Hindu Dharmic Leadership

At Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025, Ed Anobah spoke on dharma (right-acting) leadership as a means of making progress in solving societal problems using Hinduism’s spiritual tradition of bhukti (devotionalism).  Anobah based his talk on the book, Leadership for an Age of Higher Consciousness by D. T. Swami. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna says that what great people do, other people follow. What constitutes healthy, impactful leadership? The ideal leader in Hinduism is also a great sage, like Plato’s notion of a philosopher king. Leadership that deals wholistically with the human condition by exemplifies the character of a leader, which does not mean that only highly educated persons can or should be leaders. Rather, “everyone is a leader,” potentially, and “we are all leading our own life.” Each of us is a leader potentially for other people on the interpersonal level. Each of us can inspire other people. Anobah claimed that certain universal principles of leadership can apply across the board. I submit that this view is vulnerable to being too utopian when it is applied in the business world. Being realistic as to possible practical difficulties and even limitations in applying dharmic leadership in business (and government) is advisable. Even there being different metaphysical assumptions can get in the way, practically speaking, as compassionate leadership runs up against the profit-motive in business. 

The full essay is at "Hindu Dharmic Leadership." 

On the Reputational Capital of a Business Leader on a Societal Stage

Is it better that companies be publicly or privately held? Such a question is of such magnitude that glossy, simplistic answers should be eschewed. This is not to say that the answer is situational in nature. Rather, it is more likely that each comes with pluses and minuses from the perspective of an economic system as a whole. As business “leaders” give their advice, it is important to keep in mind whether any personal or institutional conflicts of interest exist and thus could warp the space itself of the advice. Yes, I am intimating Einstein’s theory of general relativity here. Rather than provide an answer without having studied the matter sufficiently, I will provide a way to look at the advice given by Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

The full essay is at "Reputational Capital of a Business Leader."

Starbucks: A Racist Company Against Racism

In June, 2023, Starbucks had to face a unanimous jury decision in favor of a regional manager whom Starbucks' upper management had fired because she had resisted the company's racist policy of punishing innocent Caucasian managers for good public relations, which the CEO felt was needed and appropriate after a store manager had legitimately called the police on two Black people in a Starbucks restaurant who presumed the right not only to sit in a restaurant without ordering anything (before Starbucks allowed this),  but also to ignore the authority of the store's manager. Starbucks cowered to the unjust negative publicity, and thus showed a lack of leadership, and went on to act unethically in wanting to show the world that the company can go after Caucasian employees. This racism is ironic, for several years earlier, Starbucks' CEO had ordered employees at the store level to discuss racism with customers. Interestingly, the anti-racist ideology being preached was partial, and thus contained a blind spot wherein racism such as the company's upper management would exhibit is acceptable. 

The full essay is at "Starbucks"

See also: Bucking Starbucks’ Star

Corporate Federalism: Did AOL Miss an Opportunity?

Citing twelve past and present AOL employees, The Wall Street Journal characterized AOL in 2011 as a “culture of clashing fiefs and personalities created by a rapid series of acquisitions that haven’t jelled.”[1] Just in managing the likes of Michael Arrington and Arianna Huffington, Tim Armstrong had his hands full as CEO. Both Arrington and Huffington were strong defenders of editorial independence in their respective units. Arrington started a venture capital firm partly financed by AOL to invest in tech firms even as Arrington’s division at AOL, TechCrunch, wrote on technology firms. The problems for AOL went well beyond acquiescing in a structural conflict of interest of TechCrunch writing on particular tech companies while investing in some of them but not others. A person familiar with AOL said that Armstrong “had a macro vision that was right but didn’t have the right plan to implement it.”[2] That is to say, his visionary leadership was good but his strategic management was bad. Strategic leadership demands better. AOL may have been a good candidate for a federal system of governance because the publishing units needed some autonomy even at the cost of foregone corporate cooperation. 

The full essay is at "Corporate Federalism and AOL."

1. Jessica E. Vascellaro and Emily Steel, “Culture Clashes Tear at AOL,” Wall Street Journal, September 10-11, 2011. 

2. Ibid.

Strategic Leadership

Strategic planning is oriented to enhancing the bottom-line.  Leadership affects organizational performance as well.[1] Therefore, strategic leadership, which can be defined as the formulation and articulation of a vision depicting a social reality and incorporating strategic aims, can enhance a firm’s sustainable competitive advantage.[2] Strategic leadership is an intangible core competency that can give rise to a core capability differential involving reputation.[3] That strategic leadership is difficult to understand and therefore to imitate contributes to its value in no small measure. But a straightforward application of strategic leadership may be thwarted if a tension develops in its exercise.  In particular, the principles behind an enduring leadership vision can be at odds with pressing strategic interests, especially as these profit-interests change while the abstract vision still holds.

