Arthashastra (अर्थशास्त्रम्)
Arthashastra (अर्थशास्त्रम्) was given by Kautilya, who was the political pholosopher and guide for Chandragupta Maurya during the Mauryan era. Arthashastra is a moolamantra not only for political governance but also a guptamantra for corporate management governance. The veracity of application to Kautilya's Arthashastra ranges to limitless boundaries of knowledge and learning from medicine to education to philosophy and even to contemporary management sciences. The preaching and mandates of Kautilya elevate human thinking to act beyond his sixth sense involving cognitive, affective and motor domains necessary to gain complete control over management of self and institutions.
Introduction
Please see this link to access the samskrita moolam for Kautilya's Arthashastra
Discussion
Glimpses of health and medicine in the mauryan empire Dr. D. V. Subba Reddy, - pp79,
Thus human personality (maharaja) must manifest multi-dimensional adaptive roles at different times by demonstrating extraordinary intuition, self control, vision, accurate prediction, confidence in decisions taken, combating venom attacks etc. Such qualities are no differently to be enumerated by a successful management expert.
The king is a ruler of the kingdom (a corporate leader) and as a decision maker has to be secretive about his war strategies (incubating new product developments) at the same time be offensive and defensive with enemies (corporate rivalry and competition) as the threat perception may be ensuring his survival despite enemy attacks (presence of substitutes and complementary products and disruptive technologies). Such preaching are of the nature of Gupta Mantra.
The central force of a political architecture is its legal system and the king is a protector and preserver of the law but most definitely not its creator which means his power is sanctioned and limited by law. Be the powers vested, the actions of CEOs of companies are governed by the Companies Act , Income Tax Act, SEBI Regulations, and the likes of these. When no confidence motions (equivalent to dethroning a king) are passed against CEOs in the U.S, his kingship is challenged, by the board of directors, for non-performance as envisioned for the company and customers. This establishes the temporal sovereignty of the CEO where the Varjasva Takat (Ultimate power) of the power owner is called into question resulting in dethroning the leader. Recent real-life corporate citations are available to corroborate this. This proves the temporal sovereign status of the corporate leader.
While Arthashastra can be considered a bible describing the methodology of supreme governance in a political architecture, such tenets can be applied to corporate governance too. Michael .E. Porter has suggested competition from rival firms to be the biggest force attacking business as much as rivalry