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sustain success under such turbulent conditions that are hard to predict, there is scant practical advice on how this could be achieved.
What is required is new thinking for driving organisational performance, such as developing a superior corporate culture that energises, empowers and engages employees to sustain success under fast-changing conditions. In the history of human thinking, breakthrough developments took place when two different lines of thought met from different cultural or religious traditions, as illustrated by subatomic quantum physics.
Relevance of Buddhist concepts
While organisational theory is attempting to guide organisations that are struggling to cope with accelerating change, Buddhist philosophy considers change as the only permanent feature of the universe, and explains how anyone can pass beyond this state of impermanence by evolving to higher levels of consciousness. Both Buddhism and organisational theory thus relate to change. Sustaining corporate success under ever-changing conditions is parallel to becoming an enlightened person in the ever-changing universe.
But, how relevant is 2,500 year old Buddhist thought to modern day corporate culture? Buddhism provides an elegant philosophical framework that accommodates our most advanced theories in the physical and mental realms. None of the recent developments in areas as diverse as quantum physics and organisational theory has invalidated anything the Buddha has said.
Buddhist techniques can help the workforce to evolve to higher mental levels, and elevate their collective consciousness to a higher level for sustaining organisational success in an increasingly turbulent world.
Unleashing employee potential
Buddha proclaimed that mind precedes everything else, and that everything we experience throughout life is nothing but the product of our own mind. Underlying this proclamation is the fundamental Buddhist concept that every person possesses the ability to evolve to higher levels of consciousness. This concept provide the key to ‘future-proofing’ organisational success by energising, empowering and engaging employees at all levels (the four E’s of organisational success) to achieve personal and corporate goals under changing conditions.
Such empowered employees can adapt to changing conditions by unleashing and channelling the vast mental power lying mostly dormant within them into an everyday, organisation-wide, business innovation ideology guided by their mindfulness.
Developing mindfulness
Developing mindfulness as advocated by Buddha is essential for developing the creative insights needed for improving organisational performance. The basic aim of Buddhist meditation is to develop mindfulness by silencing the thinking mind, and shifting awareness from the rational to an intuitive mode of consciousness. This is typically achieved by focusing attention on the incoming and outgoing breath, engaging in sports such as golf, etc.
Such activities produce mindfulness with higher levels of mental awareness and alertness. They enable employees and their managers to sense and respond to opportunities and risks quickly, while maintaining their normal daily focus on solving problems and reaching targets. However, their ability to contribute to organisational success depends heavily on the corporate culture within which they work.
Corporate culture
The close link between organisational performance and corporate culture became established over the past decades, as operating 
conditions became increasingly competitive and turbulent. Corporate culture refers to deep-seated beliefs, values, processes and methods shared by people in an organisation. These were formed through past successes and therefore accepted as the preferred ways of doing things and solving problems. It is sustained by continuous human interaction within an organisation, and determines ‘the way things are done’.
The attributes of organisational culture are thus closely related to employees’ mindsets, attitudes and behaviours. Therefore, corporate culture can best be defined as the collective consciousness of the entire workforce, which can be nourished and enhanced through Buddhist concepts.
Redefining corporate culture
To succeed in fast-changing operating environments, every organisation has to become increasingly innovative. This means deploying its corporate culture to enhance the organisation’s ability to improve processes, create new products and services, and even review the business model. However, corporate culture can either cause an organisation to prosper through continuous adaptation and renewal, or to perish by sticking to obsolete concepts and methods that no longer work.
Instead of considering the workforce as individual and separate entities that operate independently, holistic thinking suggests integrating their differences into a collective consciousness that constitutes a dynamic corporate culture. This collective consciousness can be moulded to sustain organisational success even during difficult times. These means accepting every challenge favourably as a growth opportunity, which will eliminate all the anxieties and fears associated with it, and clear the mind for planning and implementing the best possible response.
Elements of a superior corporate culture
Typical employee behaviour during difficult times shows an inner conflict between their conscious efforts demanded by corporate expectations, and their subconscious fears driven by their emotions, beliefs, mindsets and attitudes. This conflict can become aggravated when a workforce comprising of different ethnic, religious and political groups has to work closely together towards a common corporate goal.
Such diversities form integral parts of modern-day corporate culture. In contrast to the conventional analytical view that sees such diversities as a problem, the organic Buddhist view sees all such things as interrelated but different aspects or manifestations of the same ultimate reality that governs all entities including human organisations.
Buddhist framework for a superior corporate culture
A superior corporate culture can be described as one that can drive organisational success under favourable and unfavourable conditions. A practical framework for building such a superior corporate culture can be found in the four noble states of conduct advocated in Buddhism:
1. Loving-kindness: the wish for the good and happiness of all, resulting from identifying oneself with all beings and empathising with their sorrows; 2. Compassion: the desire and commitment to help sorrow-stricken beings eliminate their suffering; 3. Appreciative joy: appreciation of the prosperity and happiness of others through a congratulatory attitude towards them; and 4. Equanimity: a balanced state of mind acquired through a deep understanding of the eight unceasing cyclic fluctuations in the wheel of life: praise and blame, joy and sorrow, gain and loss, and repute and disrepute.
