Creating Profit, Jobsor Happiness? -- The Leader's Way, Chapter 5

An organization is the place where people congregate. These people need common purposes and spontaneous leader.

"Any organization is both more and less than the sum of its members. It is less because the members of the group devote only a part of their time to the organization, and much more because the organization as a whole can accomplish tasks the individual members cannot succeed in carrying out on their own.''

A Living Entity

We can consider business as a living entity. If food is essential to life, profit is essential to business. Business can be motivated. It can thrives, withers, and renews itself. It can act responsibly or irresponsibly.

As people should not live to eat, business should not live to make profit only. Making less profit is similar to having less food to eat. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Business has three important purposes: 1) Create profit, 2) serve the customers, 3) act responsibly.


Three groups of people

People have two eyes. One eye is for working. The other sees morality. Based on they eyes, people can be classified into:

1. The blinds: These people have no vision. They do not work. They cannot differentiate between vulgar and fine. As as result, they live in a poor life. They might behave badly (e.g., steal, rob, deceive) to earn wealth just to live.
2. The one-eyes: Although these people have vision and work hard to gain wealth. They do not act morally. They may acquire their wealth in a wrong way.
3. The two-eyes: These have vision to gain wealth, and they acquire their wealth righteously. They know what is good, what is evil.

One should avoid the blinds and the one-eyes, and associate with the two-eyes.

Satisfaction and Happiness

    "Happiness depends on satisfying different needs. But some fundamental need has to be satisfied before. Others can be considered.''

There are 5 levels of satisfaction.

1. Physical need
2. Safety and Security
3. Love and Belongingness
4. Self-esteem
5. Self-actualization, vitality, creativity, self-sufficiency, authenticity, playfulness, and meaningfulness

The lower level (lower number) must be satisfied before considering the higher level. For example, people need to earn enough money for food, shelter, and so on. Given the basic satisfaction, people look for other satisfaction. For example, they want to be a part of the company they can be proud of.

Source: THE Leader's Way: Business, Buddhism and happiness in an interconnected world by His Holyiness The Dalai Lama and Laurens Van Den Muyzenberg, Chapter 5 [Read the Book Review] [Read the Next Part].

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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.

About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.