Management control insights from the Mahabharata

The effective management control or strategy execution requires striking balance and managing tensions across the organisation (Simmons, 2000). Merchant (2002) classifies the cause of execution failures as imbalance on three different fronts, namely, direction, motivation (misalignments) and ability or personal limitations. The victory of the Pandavas over the Kauravas in the Indian epic 'Mahabharata' dated some 3000 BC; despite arguably superior ability of the latter provides interesting insights on how those causes were managed. The practices and preaching of Sri Krishna, the mentor in the epic Mahabharata, offer some interesting lessons on how the causes of management control failure in Kauravas led to the victory of Pandavas. Pandavas' camp demonstrated the balance on direction, motivation and ability (DMA) framework identified here, and thus created a winning organisation. The mind–body diagnosis framework (Sathe and Smart, 1997), a powerful tool to 'winning organisation', is quite close to this. The framework also compares well with Krishna–Arjuna framework a.k.a. KAF (Parashar, 2008) that right vision and focused action lead to the victory amongst equal, and focused action requires competent people and compatible team. The win without fighting strategy of Sun Tzu (Ma, 2003) is as well demonstrated and comparable with the DMA framework and the Mahabharata.