What’s excellence?” I wondered as I watched the celestial play by the
poolside at Mumbai Hilton last night. The sky was dark as the stars had
come down to earth. Five hundred of them — stars of Corporate India
— gathered by the poolside to applaud the best and the brightest
among them and take home the ET Awards for Corporate Excellence.
“Those men and women. What makes them?” I wondered.
That’s when I heard the voice of the Hermit. Loud and clear:
“Excellence, my friend, does not make for what award you win from
whom. Excellence, my dear, comes from your insight into the unknown.
And that excellence comes from the power of knowledge.”
“So, what makes for knowledge?” I pondered.
“You don’t need to see knowledge as progress from Untruth to Truth. You need to see knowledge as scaling up from a lower truth to a higher truth,” the Hermit said.
“Let me take the liberty to throw some light on two eminent award winners this year, so that you may better appreciate what excellence is all about,” said the Hermit. His references were to Brijmohan Lall Munjal, the winner of this year’s lifetime achievement award and Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, the winner of this year’s global Indian award. How did Messrs Munjal and Mittal weave the amazing success stories? around themselves?
Excellence for Mr Munjal is not in being the largest bicycle and motorcycles maker in the world, nor for Mr Mittal in being the world’s largest steel maker. In their ways, they both demonstrated how excellence can be achieved by transcending the stranglehold of belief, dogma, and narrowness by freeing the mind from the credal adherence to what had been bequeathed to them from the past.
How did they do this?
They did this by freeing their minds from the Given. Nobody had to tell Mr Munjal, that dominance for him, was not in remaining the world’s largest bicycle maker. It was he and only he who needed to transcend the barriers of the mind to emerge as the world’s biggest two-wheeler the manufacturer as well.
Likewise, some 30 years ago, when Mr Mittal left home for Indonesia to acquire a small foundry in that country, he not only transcended the geographical barriers of his nation, he also transcended the barriers of race, creed, caste and comfort to look at the entire world as his oyster, building his mega steel empire across five continents.
Down the ages, men and women who have had the vision to look beyond the obvious have always been among the counted. Because, excellence, to them, became another word for knowledge. You can ask them about this.
“That’s how you grow big in a universe that really has no boundaries.
And that’s how you really excel in your field of calling,” the Hermit said.
“How do you do that?” I asked.
“Let me try and make it simple,” said the Hermit. “All you need to do is
see knowledge as a staircase with various landings. It’s your ability to
ascend and descend those landings at will is what calls for excellence.”
This is, perhaps, why it’s no longer important that Sunil Mittal, the
winner of this year’s businessman of the year award, was the biggest
vendor of telephone instruments yesterday. Or that he is the country’s
biggest mobile phone operator today. For all we know, he may
eventually quit the mobile phone business and emerge as the country’s
biggest vegetable exporter tomorrow. What Mr Mittal did yesterday, or
what he does today, or even what he may be doing tomorrow, is not
excellence. Excellence, for Mr Mittal, is his ability to transcend the
various landings on the grand staircase of his life at will on the power of
prior knowledge.
This is why Vedanta teaches us that the world we inhabit is unreal. Because, the world that we see today is not the same as it was in the past, and the world will not be the same in the future. The world can never be real. At best, you can describe the world around you as an “illusive reality”. This is also why, in today’s technology-driven world, we all inhabit a universe of virtual reality.
When you become aware of that, you also become conscious that there is only one permanent unchanging reality or existence behind the changing universe. And that reality is the consciousness of Being. The Vedanta calls that essence of being, Chaitanya. And that Chaitanya is infinite. It is eternal. It is formless. That’s what you call sat-chit-anand: Truth-existence-absolute bliss.
And when you are in that state of Being, it matters little what you have won and what you have lost. Because your desires begin to fade. And you become kind, you become compassionate, you become selfless. That’s also when you transcend the limitations of mind and space, coming face to face with reality. That’s when it no longer matters even if The Economic Times awards India’s corporate czars with an award for Excellence.
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