Karma and Enterprise

This post is contributed by Manjeet Singh Nagi

I applied for a 3G dongle connection from one of the service providers a few years back. I made the payment in advance. Their executive visited my office but could not install the requisite software on my machine. He left promising to refund the money. It has been 3 years since then. I visited their showrooms, called their call centers, logged requests on their website, registered my grievances in consumer grievances forum but to no avail. I received calls once in a while from them stating that they would soon refund my money but they never did. I finally gave up.

A few months back I received a mail from them thanking me to avail the 3G connection with them. I continued to receive bills for a few months from them on my email. After a few months I informed them that I never took the connection and probably one of their (ex)-employees fleeced them using the application I submitted a few years. They responded, only after I refused to pay bills for a few months, that I would not get those reminders. Though they never bothered to pay a heed to my original grievance again is a matter to discuss some other time.

But I was happy that fate finally made them pay for their mistakes. Their karma finally caught up with them. That made me think - Do corporates also reap fruits of their karma? Is the concept of karma even applicable to corporates just like us the mortal? Probably yes.

Enterprises/Corporates are much like human beings. Their actions also set a chain of karma which will impact them, sometimes in ways that we cannot even establish the causality. Their actions(or karmas) will draw employees, partners, suppliers,clients, VC etc who all will have similar actions/intents/past(i.e. similar karma).It becomes a complex web of all of their karmas which defines the future of the enterprise and eventually its destiny.

I think karma is much more subtler and much more all-pervading than the vision, goal, strategic intent of organization. All these can be changed with time. But the cycle of karma once initiated with the initial thought/concept of the organization can not be changed. It is this initial thought which will define all the future actions or karma of the enterprise and eventually its destiny. A ponzi scheme set up with the objective of fleecing people of their money will draw only similar greedy investors who will make the scheme blow off.

So all the entrepreneurs planning to set up their enterprise should keep in mind to set up the enterprise with a thought/objective much bigger than just money making. It is this initial thought about their enterprise that would define the karma of their enterprise and would draw employees, suppliers, VCs, investors, bankers of similar karma to them. The positive complex web of karma all of them would uplift their enterprise.