When all managers and employees in an organisation embrace the above four noble states of conduct, they will collectively focus 
on corporate success, without disruptive internal conflicts that afflict many organisations. This will provide the fertile breeding ground needed for innovation.
Organisational innovation
Innovative organisations survive and prosper by changing faster than their operating environments. In today’s fiercely competitive business world, employees’ creativity and innovation hold the key to corporate success. Their skills, mindsets, attitudes and behaviours can proactively recognise and respond to change by reviewing products, services, operating procedures and business models.
There is a close link between such adaptive organisational behaviour for responding to change, and efforts by Buddhists to let go of their preconceived egos in a changing world. Innovative organisations reinvent themselves by continuously and pre-emptively adapting to significant changes in their operating environments.
Buddhist model for nurturing innovation
Instead of clinging to what produced past successes, organisational innovation demands constant review and renewal of all related attributes. Similarly, Buddhists see the futility of clinging to anything in an ever-changing world. This attitude cultivates mental qualities that nurture innovation such as non-judgemental awareness, relaxed concentration, and equanimity.
The resulting mindfulness, flexibility and focus facilitate the on-going renewal of products, services and business processes to sustain success under changing conditions.
Wisdom-Skills matrix of success
Success under changing conditions appears to depend on two decisive factors: knowing what to do next (Wisdom) and knowing how to do it (Skills). The Wisdom-Skills matrix depicted in Figure 1 identifies the two key requirements for achieving success, and forms the foundation of a superior corporate culture.
Hard skills refer to work-related knowledge, skills, tools and processes that are measurable, while soft skills refer to mindsets, attitudes and behaviours that are intangible. Wisdom and Skills are presented here as the key ingredients for creating ‘learning organisations’ with the emphasis on continuous knowledge acquisition and skill development, geared to changing conditions in operating environments.
Relevance of wisdom
Many businesses and industries are finding it increasingly difficult to stay competitive. One of the underlying reasons could be that too much reliance is being placed on short-term rational thinking. With more data generated through more computers, there has been a tendency to slip into managing by numbers. The emphasis has been on the application of rationality and logic to problem-solving and decision-making, using tools such as operational research and modelling by computers that ‘think’.
According to Prof. Mihalasky, what all this has given us is more incorrect, invalid or unreliable data for making decisions, whose outcomes have been correct about as many times as when they were based on blind guessing. He attributes this to people focusing all their attention on logical and analytical thinking, without investigating the benefits of non-logical, intuitive thinking under rapidly changing conditions whose outcomes are hard to predict.
Insights into wisdom
Rational knowledge and activities are essential components of corporate success. These consolidate the present, but do not create the future. Intuitive insights are what really sharpen the competitive edge of organisations. Such insights cannot be obtained through analysis or wilful concentration. During periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and produce sudden flashes of clarifying insights into what needs to be done to achieve a desired goal.
When the rational mind is silenced, the intuitive mode produces an extraordinary awareness where fragmented perceptions of 
reality merge into an undifferentiated unity. In this heightened state of awareness, one is neither tense nor hurried, but filled with mental energy that can be channelled to reach any desired goal, no matter how daunting.
This ability of our subconscious mind to find patterns in complex situations based on very narrow slices of information is called ‘Thin-slicing’. Our subconscious mind appears to have the ability to sift through multifaceted information, throw out all that is irrelevant, and zero-in on what really matters, to the point that thin-slicing can often deliver a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking in complex situations.
Wisdom in Buddhism
Buddhist interpretation of wisdom is the intuitive ‘knowing’ that occurs through a deep understanding of the nature of all things, when the last barriers of rigid analytical thought and the last traces of duality associated with such analytical thinking have been transcended.
It is the result of raising one’s consciousness to a level that surpasses all logical thought, concepts and duality associated with existence. It makes the mind utterly and limitlessly free to comprehend the true nature of life and things. In Buddhism, wisdom is achieved by following the Noble Eightfold Path that leads to the highest level of consciousness called enlightenment or Nirvana.
Developing wisdom and skills
Soft skills provide the foundation for developing organisational wisdom (knowing what to do next) through a combination of self-confidence and intuitive insights (inner soft skills), and interpersonal competencies for communicating with others (outer soft skills).
Wisdom is acquired not only through heightened awareness of organisational capability, changes in the operating environment, competitive offerings, new technologies etc., but also from sensing the attitudes and behaviours of people (customers, suppliers, colleagues etc.). Insights gained through such soft skills of employees at all levels should guide the acquisition, adaptation and deployment of work-related hard skills, especially under fast-changing conditions.
Such an employee-based, on-going feedback mechanism will enable organisations to continuously outpace changes in internal and external conditions. This mechanism will sustain organisational success through the parallel development and deployment of both wisdom and skills. However, organisational wisdom, which stems from a superior corporate culture nourished by empowered employees, is directly affected by organisational structures and governance models.
