tactics through which power is developed and used in organizations will help one become an astute observer of the behavior of others (Jeffrey Pfeffer, 1992, "Managing with power: Politics and influence in organizations," Boston: Harvard Business School Press). Understanding power would help people consider the range of approaches available to them and use what is likely to be effective in order to achieve their goals. Those who are aware of the means to achieve their goals would not allow someone else to achieve his or her goal at their expense. Knowledge of power and its manifestations would help prevent abuse of power by others. This would result in power being exercised for mutual benefit by achieving the goals of both sides, leading to a win-win solution.

Sapphire Newsletter, Vol. 1, April 1997, pp. 3-4.

"Ethical Orientations of Future Managers: Role of Value-Based Management Education"
--Venkat R. Krishnan

"Values are at the core of our personality, influencing the choices we make, the people we trust, the appeals we respond to, and the way we invest our time and energy. In turbulent times they can give a sense of direction amid conflicting views and demands." Value-based education has as one of its primary goals the shaping of the value systems of students. Nothing could be more valuable to the business world than business graduates whose personal values have been given due attention by the management schools.

A value is "an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence." If a person values freedom as an end-state of existence, it means that he or she believes that freedom is preferable to slavery. Similarly, if a person values responsible as a mode of conduct, it means that he or she believes that being responsible is preferable to being irresponsible.

When an individual ranks all the values along a continuum of relative importance, his or her value system is obtained. Value system provides the unique value configuration of an individual, and is the most accurate picture we can ever have of someone. The structural organization of the value system reflects the degree to which giving high priority simultaneously to different values is motivationally and practically feasible or contradictory. For example, a value system in which ambitious is ranked above honest would indicate that the person believes that being ambitious is more important than being honest.

Value systems provide the basis for the development of individual attitudes that lead to specific decision-making behavior. Thus value systems play a major role in the ethical dimension of decision making. When clear and simple answers are not possible, managerial decision makers must ultimately be guided by their personal values and their convictions of what is right and wrong. Differences in personal value systems help explain ethical attitudes and orientations of people. Understanding value systems has been found helpful in moving beyond the rhetoric of ethical codes by developing a more coherent, deeper knowledge of the ethical orientations of individuals and how they are likely to act in situations requiring ethical judgment. Value systems are the most powerful influences on human behavior, and therefore provide the key to understanding differences in ethical orientations.

Ethics is becoming an increasingly important topic in the management of organizations today. Powerful regulatory agencies coupled with the demands of a competitive environment have made organizational ethics a vital necessity. Many of today's businesses are faced with the challenge of creating an ethical organization. Organizational ethics is the capacity of an organization to reflect on values in the corporate decision making process and establish how managers can use these observations in management of the organization. The potential benefits of an ethically oriented organization are many though often indirect.

Ethical orientation of managers is a key factor in maintaining an ethical environment within an organization. Managerial skills alone are not enough. These skills need to be coupled with integrity and ethical behavior and traits. In order to meet the goal of an ethically oriented organization, the managers of the organization must have strong ethical orientations. So, organizations that are keen on maintaining an ethical climate need to select and train ethically oriented managers.

A society socializes individuals to value honesty because it is important to the society as a whole that individuals do not cheat or steal. Similarly, management schools could inculcate certain values in students that would stand them in good stead when they enter the corporate world as managers. Management schools need to give less emphasis on teaching methods and principles, and a greater focus on the value systems of students. Shaping the value systems of students would of course require efforts that are not confined to classrooms. Much more intensive socializing and interactive actions will be needed, since value-based education focuses on the whole person rather than just on disseminating conceptual knowledge.

Values are enduring beliefs, and therefore very difficult to change. One who values obedience is highly unlikely to start believing that it is preferable to be disobedient than be obedient. Value systems, however, can be changed with relatively greater ease. Change in value system requires rearrangement of the relative importance given to various values. For example, one who values pleasure more than self-respect could be convinced over a period of time that self-respect is more important than pleasure. The corporate world has to interact continuously with management schools in order to ensure that the value-based education provided by the latter do indeed target those values that are of utmost concern to the former.

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