Corporate Yoga: A Primer for Sustainable and Humanistic Leadership

Corporate Yoga: A Primer for Sustainable and Humanistic Leadership

Shiv Tripathi

Wolfgang Amann

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC.
Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tripathi, Shiv, author. | Amann, Wolfgang, author.

Title: Corporate yoga : a primer for sustainable and humanistic leadership /

Shiv Tripathi, Wolfgang Amann.

Description: Charlotte, NC : IAP-Information Age Publishing, Inc., [2018] |

Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017037731 (print) | LCCN 2017035862 (ebook) | ISBN

9781641130165 (E-book) | ISBN 9781641130141 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781641130158

(hardcover) | ISBN 9781641130165 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. | Personnel management. | Yoga--Psychological

aspects.

Classification: LCC HD57.7 (print) | LCC HD57.7 .T75 2017 (ebook) | DDC

658.4/092--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037731

Copyright © 2018 Information Age Publishing Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission

from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Foreword vii

1. Why We Need Yogic Corporate Action 1

2. How a Yoga of Spiritual Action Works 17

3. How Corporate Yoga Can Shape Responsible Management Actions 25

4. How Corporate Yoga Enriches the Debate about Sustainability and Humanism in Business 33

5. How to Internalize Corporate Yoga 43

6. Leading as a Corporate Yogi or Yogini 51

7. Maintaining Sustainable Momentum 61

8. Measuring Impacts on the Common Good 69

9. The Corporate Yoga Actions Framework 77

10. Next Steps for Corporate Yoga Actions:
Concluding Reflections 85

About the Authors 91

v

Foreword

As globally active scholars and advisors, we have been working towards more sustainable leadership practices and management education for years. We have jointly been actively involved in United Nations-sponsored initiatives on PRME (Principles of Responsible Management Education) and have delivered numerous faculty development workshops in a variety of countries. With this book, we aim to take all contributions a step further.

Over the years, we have seen both the untapped potential as well as the stark limitations that traditional leadership books, along with currently dominating approaches to leadership development, have. Many of our societal and corporate problems have become global changes. We seek to contribute to the leadership development debate by an invitation: to henceforth also search globally for inspiration on how to address challenges.

With corporate yoga, we present a fresh and new solution to a number of leadership and sustainability dilemmas. In our view, corporate yoga has significant potential to overcome many of the shortcomings we currently encounter in corporations, business schools, and universities.

By transferring insights from yogic thinking into the corporate world, new solutions can be designed and executed in order to build more sustainable leadership in our corporations.

During our journeys of discovery, we had the pleasure and honor to discuss our emerging thoughts with a number of corporate, political, and higher education leaders and experts. We are grateful for their time and constructive feedback.

We are equally grateful to HEC Paris and the Qatar Foundation for the generous research funding support we have received.

While concluding this work, we want to remember the contribution of a great thinker and scholar the late Ram Kumar Tripathi whose thoughts on yoga as a philosophy of ethical action constitute the foundation of the concept of Corporate Yoga. We also thank Prof. Rakesh Chandra Sharma, supervisor of a related doctoral work of one of the authors at Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidpyapith, Varanasi.

We are also grateful to our publisher, IAP, for this new opportunity to cooperate, and to Ilse Evertse and her associates for their editing support in helping us finalize this book. (Needless to say, all errors and omissions are for the authors’ accounts.)

Our thanks to our wives, Anita Tripathi and Shiban Khan, and our families, for their ongoing support.

Prof. Shiv Tripathi and Prof. Wolfgang Amann, May 2017