Developing a new governance model
Innovative organisations have a governance model that gives their employees the freedom to achieve their goals in an autonomous and creative way, within specified operational guidelines. In similar vein, Buddhists are allowed to follow diverse approaches in pursuit of their common goal of enlightenment, within the broad guidelines provided by the precepts. Buddhism advocates the complete equality of all people, since every individual is capable of reaching enlightenment solely through his or her own efforts.
Consequently, Buddhist organisational structures are mostly flat, autonomous and cooperative. Both Buddhist and innovative organisations thus have flat structures and governance models that can respond quickly to challenges posed by continuing change. They both encourage people to develop their almost limitless human potential to sense and respond to rapid change by developing mindfulness and sharpening their mental abilities.
Functioning at higher mental states
Table 1 shows the mental states associated with different brainwave frequencies. In our normally awake Beta state, the mind is bombarded with numerous stimuli such as thoughts, needs, desires, conflicts, pressures, stresses etc. Consequently, it is not free to direct more than about 10% of its attention to any one thing. At the slower Alpha state, the mind becomes more relaxed and focused, and becomes far more receptive to learning new things.
This explains why children from about seven to 14 years of age, functioning mainly at the Alpha state, learn things much faster than adults who are functioning mainly at the Beta level. In the relaxed Alpha state, creativity is increased, memory is improved, and the ability to solve problems is enhanced.
Simple Buddhist meditations such as relaxed breathing with mindfulness can quickly calm the mind and bring it to the Alpha state. In this Alpha state of relaxed concentration and non-judgemental awareness, employees will be able to use their intuitive creativity while maintaining a rational perspective. The levels of employee engagement and productivity tend to be higher when they are operating in the relaxed Alpha state, characterised by less mental stress and positive emotions.
Eliminating negative thoughts and beliefs
The collective thoughts and beliefs of the workforce directly influence organisational success every day, in every way. During good times, their enthusiasm can drive corporate performance to great heights. Conversely, during bad times when maximum effort is most needed for survival, their fears and anxieties can create a vicious downward cycle.
Buddhist philosophy provides a simple and effective way to change people’s negative perceptions and emotions into positives. The Noble Eightfold Path to enlightenment also provides a practical framework that can change people’s mindsets, attitudes and behaviours, especially during difficult times.
Adopting the Noble Eightfold Path
The first step in this path is Right Understanding, which means understanding the nature of the ever-changing world (seeing every problem as a temporary setback, with new opportunities embedded within it). This leads to Right Thoughts of non-attachment and loving-kindness (as opposed to resentment and ill will arising from resisting change), which progressively lead to Right Speech (meaning kind words), Right Action (meaning ethical deeds), and Right Livelihood (meaning righteous business practices).
The sixth step of Right Effort deals with virtuous actions arising from the development of pure mental states through self-purification and introspection. The seventh step of Right Mindfulness is about heightened awareness of oneself and the changing world we live in. Right Concentration or mental focus is the eighth and final step on the path to enlightenment.
The Noble Eightfold Path thus provides a holistic framework for transforming negative thoughts and beliefs (triggered by change and setbacks), enhancing mindfulness, nurturing an attitude of love and care for all living beings, and developing the wisdom and skills that govern success, both at individual and organisational levels.
A successful pilot project
The Indian-owned Colombo Taj Samudra luxury hotel embraced the concept of developing a superior corporate culture to boost performance after reopening on 1 November 2013, following extensive refurbishment. Over 650 Taj employees at unskilled, skilled, supervisory and managerial levels jointly underwent the identical training, aimed at collectively unleashing their physical and mental powers for building a superior corporate culture. Their new service-oriented corporate culture was symbolised by ‘Love and Care’ – two concepts closely related to Buddhist thinking. As a result, within five months after reopening, their Guest Satisfaction Tracking Index shot up by an unprecedented 40%, validating the benefits of adopting and nurturing a superior corporate culture closely influenced by Buddhist wisdom.
Conclusion
A superior corporate culture is the key to sustaining success in increasingly-turbulent commercial and financial worlds. Instead of considering the workforce as separate entities with limited abilities operating independently with predetermined roles, and treating them as disposable ‘human resources’, Buddhist thinking suggests awakening their vast untapped potential and integrating their differences into a collective consciousness for developing a superior corporate culture.
This collective consciousness can be moulded to sustain organisational success by optimising employee decisions and activities every day, in every department, at every level. This creates learning organisations that can achieve and sustain success, even during the most difficult times.
(Dr. Asoka Jinadasa is a Chartered Engineer with a PhD in Corporate Strategy. He has had decades of top-level management experience in Europe, USA and Sri Lanka. As a renowned thought-leader in HR, he has been invited to make keynote speeches and presentations at major international conferences in India, Malaysia, Poland, South Africa and Sri Lanka. To request this full paper complete with references, email him at: [email protected].)
