Satyam and Thought Leadership

The fall from grace of yesterday's icon and role model Ramalinga Raju is indeed a sign of our times where the lure of the lucre is the only driving motive for all our actions and that one can succeed at the highest levels by sacrificing all principles and values that make life worth living. Mr Raju indeed has shown great courage in building a business empire from scratch which has dishonesty, cheating, moral bankruptcy as its building blocks. One of the finest Thought leaders of our times till yesterday, Mr Raju has given Leadership a new meaning altogether. The notion of the ' ideal leader' : the "philosopher king" so engagingly potrayed by 'Plato' in his seminal work The Republic lies in shreds today. While the full implications of the 'satyam fiasco' would be felt in times to come the scenario only underscores the need for us to embrace the good old values we learned growing up as children, in the playgrounds,in the classrooms. The fiasco is a stentorian call for the business world to reassert accepted moral values and live up to its responsibility of sharing gains with the society. The need is for Thought Leaders who preach well and replicate the same in their daily actions not preach high and display moral bankruptcy by their end actions. I would quote Mr Raju form one of his many articles in a leading business magazine, " Practically every wealth creation attempt is a transformational process." Mr Raju has indeed taught us to create wealth by ' transforming' the very ' values and precepts' which make life worth living. He stands today in a quagmire all of his own.