The full essay is at "Strategic Leadership."

---

[1]. J. A. Petrick and J. F. Quinn, “The Challenge of Leadership Accountability for Integrity Capacity as a Strategic Asset,” Journal of Business Ethics 24 (2001): 331; S. Finkelstein and D. Hambrick, Strategic Leadership: Top Executives and Their Effects on Organizations (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1996); J. Ciulla, “Leadership Ethics: Mapping the Territory,” Business Ethics Quarterly, 5, no. 1(1995): 5-28; K. B. Lowe, K.G. Kroeck, and N. Sivasubramaniam: “Effectiveness Coorelates of Transformational and Transactional Leadership: A Meta-analytic Review of the MLQ Literature,” Leadership Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1996), 385-425.

[2]. R. D. Ireland and M.A. Hitt, “Achieving and Maintaining Strategic Competitiveness in the 21^st Century: The Role of Strategic Leadership,” Academy of Management Executive 13, no. 1 (1999): 43.

[3]. Petrick and Quinn, “The Challenge of Leadership”; J. A. Petrick et al, “Global Leadership Skills and Reputational Capital: Intangible Resources For Sustainable Competitive Advantage,”  Academy of Management Executive 13, no. 1(1999): 58, f.n. 2.

The Essence of Leadership

According to DePree (1989, p.19), the first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. This might seem metaphysically esoteric, but I believe DePree hit the nail on the head. Even though far less has been written in leadership research about the importance of viewing reality and interpreting it than about traits, styles and situational factors, defining reality is the fundamental task distinguishing leadership as a phenomenon (Caldwell, Bischoff & Karri, 2002, p. 153).

 Material from this essay has been incorporated into The Essence of Leadership: A Cross-Cultural Foundation, which is available at Amazon. 

Sources:

Caldwell, C, S.J. Bischoff, and R. Karri: 2002, “The Four Umpires: A Paradigm for Ethical Leadership,” Journal of Business Ethics 36, 153-163.

De Pree, M.: 1989, Leadership Is an Art (Doubleday: NY).

Servant Leadership Christianized: Self-Effacing Love in Business

Although servanthood is a very important biblical concept for leadership, according to Richard Higginson, the role of servant “is not reserved only for those who are leaders. Christians in general are “servants of God” and are expected to serve other people.”[1] Moreover, to be ethical in a servant style is not distinctly Christian; leaders who are not Christian can nonetheless operate as servants. The term servant does not in itself have a religious connotation. Yet under theological auspices, a distinctly theological sense of servant leadership can be understood and practiced. I contend that such servant leadership is something more than the notion that has been popularized.

The complete essay is at “Christianized Ethical Leadership.”

---

[1] Richard Higginson, Transforming Leadership: A Christian Approach to Management (SPEK: London, 1996), p. 48.

Ethical Leadership: Pruning Off the Debris

As business practitioners grapple with the intangible yet potentially valuable notion of ethical leadership, it is left to scholars to assess whether those practitioners are “coloring within the lines.” It is admittedly all too easy to draw in exogenous material that is pleasing to the eye; it is all too easy to deem such material required for ethical leadership rather than ballast weighing it down, unnecessarily. One business practitioner characterizes ethical leadership as that which “inspires the behaviors in people necessary to create competitive advantage.” As achieving a sustainable competitive advantage is the task of strategy, inspiration alone can be extracted as that which is particular to leadership. Strategy is what is left once one has extracted inspiration from the characterization.

Material from this essay has been incorporated in The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon.

Non-Positional Leadership: A Matter of Charisma?

The concept of non-positional leadership is typically associated with charismatic leadership.[1] The Hebrew prophets are a case in point, as none had any formal civic position.  To be sure, a non-positioned leader need not be charismatic; such a leader can be effective in utilizing persuasion to get his or her position (i.e., "vision") sufficiently adopted by followers to become the default.  Obviously, a positioned official, whether in the upper echelons of a large corporation, government, or religious institution, need not “stoop” to persuasion; power from authority can be sufficient for an official's will to be done. However, does that evince leadership or simply raw power?

Gandhi epitomized non-positional leadership. He never held a formal office in religion or government. Is the strength of non-positional leadership necessarily moral?  Image Source: Idleindia.com

The entire essay can be found at "Non-Positional Leadership."

