Advancing with Time: Yijing Philosophy of Management and Leadership

Given that the human world is presently confronted with three kinds of global crises, the ecological, the economic and the ethical, due to respective aspects of malfunctioning of human society, this article proposes a deep search for a new approach to management and leadership as forces for renovating and innovative re-orientation in which the cosmic and the human, self-interest and equity, knowledge and value, technology and wisdom must be integrated on interrelated levels of global productivity. This new approach is founded and derived from a creative interpretation and presentation of the core insights of the Yijing as an onto-generative cosmic philosophy which identifies creativity on two levels, the cosmic creativity and the human creativity. I shall show how we come to understand these creativities and their close relationship in light of five senses of change (yi) in the philosophy of Yijing: change as identity, change as difference, change as polarity, change as exchange, change as harmonization. It is argued that it is through creative cognition and synthesis of these aspects of change in management and leadership that human creativity will emerge as a power of transformation of the human world and resolving global crises. This new approach to management and leadership will be also shown to have five characteristic unities of substance and function which can find great uses in all areas of human efforts: unity of the macroscopic and microscopic, unity of the source and system, unity of knowledge and orientation, unity of prediction and decision-making, and finally unity of cultivation and harmonization. We shall see how this new approach embodies an integration of ethics and management in an effort to integrate the best of Western insight into the world and the Chinese wisdom of the human self.