Swaminathan Gurumurthy is one of India’s well known chartered accountants and a highly respected and sought after corporate advisor. His association with the Indian express and the newspapers campaign against corporate misdeeds and corruption at high places in mid & late 1980’s brought out the investigative journalist in him. 

Undoubtedly a brilliant chartered accountant and exceedingly astute amature lawyer he became the close and trusted counselor of Ramnath Goenka.  Apart from his great achievements as investigator and a writer, his original thinking on economic issues, his influence over the corporate India, his association with the RSS added more power to his already powerful personality.  Repeatedly rated among 50 most powerful person in India.  Instead of using his extraordinary power for personal gain, he preferred to do basic work like moulding public options on issues of rational importance and original studies & research on the community linkages to India’s economic model.

In a discussion meet which was recently held at Tidel Park Gurumurthy addressed a group of 30 finance professionals on “How to resolve conflicts”.  Being a spontaneous speaker loaded with wealth of information, he provided great insights on several aspects. Excerpts of this meet are given below. Drawing an inference between India and Japan, Gurumurthy stated that India being an organic social structure and a family oriented society like Japan, Korea and many such Asian countries is today undergoing lot of structural changes by aping the western culture. 

Japan is the foremost Asian country to become a developed nation.  This is because Japan follows the west in business transactions but at home they practice their own culture.  They do not mix up business and home thereby creating a successful and powerful business model. In a sharp contrast India imports western thoughts not only for its business practice but also applies it to the social thinking pattern which creates conflict and adds to our woes.

West today is struggling with their own ideologies and social problems, this is because they strongly believe in Individualism which is ego centric and builds informality in relationships.  By imitating west we bring artificial behaviors into our life and organization.  We are distracted with the so called western concepts and we are unable to live to ourselves.   Large organizations today are struggling to build better management & HR practices and bring relationship orientation. But to achieve this we must become a better human being first, because only a better human is capable of building and creating a better organization.

How can we become a better human being? -   Self introspection is the best way to do it.  We must continually interrogate ourselves.  If we develop this practice of analyzing ourselves and put us in other person’s shoes we will definitely become a better human being and in turn a better employee. 

We have a rich culture and we should strongly believe in family values. Unfortunately individualization is taking over our society like in US and we are replacing familial values with contractual ones.   Today no one is loyal to any organization as they are bound by mere contractual obligations and loyalty is termed as inefficiency.  In business contracts are needed, but we should not convert our workplace, family and marriage into contracts.  In this context he cited few examples stating that the collective individual borrowing in US is over 2 billion US $ per day whereas in countries like India and Japan the savings rate equals the borrowing rate of US, he also mentioned about the transaction cost which is very high in US.  For e.g.  If you live in US and you have a house which has not been white washed for some time, your neighbor could sue you for not whitewashing your house stating that the property value of his house is going down because of it.   This is the height of individualism and ego centric approach. 

He also stated that by imitating west we will only be like a fourth carbon copy which will be a poor replica. English is our strength but unless we think like an Indian and speak English there is danger.

Let us play with our strengths and for this we must also develop the art of saying “No” and the greatest requirement to this is humility which comes only through self introspection.  At this juncture it is imperative today to realize our weakness and overcome it rather than cover it up.  Since otherwise we have a tendency o justify our conduct.  We must search for models to correct ourselves, and be willing to take assistance from our own colleagues. He concluded with a quote from Sukhra Neethi stating that “anyone who wants to be acceptable to all should never proclaim anyone as his enemy or proclaim himself as anyone’s enemy”.