---

1. On “non-positional” leadership, see David Burkus, http://theleaderlab.org/

The Founder of Theranos: A Flawed Charismatic Vision and Leader

“Theranos rose quickly from being a college dropout’s idea to revolutionize the blood analysis industry to a hot tech bet that accrued $700 million in funding and many famous names for its board.”[1] Elizabeth Holmes, the company’s founder, was stripped of her position at the company in 2018 after the SEC discovered her deep involvement with the fraud at the company. Her “smarts, fierce determination and Steve Jobs-inspired look . . . were critical” to her being able to perpetuate the lie that the company had a device that could do blood tests with just a scant amount of blood, obviating the unpleasant experience of having blood drawn by needle.[2] Although Jack Welsh, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs accomplished enough to warrant their fame, I submit that companies are too prone to create “champions”—even strangely calling them “rock stars.” In other words, even though charismatic vision is of value to a business, neither such a leader nor his or her vision itself should be overplayed. Business, I submit, has a marked tendency to do just that, and often with impunity.

The full essay is at "Fraudulent Charismatic Vision at Theranos."

On leadership vision, see Skip Worden, The Essence of Leadership: A Cross-Cultural Foundation

---

[1] Marco della Cava, “Behind the Scenes of Theranos’ Dramatic Rise, Fall,” USA Today, March 16, 2018.

[2] Ibid.

Executive Compensation (Part II): Paying Failure

In late September 2011, Léo Apotheker was fired after 11 months as CEO at Hewlett-Packard. As a reward, he walked with $13.2 million in cash and stock, in addition to a sign-on package worth about $10 million, according to the New York Times. A month earlier, Robert P. Kelly received severance worth $17.2 in cash and stock when he was fired as CEO of Bank of New York Mellon. Even his clashing with board members and senior managers did not obstruct his nice severance package. A few days later, Carol Bartz was let go as CEO of Yahoo with nearly $10 million in spite of the company’s poor performance. Back in April 2011, John Chidsey, the CEO of Burger King, had departed with a severance package worth almost $20 million in the fact that McDonalds had been outcompeting Burger King. Baxter Phillips, the CEO of Massey Energy, got a package worth over $34 million in spite of “presiding over a company barraged with accusations of reckless conduct and with legal claims stemming from one of the deadliest mining disasters in memory,” according to the New York Times. Unfortunately, the list goes on and on. Is this a system of pay-for-failure? Moreover, do chief executives, who seem to outward appearances to be almost exclusively motivated by what they can get in additional compensation, have too much leverage over boards, and thus over even the owners as well? If so, is corporate governance itself severely broken? I answer in the affirmative.

The full essay is at "Executive Compensation: Paying Failure."

Eric Dash, “The Lucrative Fall from Grace,” New York Times, September 30, 2011. 

Leadership Consulting: Stances on Scholarship

As the field of leadership consulting continues to proliferate, fringe-elements have developed that risk taking down the credibility of the field itself as well as its more solid practitioners. In this essay, my objective is to make those practitioners aware of the damage to their field (and indirectly to their own practices) that is being committed on the periphery. Relatedly, my task extends to making scholars of leadership aware of how leadership itself is being undermined as a concept used (and abused) in the business world. I contend that maintaining the distinction between consulting (including writing on it) and scholarship is in everyone’s interest, even if some “coaches” believe they have a momentary interest in blurring the lines for personal gain.

The full essay is at "Leadership Consulting."

See related essay: “Toward a Definition for Ethical Leadership: Disabusing the Pessimists”

From Visionary Leadership to Management: Taking a Bite Out of Apple

Founders and otherwise visionary leaders in business can be distinguished from managers, even though a manager may be running a company. For one thing, managers may resent leaders for being able to take in a larger view while relegating—even dismissing the petty, which can be so alluring to the managerial mentality. Leaders in turn may view the implementation of a vision as nugatory at best. More abstractly, change as paradigmatic (i.e., shifting from one broad framework to another) has its fans (i.e., visionary leaders), while the status quo has its own defenders (i.e., managers). Vision and big ideas are typically associated with a company’s founder or visionary leader, whereas bureaucracy tends to go with the implementation-focus of managers (including executives). In short, to suppose that leadership and management are the same is to ignore a lot that separates them. In the case of Apple, the shift from leadership to management that occurred with the passing of Steve Jobs may be at least partially responsible for the subsequent decline in the company’s stock price. In this essay, I explore the change at Apple to demonstrate why management should not be conflated with leadership.

