The Spirit is GREAT. But the spirit in life is invisible. It is also invincible. India is a land of spirituality. The SPIRIT is there everywhere, pervading all aspects of life. We do not see it with our naked eyes. A link, a live link between the deep-seated spirit down below and the realities of work at the office, kitchen, factory and field must be found. Our culture has supplied us with copious details of it. Even the smuggler takes his taxi of wares to the temple and prays for protection from the police. Who does not believe in GOD when the crisis crops up in his life?
The reality is India is poor. How can a spiritual nation be poor? It is a contradiction in terms. Can you be a millionaire and starve? It is much more impossible for a spiritual person to be poor. In the eighties some of us tried to apply Spirit to business and made out a logical version of it. Peter Drucker saw it and commended it as a piece of wisdom. We were looking for our first trial, a trial of strength with Life and its harsh realities. A certain businessman was awarded the title "Businessman of the Year". We knew this recognition makes everyone expect high standards from him. There begins his trouble. He agreed for us to experiment our ideas in his company and added, "Forty new entrants are licensed this year in my field, some of them international giants. I do not know whether I will be around next year." Just then, we could NOT tell him it was a rare opportunity that would raise him sky high.
We translated Spirituality into values of the work place: exhausting our potential, paying the greatest attention, using the available technologies to exhaustion, avoiding waste, eliminating unavoidable waste by appropriate systems, saving every minute of Time that could be saved, etc. Based on this, we wrote 122 recommendations that are intelligible to hard businessmen, practical managers, exhausted supervisors and intransigent labour. The company's profits doubled that year. It continued to grow in size and profits. At the end of ten years, the company was ten times in size, making tenfold profits. What the company did or did not do, we do not know. With forty new entrants, the market expanded fifty or a hundred-fold and every one of the forty entrants grew in size. Competition is a spur to growth. No one likes to develop the competitor, but the market does when she wants to shower super grace on you in spite of yourself.