dr. aziz and the syndetic paradigm go to india
by robert aziz
Two weeks ago in The Times of India, Speaking Tree, Anant Nadkarni, Vice-President of Group Corporate Sustainability of the Tata Group, introduced The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung to the people of India by way of a most thought-provoking review of that work titled, A New Approach to Leadership. "Today," Anant Nadkarni would have us understand, drawing on his own executive observations in leading the social and environmental related initiatives for major Tata companies through a network of nearly 50 CEOs and 200 champions, "we particularly need to learn how our leaders might progress beyond power dynamics, a progression, as Aziz puts it, from ego control (narrow egocentric action) to ego strength (facilitation of the life process, co-creator). Business management, economics and finance has recently touched upon the importance of engaging triple (economic, social and environmental) or even multiple contexts in decision making – a development that is envisaged to be represented in the future in the presentation of integrated forms of business reporting."
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The Syndetic Paradigm, Anant Nadkarni quite rightly notes, the progression from an ego-centric, willful life orientation, lived largely according to the power principle, to a life orientation in which we seek to align ourselves consciously with the intrinsic process of self-organizing nature itself, is indeed a progression that is not only loaded with implications for how we are to do our personal lives, but it is no less loaded with implications for how we are to conduct ourselves in business. Speaking with specific reference to
The Syndetic Paradigm’s distinctive theoretical progression beyond the Freudian conflict-model of the psyche and the Jungian closed-system model of a self-regulating psyche to an open-system model of a psyche in a self-organizing totality, Nadkarni cogently asserts: "When such a process-based life orientation is applied to daily life and work, the search for meaning and the need to have a purpose becomes critically evident. It then becomes much simpler to explain why profit must have a purpose, why an individual’s passion must emanate out of a search for meaning, why genuine meaning must have an ethical basis and why people should behave ethically – because all of us are bound and connected and interconnected to the universe and its totality. We cannot, therefore, manipulate or subvert the system, the idea of being selfish is illusionary and the totality in which we all exist cannot be divided. Leadership will have to incorporate in daily ‘work-situations’ a much higher purpose for itself, its co-workers and their organizations, which is to say, become more inclusive, sustainable and personally be at peace with oneself. Just as there is evolution of the self, it would reflect on the evolution and behaviour of Capital." What a profound summation! What a wonderful introduction to the people of India, thank you.
