Five Seats of Power: Leadership Insights from the Mahabharata

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

In FIVE SEATS OF POWER, Raghu Ananthanarayanan uses insights from the Yoga Shastra and the Mahabharata to offer principles and practices to enable behavioural transformation. Transformation that, in turn, will ignite an individual's natural genius.

Ananthanarayanan presents each of the Pandavas - Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula and Sahadeva - as an archetype of a particular kind of power of order and stability, passion and action, and curiosity and knowledge, among others. Drawing on each of these archetypal energies, he explores the functional and dysfunctional aspects of the use of power. He examines how, in order to mobilize one's heroic potential, a person must celebrate their desirable qualities, while resolving the dark and compulsive energies within themselves.

The book also includes interviews with visionary business leaders, such as N.R. Narayana Murthy and S. Ramadorai, that exemplify the lessons gathered from analysing the heroes of the Mahabharata.

This is an invaluable guide to becoming the best you can be.

Raghu Ananthanarayanan is one of the chief mentors at Ritambhara Ashram in the Nilgiris. His work involves helping individuals, groups and organizations discover their dharma, and become the best they can be. He has co-founded many organizations focused on inner transformation and its application in various fields. He has also authored several books and papers on yoga, inner transformation and organizational alignment.

India is a collage of many strands of philosophy, science, and many Iways of engaging with the world. It has been able to weave a tapestry where these strands flow into each other. Science and spirituality, the philosophical and the pragmatic, blend together in many subtle ways. These are very relevant in an emerging global context, where society is impacted by vast changes in technology.

Leadership processes that can mobilize the natural genius of people and shape powerful organizations lie at the core of success. Raghu Ananthanarayanan has engaged with this enquiry for over four decades and made unique contributions to the fields of leadership development and organizational transformation. He has enabled organizations and leaders to anticipate the future and build capabilities through frameworks derived from traditional Indic wisdom.

Raghu uses design principles drawn from Vaastu Shastra to study organizations and facilitate their growth. He has also effectively used insights from the Yoga Sutras and the Mahabharata to enable behavioural transformation and inspire people to perform to their potential.

I have had the opportunity to appreciate his methods over the years through his association with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). His leadership development programme, 'A Leader Prepares', has enabled over 2,000 people in leadership positions to gain a new perspective into themselves and their roles. Through this book, Raghu offers a bridge between one's inner potential and its outer expression. It can be used as a mirror to reflect upon yourself and put into practice its pragmatic recommendations. It can be your first step on the inner voyage to become the best version of who you can be.

Since time immemorial, man has been on an eternal quest to know Soneself. But why is this quest important in the first place? It's because if we do not understand the process through which we make meaning of ourselves and the world, we will lack the clarity to use our skills effectively.

Defining oneself is an integral part of all the philosophies of the world. In the East, we have Vedic scriptures, the Yoga Sutras and Buddhist traditions that focus on the subject. In the West, the dominant idea of scientific proof and validation took over with the birth of psychology as a major field of study. Freud approached looking into one's own mind from a scientific perspective. This became more prominent in the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Having studied and referenced the Vedas and Upanishads in his work, Jung had a deep appreciation of the wisdom of the East.

At its extreme, this journey led to the birth of Skinnerian behaviourism, which shrugs off any attempt to understand the self. It is only concerned with behaviours that are to be operationally conditioned to control the behaviours one wants the other to exhibit.

Some of the recent advancements in psychology have emerged from meaningful engagements with Buddhist and Yogic traditions.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages