In 1978, S. K. Chakraborty began thinking deeply about human values in the context of management. He now directs the Management Centre for Human Values at the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta. Author of more than a dozen books–including Values and Ethics for Organizations: Theory and Practice (Oxford University Press, 1998)–he began his work in finance and accounting. He was interviewed for Newsline at his Centre in March by Bruce Lloyd, principal lecturer in strategy at South Bank University in London.

You have established a remarkable Centre here on this campus on the outskirts of Calcutta. How did it all happen?

It began about twenty years ago as a small individual effort, while I was teaching finance and accounting at the Indian Institute of Management. Working with both the Institute and on in-company training, I found many managers raising two questions. First, when it came to managing the human side of the organization, why did we always have to discuss ideas in terms of essentially American values? On the human side, at least, there was a tradition of indigenous Indian ideas that could be offered.

Second, why was it that beneath the surface of almost all organizations there appeared to be an enormous number of factors that were causing managers to operate suboptimally?

I came to the conclusion that the problem was due to not addressing the quality of the human being. Professional competence and professional skills [are not an] answer to being a good human being.

So we began to identify a skills/values gap, and we noticed that, although the combination of skills was changing fast and becoming more refined and focused, at the same time the values area was not being taken care of in any conscious way. It appeared that professional management was taking a more and more manipulative approach toward skills. This manipulating appeared to be taking place primarily because the values dimension in management was not openly and explicitly acknowledged. Inevitably, because of that, this area was not well managed.

The essential content of your work is in two areas: strategy and leadership. It is increasingly recognized that a first organizational priority is to embed effective values, as this will critically influence both the nature of the strategy that emerges and the effectiveness with which it is implemented. Are there elements of Indian culture that enable that importance of the sense of "being" to be more easily recognized than in other cultures, which appear more preoccupied with "doing"?

I agree. There are two aspects of any human role. One is concerned with "doing" and the other with "becoming." Unfortunately, most professionals seem to swing to the side of "doing" at the cost of "becoming." This is not good, either for the corporation or the individual. So we say, "Don’t be impatient. We will talk about the organization later, and we will talk about society even later, and about the world even later than that. First let’s talk about the individual."

We insist in our workshops that we cannot continue talking abstractly about organizations and society. We start with the individual. And at that level we have to reconcile "doing" with "being." If I am "doing" without "becoming," it is no good. It is defeating the purpose of human life.

In many ways the core organizational challenge today is how to reconcile the vested interests of the past with the strategic needs of the future. At a global level, the challenge is to establish some agreement around the core values. Many conflict situations around the world, such as Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, and even in parts of India, are between groups where there is relatively little difference in the core values, but where the historic structures and vested interests can ferment the differences to the point that they produce an almost infinite amount of conflict. How are we going to overcome some of these divisions?

I might be making a rather simplistic response to that point, but in the days to come, unless business and politics are to some extent spiritualized, these problems will never be solved. It is this combination of business, technology, and politics which is the real problem. Unless this combination can, over a period of time, get a little more spiritualized, a little more civilized, we are not likely to make progress.