Managing in the Gray

Managing in the Gray

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The Network of Mutuality

If managers ignore their constitutive relationships when they

face hard decisions, they are not only rejecting parts of them-

selves. They are also rejecting a long-standing perspective on

our common human experience. Over the centuries, the idea

that human nature is profoundly social has taken many differ-

ent forms. The sacred Hindu text, the Upanishads, explains

this perspective with a simple metaphor. It says, “As all the

spokes are fastened to the hub and the rim of a wheel, so to

one’s self are fastened all beings, all the gods, all the worlds,

all the breaths, and all these bodies.”

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In the West, Aristotle’s

succinct and famous statement of this perspective was his

definition of human be