Śrīla Prabhupāda’s Vyāsa-pūjā – Dhanurdhara Swami’s Offering to Śrīla Prabhupāda

Dear Śrīla Prabhupāda,

Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to you!

I marvel at your genius. I had written an article about that for my weekly blog. Please accept this offering at your lotus feet on this glorious day.

Your servant,

Dhanurdhara Swami

The Genius of Śrīla Prabhupāda and the Principle of Intrapreneurship.

In my last article Build Devotees, Not Temples I opined that institutions like ISKCON need to spend more resources supporting and empowering its people, especially those that are creators and doers, to successfully carry its mission into the future. I shared this article with a friend who was a business consultant. He was intrigued by the article and shared with me something from his own experience in the business world that he thought was relevant to the topic at hand. He described the concept of intrapreneurship. In this post, I will briefly share his experience and show how it inspired me to even further realize Śrīla Prabhupāda’s genius.

My friend worked for Adobe as a consultant. They had basically one product, Photoshop, and the engineers who had developed the company had improved it as far as it could go. The CEO became concerned. He saw that this one-product company was gradually losing the culture of initiative that initially spurred its success. He knew the history of several successful companies developed by self-motivated and creative people who gradually ceded their authority to technicians and managers only to see the company become stagnant and fail. He became concerned.

He thought of Kodak, for example, who were pioneers in the technology of photography. It went from an established major company to bankruptcy. Led by bureaucrats resistant to internal change, they lost their inability to keep up with smaller, more nimble competitors that could innovate quickly and respond to changing market trends.

The CEO realized he needed to do something. He decided to apply the principle of Intrapreneurship.

Intrapreneurship refers to a system within an organization that enables creative and innovative people to take the initiative to develop pioneering products and services. And to encourage such creativity and risk-taking, the company not only empowers the employees to innovate but ensures the “intrapreneurs” that they will not be held accountable for any failures or losses as a result of their experiment. It’s called intrapreneurship because it gives the same creative freedom to people within a corporation or organization that independent entrepreneurs have.

It has been seen that companies who find ways to allow the self-motivated to leverage their creativity and ingenuity are more likely to survive and grow, especially in the rapidly changing modern world. One of many such examples of success include Google’s “20% time program” which allowed their employees to allot a fifth of their worktime to freely engage in intrapreneurship. The result: gmail. When listening to my friend’s experience of intrapreneurship I thought of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s genius in setting up ISKCON along similar principles by encouraging a system of management that would empower independently thoughtful and creative devotees. Śrīla Prabhupāda’s understanding of the principle of intrapreneurship is outlined in his famous letter to Karandhara dasa.[1] Below is a relevant excerpt:

“Regarding your points about taxation, corporate status, etc., I have heard from Jayatirtha you want to make big plan for centralisation of management, taxes, monies, corporate status, bookkeeping, credit, like that. I do not at all approve of such plan. Do not centralise anything. Each temple must remain independent and self-sufficient. That was my plan from the very beginning, why you are thinking otherwise? Once before you wanted to do something centralising with your GBC meeting, and if I did not interfere the whole thing would have been killed. Do not think in this way of big corporation, big credits, centralisation–these are all nonsense proposals. Only thing I wanted was that books printing and distribution should be centralised, therefore I appointed you and Bali Mardan to do it. Otherwise, management, everything, should be done locally by local men. Accounts must be kept, things must be in order and lawfully done, but that should be each temple’s concern, not yours. Krishna Consciousness Movement is for training men to be independently thoughtful and competent in all types of departments of knowledge and action, not for making bureaucracy. Once there is bureaucracy the whole thing will be spoiled. There must be always individual striving and work and responsibility, competitive spirit, not that one shall dominate and distribute benefits to the others and they do nothing but beg from you and you provide.”

Genius? At least, it’s quite remarkable that more than fifty years ago at the beginning of his fledgling movement he so clearly understood these principles of empowerment and tried to set up his movement on principles of intrapreneurship that only became prominent in modern corporate leadership over thirty years later. Let us all honor in our own capacity the genius of Śrīla Prabhupāda and the principle of intrapraneurship.

[1] https://vanisource.org/wiki/721222_-_Letter_to_Karandhara_written_from_Bombay?hl=thoughtful%7Cindependently