Human beings are acknowledged to be gregarious creatures. They find it very difficult, if not impossible to survive in isolation. Each individual needs some association, call it company if you will, to fulfil the basic needs of life. Food requires a producer, a supply chain and method of exchange. Shelter needs support to make an environment hospitable for living: protection from nature which includes the sun, the rain, the thunderstorm to be available to keep the body and soul together. Hence company is essential to survival. This dealing with people and processes for survival needs a shared platform for exchange. Few would render ant services to anyone unless there was something in exchange to be received for providing the service. This in turn creates a whole web of exchange relationships which then become a key foundation for the civil society. The civil society in its turn requires rules for exchange and therefore governance. Governance itself has its ramifications and the rules of governance have to be decided and agreed upon.
A simple life of solitude is neither possible nor conceivable except in the rarest of the rare cases. A hermitage is possible but even a hermit requires feeder services, come as it may from nature itself. The hermit has to create a shelter and have some clothing to keep the body and the soul together. This itself can be a demanding fare because the more powerful may poach upon him and the hermit would need to defend himself against expropriation and dominance of the more powerful. That in turn raises the need of a civil society and an ambience of good governance.
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The urge for life and living thereby keeps getting from simple to the complex and from the complex to the more complex. There are no defined limits to the requirements of a civil society. By itself this proposition is complex enough. When one adds to it the nature of a human being the complexity is compounded. A human being can feel and hence feelings become important. A human being has the capacity to be attracted and repelled, hence emotions become important. The human being also has a body to nurture hence creature comfort becomes a real factor. The list can be multiplied; however, the basic point is simple. To function has a human being relationships become one of the driving features.
Relationships in their turn generate their own logic. There is attraction to situations and people which provide understanding and support. Even support can wait but understanding is the foundation. This is a tricky process to handle. One offers understanding only if emotionally aligned. If the needs don’t enmesh, if the level of mental sophistication is at variance, if the knowledge wherewithal is not on a common shared platform, relationships won’t work smoothly and without relationships there can be no understanding. Grief is a natural outcome and people’s ability to handle grief varies. It can lead to not just impatience and sharp words but expressions of verbal violence with physical violence not being ruled out. The anatomy of relationships has interested the intellectually oriented humans for exploration. Many well thought through approaches have been elaborated and documented on various media from papyrus to the digital. Even with all the good work that has gone into this, the domain remains open and is as wide as the sea. Hence it is that scholarly exploration of these various issues becomes a subject area out of which institutions with knowledge pursuits as their objective, are born.
Learning itself has been segmented as per the life cycle of the homo sapien. Infancy, childhood, boy/girlhood; adulthood and beyond is a chain. Some communities have achieved an integration among all this a little more seamlessly, than others, but the pursuit goes on. This is the essence of institutional learning.
Like everything else, categories and clusters enter this domain too. There are different types of learning processes. None of them can be comprehensive enough to eliminate the need for other approaches and there is enough scope to learn from each other.
Thus, it is that patience and openness become a prime attribute of not just growth but survival itself. Composure of the brain and the heart, to talk of just two organs of the human body, is central to having an optimally functioning body. This is without prejudice to the understanding of the functioning of other parts of the body such as the lungs, the stomach, the intestine, the colon and many others. This is essential for the body to remain functional. Nothing else can actually discharge the function related to these organs, for any individual. Hence the need for composure and enabling optimality of function for the body organs. Mind control and channelising of emotions are central to this.
Like everything else, all these factors affect the management of business.
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