HOLY HELP: Swami Sukhabodhananda and (top) Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

When the HR team of the Delhi-based Centurion Bank asked Ajey Vig to sort out an ego clash between two managers, he offered a straight solution — a spiritual one. “Both managers were among the company’s most competent employees. But they couldn’t see eye-to-eye. This caused chaos in their department,” recalls Vig, a teacher with the Bangalore-based spiritual organisation, Art of Living, which conducted a workshop on team building, bonding and inspirational leadership at the bank two years ago.

During the workshop — called APEX (Achieving Personal Excellence) — Vig trained the bank’s employees on how to use spirituality to achieve mind control, manage emotions, maintain mental equilibrium and keep egos in check. The lessons paid off. “They started working in sync. As a result, the department’s productivity shot up,” says Vig.

APEX, which, according to Vig, draws its lessons from ancient Indian scriptures, has been conducted at over 200 companies across India, including Larsen & Toubro, Siemens, LG, Accenture, Capgemini and Reliance Capital.

Clearly, Indian spirituality is sashaying down corporate corridors and monks have become the new management gurus. “Management studies are shifting from being result-oriented to being value-oriented. This is where the spiritual dimension comes in,” says Vig.

Prabir Pal, president, Association of Indian Management Schools (AIMS), says that in the last three years over 100 management institutes under the AIMS umbrella have invited spiritual gurus to lecture students on ethical management practices. Some B-schools even have in-house departments that fuse spirituality with management.

The trend began a decade ago when the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta, started the Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV), which uses parallels from the Mahabharata, the Gita and the Upanishads to teach marketing lessons. “We have a course in business ethics and on management culture creativity, which have a spiritual dimension,” says Panduranga Bhatta, co-ordinator, MCHV. IIM, Indore, too has a course on the Gita.

HOLY HELP: Swami Sukhabodhananda and (top) Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

Today, India’s new-age swamis are re-packaging Indian philosophies and spirituality and making management programmes out of them. Take Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev. The saffron-robed, bearded swami, who runs the Isha Foundation in Coimbatore, offers a philosophy-cum-yoga course that he calls Inner Engineering. The programme, claims Kumar Govind, head, Isha Communication Bureau, is an “effective tool” for corporate companies to run successful businesses. Vasudev is now a globe-trotting management speaker. He has delivered lectures at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Indian Economic Summit, TED India Conference in 2009 and at the Tuck School of Business, US.

Swami Sukhabodhananda, founder, Prasanna Trust in Bangalore, is yet another spiritual leader who dispenses work-life salvation to professionals. He specialises in sermons on managing life and businesses creatively. The trust runs Bangalore’s Prasanna Centre for Life Management, which offers tailor-made management programmes for organisations and also a Yogic Linguistic Program (YLP), which helps young managers learn the spiritual software for success. “India’s ancient work practices had not been properly documented and put forth so far. That changed with the new breed of spiritual thinkers,” says P.R. Madhav, CEO, Prasanna Trust.

The Mount Abu-based spiritual organisation, Brahma Kumaris, has also set up Spiritual University that conducts training programmes in self-leadership management, spirituality and management, communication skills, and stress and self-management. “The programme has been conducted in over a hundred companies,” claims Sister Chanda, a Raj Yoga teacher with the Brahma Kumaris.

Vig believes the corporate world is looking East for new management doctrines because companies have become people-driven. “The strength of present-day companies is measured by its human resources — not machines or funds. So there is increasing emphasis on handling people the correct way,” he explains.

Also, the employee is king in the Indian job market today. “Earlier, a jobseeker had few work options to pick from. So, like it or not, he stuck to his company,” says Vig. That changed with the economy opening up and job opportunities soaring. “It’s the reverse now — companies are keen to hold on to their human assets,” he adds.

Indian spirituality also benefited when Japanese management models — like Kaizen and TQM (Total Quality Management) — became a hit in the West. “The Japanese work models — which are based on Buddhism and Shintoism — proved that holistic management principles make brilliant business sense. This got the world interested in Eastern work ethics,” says B.P. Mathur, spokesperson for Swami Bodhananda, a Vedanta and meditation teacher, and a regular in the B-school lecture circuit.

The recent global economic meltdown also got management gurus rethinking Western work methods. “The meltdown was blamed largely on unethical work practices. Ever since, the focus has shifted to teaching ethics and values in management education. Corporations are realising they are important in business,” says Aims president Pal.

When Swami Someshwarananda began sermonising on spirituality two decades ago, he assumed his audience would largely be middle-class, middle-aged solace seekers. So when he was invited by the Indian Oil Corporation to give a lecture on ethical work practices to its managers in Mumbai, the Indore-based Swami was taken aback. “It set me thinking on integrating ancient Indian wisdom with management practices,” he recalls.

Someshwarananda set up the Vivekananda Centre for Indian Management (VCIM) in Indore in the early 1990s — to incubate home-grown management models. Here, ancient Indian mythological figures got a corporate twist. Among the management principles propounded by the Swami is the Arjun model of management, which trains managers to be goal focused. The Eklavya model is about self-management and self-motivation. And the Krishna management model talks of smart strategising.

“Put Krishna in today’s corporate world and you have the typical CEO, and the Gita a perfect management manual,” says Someshwarananda, who has conducted workshops on leadership, communication and marketing in about 100 companies — including Coca Cola, Pepsi, Ranbaxy, and Oil and Natural Gas Corporation. The VCIM has 15 centres across the country.

Amit Dasa, a spirituality teacher with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Iskcon), Bangalore, begins his lectures at B-schools by comparing corporate work life with an electrical product. “When you buy a new product, you read the manual before using it. Similarly, the Gita is a beginner’s manual for working professionals,” explains Dasa, who has held management workshops at IIM, Bangalore, and several other B-schools and corporate companies.

“Earlier, the success of corporate management was measured by results on the balance sheet. But now that management education is becoming holistic, Indian spirituality is finding its way into B-school curriculums,” says Dasa.

Indian spirituality has, clearly, caught up with the times.