2. Training the Mind for the Knowledge and Creative Work

Highlighting the importance of intellectual and mental work in contemporary organizations, this chapter goes over how the Bhagavad Gita analyzes the difficulties of focusing mind and suggests ways to gain control over it to do the knowledge and creative work. The author takes the usual behavior modification theories of stimulus-response-reinforcement (S-R-R) given by the psychologists, during the twentieth century, for controlling worker behavior for mechanical, repetitive, structured work and shows how it fails in controlling the mind of workers for assignments that go beyond the rudimentary. Then, he applies the mind theory of the Bhagavad Gita and modifies the S-R-R model incorporating the Bhagavad Gita’s concept of doing karma without any expectation of reward, describing how a knowledge worker could be motivated even when there was no reinforcement. He goes further in modifying the model by internalizing the motivation such that a knowledge worker will self-pick knowledge and innovation work to do rather than waiting for the supervisor to assign it. The final model emphasizes the Gita’s concept of kartavya (duty) and shows how knowledge workers could perform well on innovation and mental work without any direction, extrinsic control or supervision. This will focus employee’s mind on the innovation and creative work.