Kautilya on Management by Wisdom during the Fourth Century BCE

摘要

In recent years knowledge management has acquired a pivotal place in business strategies for survival and growth. Current research rightly considers data management as a subset of information management and that in turn a subset of knowledge management. It appears though as if knowledge management is a new tool to acquire a competitive edge. However, Kautilya understood the importance of knowledge management to economic prosperity more than two thousand years ago. His analysis offers at least four insights, which may be relevant to today's enterprises. First, he believed that wisdom was the most valuable asset and advocated a wisdom-based management instead of a knowledge-based management. According to him, information, knowledge, and intelligence were the critical inputs to management by wisdom. A wise person, depending on the situation, understood how to reconcile, negotiate or coordinate, sometimes, the conflicting forces arising from ideas, institutions, and interests. Second, he indicated how one became wise and included acquisition of ethical values as an important component of knowledge. Third, according to him, a wise CEO (King) was ethical, self-disciplined, farsighted, foresighted, humble, and balanced. Such a CEO understood the inherent trade-off between maintaining confidentiality and sharing information and knowledge. Fourth, he suggested that a wise king (CEO) not only maximized the probability of success of a project but also undertook some contingency planning in case the project failed and evaluated afterward as to how much of the success was due to human effort and how much due to pure luck.