Practical wisdom from the Japanese Traditions

Since 2009 The Academy of Business in Society and Yale University, supported by the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD), are organizing a series of conferences on Practical Wisdom for Management from the World’s Spiritual and Philosophical Traditions, addressing the central question: How can we bring back the value of wisdom in management and management education? These conferences are designed to bring together philosophers, theologians, economists, management scholars, business leaders and policy makers to engage in reflection and dialogue to find new grounding for management education and management practice. The Practical Wisdom initiative looks at the spiritually and philosophically inspired practical virtues inherent in managerial decision-making, which lead to wise decisions in strategic management, leadership, human resource management, etc. This approach takes into account the consequences of globalization and the belief that a global market economy needs an ethical framing and a moral compass to be viable, sustainable and equitable.

It is precisely practical wisdom as derived from the world’s spiritual and philosophical traditions, which serves as a platform for discovering the common ground between diverse traditions, making traditions speak to each other in a global society and a global economy. This initiative seeks to create a bridge between the world of management and the spiritual and philosophical traditions on a basis of mutual appreciation instead of mutual suspicion.

Practical Wisdom rooted in religious and spiritual traditions plays an important role in the context of modern society. In many ways, traditions of practical wisdom still serve as a palimpsest of contemporary cultures. Veiled but nevertheless influential, they inspire education and civic culture, framing decisions in social and economic organizations that are reluctant or even hostile against explicit religion. In the context of the globalized markets of the 21st century, the social importance of practical wisdom may even increase. As legal institutions based on national legislatures no longer expand their regulatory power, the orientating force of overarching notions of practical wisdom may enable cooperation even in contexts where no common legal rules are available. This holds especially true for business life, in which common sense and professional ethics have always played an important role. Religious notions of practical wisdom, however, are still an academically underexplored area. Modern philosophers and ethicists have tried to elaborate normative constructs, which should serve as a rational substitute in a post-religious era. However, as the artificial language ‘Esperanto’ could never displace the real historic languages of people, even modern normative concepts like the ones proposed in recent years will never displace the orientating forces that religion and spiritual concepts embody. Bringing these concepts to light again and illustrating them in their regulating influence on business practices in certain cultural and historic contexts is an important challenge for contemporary academic research.

Japanese spiritual and philosophical traditions for management is widely admitted ranging from “Shu-ha-ri” (three stages of learning mastery): the fundamentals, breaking with tradition, parting with traditional wisdom to three way satisfactory business to seller, buyer and society.  The high economic development after the Second World War elucidated the strength of Japanese management way in the form of life-time employment commitment and workplace productivity improvement and knowledge creation. The applied practices include joint consultation system in the constructive industrial relations and “Kaizen” activities like 5S and small group activity in quality control circle. However, a lot of implicit knowledge is not converted into explicit in high context working environment of Japanese businesses. There are a lot of needs in Japanese spiritual and philosophical traditions for management to be shared with international experts. 

Contact: Cristian Loza Adaui (email: [email protected]).

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