Singapore:
In a view to present other angle of the holy book ‘Bhagvad Geeta’, a Singaporean Chinese has authored a book on the Bhagavad Gita's relevance to business management and individual competitiveness.
The book titled 'Management Efficacy Wisdom from the Indian Bhagavad Gita and the Chinese Art of War' reflects years of learning experience of businessman Charles Chow, who works on strategic interests of high potentials in Germany and India in education and environment through his East-West Group.
The book was released on Friday night by Singapore Minister for Environment and Water Resources Vivian Balakrishnan at the Singapore Management University.
Unlike the Chinese classic The Art of War that focuses on competition, the Indian Hindu spiritual tome, 'Bhagavad Gita', deals with individual competitiveness, says Chow, a Roman-Catholic, in his introduction to the book.
Among the comparatives, the book looks at Genghis Khan's 'Art of Winning' and Zheng He's 'Art of Collaboration'.
"The Gita de-clutters the confusion between profit and purpose, and outlines tools and techniques for stronger corporate resilience and impactful leadership.
"To produce results, the focus must be on the delivery (process) instead of the deliverables (products). Gita rearranges commonly held perceptions about efficiency and effectiveness for efficacy, that is, to be really accessible, actually attentive and always appropriate basically to be more aware of being aware," he says.
"This concept of mindfulness is not new," he points out.
Chow had served in Singapore navy, police and trade agencies and had also headed the Singapore-India business network group during his career.
"But novel in this book is a model to embrace such awareness with insight and foresight in order to arrive at the here and now of efficacy. On hindsight, most actions can be traced to a reason.
"However, in order to ensure sustainability, scalability and significance of decisions, there must be, from the very start, an enduring inner firmness of purpose," Chow said.
The purpose of this book is to empower every decision-maker with this inner firmness, he said.
"Many rivers flow into the same ocean, yet the ocean never overflows. Likewise, there are numerous management frameworks to assist the decision making process, yet there is no one universal model to properly ensure the suitability, acceptability and feasibility of decisions. Hence, decision-making models are never enough," Chow stressed.
This book will therefore explain the root causes that lead to decisions, instead of introducing yet another decision-making model, he said, adding that although the book is an East convergence of ancient wisdom, it includes many practical tips for modern businesses.
