Consciousness-Based Education: A Foundation for Teaching and Learning in the Academic Disciplines

Throughout the twentieth century, the dominant paradigm of management has been changing. As a consequence, there has been an evolution in the concept of leadership and in the way that executives think about business strategy. The trend in both leadership and strategy began with an emphasis on the concrete or material aspects of business and was focused on production. This was followed by progressively subtler interpretations of the business enterprise that emphasized the importance of the human element. Contemporary thinking about both leadership and strategy focuses attention on the knowledge base of the firm and emphasizes the value of creativity and learning in organizations. This evolution of management thinking will find its fulfillment in a paradigm based on the Maharishi Vedic Science principle that knowledge is structured in consciousness. In this view, the role of the leader will be to create coherence in the collective consciousness of the organization, and the strategy of the firm will be to harness the infinite creative potential of natural law through the development of the consciousness of the employees. The Evolution of Leadership and Strategy in Management Thought Management thought has followed many fads in the last half of the twentieth century. We have witnessed several cycles in which a wave of mergers and acquisitions rose in tune with a managerial logic of synergy and control, only to be followed by a period of spin-offs and downsizing as the song of efficiency, focus, and core competence had its play in the managerial culture. Though cycles of centralization and decentralization have alternated throughout the twentieth century, a discernible trend in management rhetoric has remained. The present dominant paradigm of management emphasizes creativity and organizational learning as the only core competencies that can enable a firm to sustain a competitive advantage in the hyper-competitive environment of rapidly changing technologies and emerging global markets. This dominant mode of management thinking differs from the logic of high-scale production and efficiency that guided the management of the large corporations of the early 1900s. This article will identify a systematic trend in management thought, and we project that trend in order to discern the outlines of the emerging paradigm of management for the twenty-first century. We do so by C O N S C I O U S N E S S B A S E D E D U C A T I O N A N D M A N A G E M E N T 30 considering the common elements in the trends of the two principal functions of management. One is executive leadership and the other is business strategy, expressed in the common understanding about the sources of competitive advantage in an industry. Analysis will show that in the coming era the competitive advantage will belong to companies whose managements have aligned themselves with natural law through Maharishi Vedic Management, a discipline of Maharishi Vedic Science, and that companies not in tune with natural law will lose their competitive edge and have difficulty meeting their goals. By developing their own consciousness with the technologies available through Maharishi Vedic Science, company leaders will be creative and farsighted and will spontaneously act in accordance with the laws of nature, thus winning the favor of natural law and guaranteeing their company’s success. Changing Paradigms of Management in this Century Scientific Management. In the early twentieth century, the role of the business leader was to organize capital, people, and technology into an efficient system for production. This search for efficiency was paramount among the functions of leadership. Within the business setting, the leader was a designer. Following the logic of the school of scientific management, a business leader’s job was to design efficient production processes to support a strategy of low-cost, high-volume production (Taylor, 1911). The large successful enterprises of Ford, General Motors, DuPont, Bell Telephone, and the railroads emerged from this concept of management. The Human Relations School. During their efforts to identify more efficient designs for the organization of work at the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric Company, efficiency engineers accidentally discovered that workers were more productive when they felt that their personal feelings were being cared for and when they had opportunities to satisfy their individual, emotional, and interpersonal needs in the workplace. This discovery led to the evolution of the Human Relations School of management in the late 1930s pioneered by Elton Mayo (1933) with contributions from Chester Barnard (1938) and F. J. Roethlisberger B E Y O N D T H E C U R R E N T PA R A D I G M I N M A N A G E M E N T T H O U G H T 31 and W. J. Dickson (1939). Managerial theories of employee motivation became much richer under the influence of this perspective. Managers learned to think of employees not only as work units interested solely in the economic rewards their jobs would generate, but as individuals who have needs for recognition, status, control, and a sense that they are contributing to the entire production system. The role of the leader, in the Human Relations School of thinking, included much more than technological design. The leader became a psychological diagnostician, a coach to employees, a benefactor to the community, and an arbiter of disputes. The fundamental concept regarding the source of competitive advantage did not vary much during this period. Though the concept of leadership was changing by mid century, business strategy through the 1960s was still based on large-scale production. The Human Relations School merely alerted the executive to the potential sources of inefficiency in the production system. Nevertheless, as the late-century model began to emerge, the Human Relations School inspired the development of a wave of interest in corporate culture as a source of competitive advantage. The Knowledge-Based Organization. During the 1980s and 1990s, a new and distinct paradigm of management thought began to emerge. It began with the publication in 1980 of Michael Porter’s book, Competitive Strategy, which showed that the strategy of high-volume, low-cost production was suited only to certain industries and could be vulnerable to a more focused strategy in which a firm’s product is specifically differentiated from its generic counterparts. Porter’s focus and differentiation strategies are based on the development of core competencies by which the competitor can serve market niches better than the generic producer. This theme was echoed in the 1982 best-selling book by Peters and Waterman, In Search of Excellence, which advised executives to “stick to their knitting.” By this the authors meant that a company’s strategy should concentrate on its core skills as a means to differentiate it from other firms. Porter’s 1985 publication of Competitive Advantage drew increased attention to the specific characteristics that support a firm’s sustainable competitive advantage over others. This view was further develC O N S C I O U S N E S S B A S E D E D U C A T I O N A N D M A N A G E M E N T 32 oped in the late 1980s as the resource-based view of business strategy (Barney, 1991; Prahalad and Hamel, 1990), which sought to identify a firm’s characteristics that are unique, such as organizational culture, or that are difficult to imitate, such as the research-and-development skills of scientists, the product development skills of engineers, or the information systems used for inventory control throughout a channel