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General Introduction
1. Intended content and perspective
Leadership plays a crucial role in the success story of any organization. In order to be an effective manager, one must have specific leadership qualities. For the leader of a nation, a company, or any other organization, there may be various sources of inspiration. For a company based primarily on Jain principles some of the fundamental guidelines are derived from ancient Jain scriptures. In those texts we find theories, concepts, ideologies, ordering mechanisms, and worldviews that had evolved over time, through ages of reflection and lived experiences.
Jainism, however modest in the number of its adherents, has been a treasure trove for the finer points of accountable behaviour. Its system of ethics has no parallel in other value systems as to its lofty ideals and logical consistency. Basic virtues all cohere in a worldview of dazzling clarity: causality, karma. Jain teachings insist on this coherence: right behaviour is intrinsically linked with right perception and right knowledge.
On the work floor and in domestic life the seemingly endless inhibitions, restrictions and self-reflections that govern behaviour may be the most conspicuous of the three domains, but it is important to state at the very outset that Jain ethics (the prescriptive domain) are fundamentally intertwined with the other two domains, the perceptive and the cognitive.
The present work is not written from the standpoint of a traditional scholar, just looking at the object and talking about it with other scholars, without further commitment to the substance of what is said. On the contrary, the work is written from the standpoint of engaged practice, in which what is talked about must be evidenced in what is done. For a Jain businessman in particular, practice is never divorced from philosophy, causality, soteriology, teleology and the ultimate order of things. In this vein, the author becomes what is called 'reflective practitioner', who reflects on the ideals, which drive good practice. Good practice, i.e. ethically determined enlightened behaviour, should be constantly questioned and thus related back to that inner balancing act that every deeply religious person needs to return to.
One of the ubiquitous tensions that adherents of such a profoundly causal system face, and thus also the present author, is the discrepancy between crystal-clear but almost unattainably high standards for right conduct, on the one hand, and the messy, entangled, multidirectional and multivocal
* According to M. Monier Williams, Sanskrit-English Dictionary (edition 1974, p. 1181), samy-añc = going along with or together, turned together or in one direction, combined, united (...), entire, whole, complete, all (...), turned towards each other, facing one another, lying in one direction, forming one line (as footsteps), correct, accurate, proper, true, right; on the same page of the dictionary samyaktva (often short for samyagdarsana, see also the variant samkit on the title page) is glossed as right perception or insight, with a reference to ratna-traya, the same three gems or jewels often referred to in this dissertation.
