Ethics in Business and Management

Summary

Ethics in Business and Management collects the text of the 9th Bhogilal Leherchand Memorial Lecture, delivered by D. Veerendra Heggade — the Dharmadhikari (hereditary religious head) of Sri Kshetra Dharmasthala in Karnataka — in Mumbai on 7 January 1998 and presided over by Nani A. Palkhivala. Published as a booklet by the Forum of Free Enterprise, the address asks whether the term ‘Ethics’ retains any meaning in a modern world enthralled by money, technology and unlimited consumption, and answers by drawing the management vocabulary back to dharmic categories: Artha, Kama, Moksha, and above all Dharma as a restraining force on the acquisition of wealth.

Heggade builds his argument in successive sections — ‘Nature—the Best Manager’, ‘Problems of Parigraha’, ‘Present Condition’, ‘A Way Out’, ‘Dharmasthala Model’ and a closing ‘Message’. He contrasts the natural restraint embedded in Vedic and Upanishadic ethics (Apariraha, Samyama, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam) with the ‘TINA syndrome’ and ‘MAD’ — Mutually Aided Destruction — that he sees in the science-and-technology-driven business order, in the hands of MNCs and TNCs. He singles out cigarette companies as ‘global traders of death’ whose CEOs win Best Manager awards, condemns the vulgarity of TV advertising for liquor and condoms aired during cricket broadcasts, and notes that around 40% of executives suffer psychosomatic illness from the resulting moral-emotional dichotomy.

Against this, he offers the Dharmasthala temple administration as a working model of accountability: every Sanskramana day the Heggade must answer to the Dharma Devathas for the previous month’s performance, with instant punishment for intentional lapses. He invokes Kautilya’s Artha Shastra on yoga-kshema, the maxim ‘yatha raja, thatha Praja’, and the image of Rama with bow and arrow (Rama Bana) as warnings to political and business leaders who escape the fear of Danda. The lecture closes with a plea against Charvaka-style hedonism and a call for management institutes to produce ‘Indianised, Indian value-based management experts’ modelled on Koutilya and Manu rather than on imported American or Japanese systems.

Key points

• The booklet is the published text of the 9th Bhogilal Leherchand Memorial Lecture, delivered by Dharmasthala’s Dharmadhikari D. Veerendra Heggade in Mumbai on 7 January 1998 under the chairmanship of Nani A. Palkhivala.

• Heggade frames ethics through Indian categories — Niti, Prakriti, Samskriti, and the four Purusharthas (Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha) — arguing that ancient wisdom blessed earning but bound it by Apariraha (non-acquisitiveness) and Samyama (restraint).

• He warns that science and technology in the hands of MNCs and TNCs have produced a ‘TINA syndrome’ and ‘MAD’ (Mutually Aided Destruction), exemplified by tobacco companies that he calls ‘global traders of death’ whose CEOs receive Best Manager awards.

• Cultural critique targets cricket telecasts carrying liquor and condom advertisements, vulgarity in TV ads, the displacement of cottage industries by urban-marketed goods, and the loss of contentment in villages once exposed to TV.

• The ‘Dharmasthala Model’ is offered as evidence that authority, responsibility, accountability and transparency were already embedded in temple administration — with the Heggade himself answerable monthly to the Dharma Devathas and silent (not oral) acceptance of lapses.

• He invokes Kautilya’s Artha Shastra on yoga-kshema (‘In the happiness of the subjects lies the happiness of the king’), the principle ‘yatha raja, thatha Praja’, and the Rama Bana as a symbol of Danda that politicians no longer fear.

• The closing ‘Message’ rejects Charvaka materialism and urges management institutes to produce graduates trained in Indian value-based management drawing on Koutilya and Manu rather than imitating American or Japanese systems.

• Front-matter pairs the lecture with an A.D. Shroff aphorism on free enterprise, and the back cover with a Eugene Black quotation framing private enterprise as ‘an affirmative good’ — situating the address within the Forum of Free Enterprise’s wider pedagogic project.