Mahadevan shifts leadership norms 

Prof. B. Mahadevan

By Shehana Dain

World-renowned speaker Prof. B. Mahadevan reflected on how leadership roles have gone through a paradigm shift in the recent years as corporate leaders embrace spirituality and ancient teaching.

 “Today time affluence is far more valuable than money affluence, this is beginning to happen. People are also saying that they need a little bit of spirituality of the work place, which has been missing for some time and people want that conversation back to the workplace,” he said.

On the invitation of the Business School of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka (CA Sri Lanka), Mahadevan was recently delivering programs for the corporate leadership in the country. 

During his stay in Colombo, Prof. Mahadevan was the guest speaker at the CEOs’ Breakfast Forum on ‘Inspirational Leadership: Lessons from  Ancient Indian Wisdom’ which was followed by a HR forum on ‘The Notion of Incomplete Leaders and New Ideas in Leadership’ on 16 February, which was held at the Cinnamon Lakeside.

Portraying his thoughts to over 150 CEO’s and senior management personnel at the breakfast forum Mahadevan stressed that there is a striking difference between who we think of as leaders and who is actually a leader, he noted: “Who we think is a leader and who we read and understand as leaders are two different roles.  The traditional role of leadership is in two dimensions. One is ownership and the other is power. The most important change when it comes to leadership is a leader follower exchange model which has completely changed.”

He spoke of the concept of equanimity that is mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita and the need for leaders to maintain a level of calmness when dealing with various business situations on a daily basis. The outcome of any activity has a state of duality, and leaders need to understand this and rise above such situations he emphasised.

“In the whole text of the Bhagavad Gita there are over 700 couplets of poetic versus which say that if people do not know how to outgrow their visions from a narrow perspective, the opportunity to make difference and leadership will not go too far.”

He was confident about political scope in Sri Lanka changing towards the positive in the future however noting that it could take up to 50 to 100 years.

“We were colonised for over a century and we still have that impact embedded in us, we are still overcoming that mentality and it’s not easy. However I’m confident that the political force will change for the good. Prime Minister Modi is an example: he’s a character we never thought we would see in Indian politics. Saying that it’s not easy for him since the youth in our country is restless to see change he has to respond to that fast.” He quipped.

Prof. Mahadevan is a Professor of Operations Management at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, where he has been teaching since 1992. He was also the Dean of the Institute and a member of the Governing Board of IIMB for four years. Professor Mahadevan has more than 24 years of wide-ranging experience in teaching, research, consulting and academic administration at IIM Bangalore and other reputed institutions such as IIT Delhi and XLRI, Jamshedpur.

He was conferred the ICFAI Best Teacher Award by the Association of Indian Management Schools in 2005. Prof. Mahadevan was one among the 40 nominated globally for the Economic Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Business Professor of the Year Award, 2012.

 He was also the guest speaker at the CA Sri Lanka Training Partners Forum in 2016 where he spoke on ‘Bringing out the Leader from Within.’

Pix by Lasantha Kumara