Tim Cook testifying at the U.S. Senate. Is he innately a visionary or is his leadership managerial in nature?    Getty Images

Material from this essay has been incorporated in The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

The Essence of Leadership

In The Essence of Leadership, leadership itself is reformulated in such a way that what emerges—the essence of leadership—is distinct from related phenomena, including management, presiding, and mentoring. This is not to say, however, that leadership bears no relation to strategy—hence the complex concept of strategic leadership, which is not without risks. Leadership itself contains risks, which a focus on the essence of leadership, rather than, for instance, taking leadership as simply about having influence, can arguably minimize. Such risks include the cult of the leader, to which charisma and attributions of heroism are especially susceptible, and the distorting impact of ideology, such as in Burns’ version of transformational leadership. Shaking out the risks and distinguishing leadership as a unique phenomenon are ways of pointing back to the essence of leadership, which applies in virtually any culture. That is, the essence is cross-cultural. Taking comparative religion as a stand-in for cultures, I demonstrate that the essence of leadership can be informed by Taoist, Buddhist, and Judeo-Christian principles.

Material from this essay has been incorporated in The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical

In this essay, I provide a synopsis of my booklet on spiritual leadership in business. In the text, I suggest that while it may convenient in the business world to conceptualize spiritual leadership as being essentially ethical in nature, this convenient tactic does not do justice to the distinctly religious basis and connotations of spirituality. By religion, I do not mean only theism, or even just organized religion (i.e., religious organizations); rather, I have in mind religious experience—whether through prayer, meditation, worship, or another means that is oriented to yearning beyond the limits of cognition, sentiment, and perception—as if an inherently limited human brain were nonetheless “hard-wired” for beyondness itself whether or not a transcendent religious object (e.g., a deity) exists. Rather than expunging spiritual from its native terrain and reconfiguring it to fit within a secular context as ethics, we can relate the religious sense of spirituality to the secular world of business with due deference to their respective natures rather than muddling them into something murky.[1]

The full essay is at "Spiritual Leadership in Business."

The booklet, Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical, is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

Spirituality in Business Leadership

To be at its fullest, the notion of spiritual leadership applied to business should not shirk the religious basis of spirituality to make it somehow more fitting to business-or a certain rendition of business. Many of Gilbert Fairholm’s descriptions of spirituality risk embalming spirituality in a secular tomb in keeping with the bias typically found in the business world against anything religious. Fortunately, some of his other characterizations of the term provide an alternative basis for an invigorated notion of spiritual leadership applied even in the business world.

The full essay is at "Spirituality as Distinctly Religious."

Transforming Transformational Leadership: Foundations over Ideology

James Burn’s concept of transformational leadership is in essence a process in which “one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality.”[1] This includes a moral commitment to develop followers, especially morally. To Burns, transformational leadership is therefore “an ethical, moral enterprise.”[2] I contend that the term transformation is not inherently ethical, and so it can apply to leadership in an amoral sense. Freed up from the limitations of being viewed primarily or even exclusively as moral, transformation can be seen to apply to leadership in at least two, much more direct—or central—ways than morally: as referring to a leader’s own transformation and to a leader’s vision being transformational. 

Material from this essay has been incorporated in The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

---

1. James M. Burns, J. Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1978): 20.

2. Ken W. Parry and Sarah B. Proctor-Thomson, “Perceived Integrity of Transformational Leaders in Organizational Settings,” Journal of Business Ethics 35, no. 2 (January, 2002): 75.

Can Ethical Leadership Be Taught?

In the typical business school, this question would be interpreted, or “refurbished.” Can students be trained to become ethical leaders? While often conflated contemporaneously, these two questions are indeed distinct. Instructors, professors and school administrators should first decide which question is more relevant to their purposes. The question chosen should fit with the education, pedagogical method, and philosophy of education of not only the instructor or professor, but also the school itself. In this essay, I distinguish the two questions in order to unpack them with their full significance.

The entire essay is at “Can Ethical Leadership Be Taught?

Sinek's Ideological Leadership of Sacrifice: At What Cost?

In the world of journalistic and popular writers who double as motivational speakers, leadership is the proverbial rainbow into which practically any ideal can be subsumed. Unfortunately, the enterprise can be likened to a hot-air balloon that has lost its moorings. That is to say, the link between the aspirations and what they can actually deliver typically received little if any real attention, not to mention respect. In some cases, the promises of leadership motivational-speakers, or “coaches,” run up against, or ignoring outright, human nature itself. Ironically, as such leadership preachments are typically (and quite conveniently) oriented to upper-echelon corporate managers, or executives, Communism suffers from the same flaw: contravening human nature. Yet the leadership bubble continues upward, quite unabated by reality.

From: "Leadership as a Responsibility to Sacrifice"