High Consciousness Manager – Who Are We Bringing Back in Management?

Abstract

The Academy’s theme for 2021 is Bringing the Manager Back in Management. How should one interpret and model the manager that needs to be brought back? It is unlikely to be the qualities that were factored out of management by digital technologies. The qualities needed in the new manager could be the empathizing and synergizing quality, the visionary and transformative quality, the moral quality (Laszlo, 2020), and more. All these and similar qualities can be subsumed under the idea of an integral (Wilber, 2000) or holistic (Dhiman, 2019) or higher state of consciousness (Maheshwari & Gupta, 2020), towards the appreciation of the total interconnectedness (Tsao & Laszlo, 2019) and oneness of the world (Laloux, 2014). A manager being brought back ideally would be self-aware, self-regulating, and flexible enough to work at higher levels of consciousness. The ability to raise consciousness around him/her/them could be a key role for the new High Consciousness Manager (HCM). From an increasing convergence of quantum science and spirituality, also identified as the Unified Field Theory (Hagelin, 1987), we hope to offer useful, grounded and generative perspectives that could offer a new ontology and epistemology for the new HCMs (Lazslo, 2020; Pavlovich, 2020). This may be also the key to accelerating the kind of pro-social and pro-environmental behavior needed for business-led flourishing and expansion of happiness. Some of the challenges to be discussed on this path are (a) What are the structural and personal rewards and incentives, as well as obstacles and challenges, for organizations to develop and deploy HCMs? (b) What new concepts, holistic and functional, are emerging to model the future of HCMs in organizations? (c) What are the characteristics of the experiences of organizations that have progressed on this path of deploying HCMs? This symposium plans to provide a rich unfoldment of these questions from multiple perspectives