Neerja Raman, longtime resident of Los Altos Hills, has published a guide to decision making based on “The Bhagavad-Geeta,” a chapter in the ancient Sanskrit epic poem “Mahabharata.”
Raman’s 89-page guide, “The Practice and Philosophy of Decision Making: A Seven Step Spiritual Guide,” uses the elegant metaphor of the conversation between Prince Arjuna, charged with leading an army into battle, and the god Krishna, who acts as his charioteer and counselor.
As Arjuna struggles with an overwhelming dilemma, he asks questions of Krishna, who answers but does not tell him what to do. Arjuna has to work it out for himself.
Asked how she came up with the idea for the book, Raman said, “I guess it is a combination of who I am and my experience in managing people. … A lot of progress in business is not made, because people are afraid to make a decision, to take a stand. This is true in their personal life as well. Making a decision is taking responsibility for yourself.”
The setting of the “Geeta” is a field on which two armies face each other, waiting for battle to begin. The battle scene symbolizes our inner conflict when faced with a difficult choice, Raman said.
Arjuna leads the army of the Pandavas, who are skilled in battle, compassionate and just. They face the armies of their jealous and selfish cousins, the Kauravas, who have tried repeatedly to wrest the throne from them.
The Kauravas’ armies are huge because, given the choice between Krishna’s counsel and his vast army, they chose his army. The Pandavas chose his counsel. Krishna and Arjuna engage in a dialogue throughout the “Geeta” as Arjuna struggles between his duty as a leader and his abhorrence of doing violence to his cousins.
“Decision making doesn’t have to be a slow process; it can be very fast. But you have to have that dialogue or you don’t have commitment. An edict doesn’t encourage cooperation,” Raman said. Approaching decision making as if it were conflict resolution “is going about it the wrong way.”
She writes: “Just as you cannot get happiness by seeking it, you cannot resolve a conflict as long as you see it as a conflict, because you will be thinking in terms of winners and losers, us and them. You will need to enlarge your thoughts … enough to see the problem as a solution rather than as a conflict.”
Raman told the Town Crier last week, “The process can be liberating. You can make decisions faster because you’re not reinventing it every time.”
The overriding lesson is, “You’re always responsible for who you are or can be.”
Raman believes the lessons of the “Geeta” are very relevant today.
“The whole concept of war in this global economy doesn’t make sense. … And there is something new and different in the business world: ethics is missing from management. … A decision is about the community and yourself.”
Concise, with short chapters, and not meant to be read from cover to cover, Raman’s book is accessible to all readers.
And you don’t need to understand the “Geeta” to understand her guide, Raman said.
“People have told me after reading the book, ‘It’s not that I don’t know how to do this, it just gave me the confidence to do it,'” she said.
The first-time author said she plans to donate all profits from the book to charities. The first check she will write, she said, will be to the public library system.
“Two things really struck me when I came to America – the library system and the park system,” she said. “The library system allows me to be who I am in my mind, and the park system allows me to be who I am in my heart.”
Raman is a technology manager and research director in HP’s central laboratory in Palo Alto. She was a featured speaker at the Women in Technology International conference, held in San Jose, June 8-9. Her Web site is neerja.raman-net.com.
Raman is scheduled to give a reading at 4 p.m., Saturday, at Borders Santana Row, San Jose, which stocks copies in its business section. The book is also available online from BookSurge.com, which published it at the end of 2003.
