The Value of Ancient Wisdom for Future Leaders

• Human skills such as adaptability, resilience, and emotional intelligence are critical to thriving in a complex and unpredictable job market.
• We can place greater emphasis on these skills in our classrooms by introducing our students to the tenets of ancient traditions such as Buddhism, Daoism, and Hinduism.
• The more students appreciate concepts such as mindfulness and interconnectedness, the more likely they are to develop into agile, responsible, and compassionate leaders.
  
  

When it comes to preparing our students for the future of work, one of our greatest challenges is that we have no way of knowing in what industries or professions our learners will land. Many are likely to work in jobs that did not exist even a decade ago, such as 3D printer operators, SEO specialists, social media marketers, and social media content creators. Our more daring graduates might even work in occupations that are still germinating just beyond the future’s horizon.

At the same time, traditional roles that had been all but forgotten are making a comeback. In its Future of Jobs Report 2025, the World Economic Forum predicts that about 170 million new jobs will be created this decade, many of which will reside in mature professions such as agricultural work, counseling, nursing, project management, software development, and teaching, just to name a few.

How can business schools prepare future leaders to enter such a wide variety of mature and emerging occupations? The World Economic Forum, for one, makes this recommendation: Focus on developing a responsible blend of technical and human skills.

That guidance makes sense. In today’s fast-paced and diversified world of work, business school graduates will need to transcend the perceptual boundaries and biases they might have developed in childhood. They will need to cultivate skills such as agility, adaptability, and the ability to collaborate if they want to succeed in a wide range of jobs. Unfortunately, they cannot learn these essential interpersonal skills by reading standard textbooks.

While business schools are quite adept at teaching the technical side of management, teaching the human side has proven more elusive. To address this difficulty, I have my own recommendation: Let’s bring into our classrooms ancient wisdom that offers a path to developing exactly the skills we seek to teach.

Choosing What We Teach

As educators, we have written and talked at length about the growing need to instill in our students traditionally human skills. After all, students can acquire technical competencies via online learning platforms and conventional certification programs or at ad-hoc training centers. Human skills, however, are not so easily transferred, especially within today’s traditional educational structures.

The problem is that our traditional education system still focuses far too much on “left-hemisphere” competencies based on reason and logic, and not enough on “right-hemisphere” competencies such as creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, and agility. (As a reminder, split-brain theory, introduced in the 1960s by neuroscientist Roger Wilcott Sperry, holds that the left hemisphere of our brains processes our experiences logically and sequentially while the right hemisphere processes them more holistically. Although some researchers have recently questioned this hypothesis, I find it’s still a useful way to consider the two sets of skills.)

Our students will require a blend of abstract and holistic approaches to navigate the world and to connect, reflect, and interact successfully with other beings.

This is especially true in business curricula, which consistently prioritize left-hemisphere reasoning—especially in Western educational contexts. As my co-authors and I argue in a 2023 paper that appears in Development and Learning in Organizations, this one-sided focus comes at the expense of interpersonal and intuitive abilities that are vital to leadership. In our business courses, we too often present subliminal impulses such as intuitive leaps, hunches, and insights as incompatible with good business practice.

Yet, it is becoming clearer that our students will require a blend of abstract and holistic approaches to navigate the world and to connect, reflect, and interact successfully with other beings. As business settings become more complex, diverse, and fast-changing, we all need to attune our skills to each circumstance as it arises.

Where Mindfulness Comes Into Play

We can design many exercises to help students cultivate left-hemisphere skills, but, fortunately, we already have a proven “curriculum” available to us. The following reasoning may sound paradoxical, but it is not: To prepare our students for future success, and to develop their right-hemisphere awareness, we can tap into ancient practices that offer profound insights into what really matters in our lives. These practices can provide us with greater sensitivity and augmented emotional awareness in any interaction.

These core practices are tied to traditions such as Buddhism, Daoism, and Hinduism, which are based on concepts such as oneness, interconnectedness, impermanence, the ending of suffering, equanimity, and “non-harming” (or ahimsa). Such concepts provide a superb mental roadmap to guide us through often unpredictable stakeholder interactions and work experiences.

These traditions are especially valuable to business leaders for three reasons. First, their fundamental concepts are widely accessible—an abundance of information about each is available online. Second, their tenets are easily comprehensible and applicable to the challenges we face in our daily lives. Finally, their messages are secular, so that we can learn about and apply them without shifting away from our religious beliefs.

In a 2024 paper published in the Journal of Business Ethics, two co-authors and I explore how people can draw on the tenets of Buddhism, Daoism, and Hinduism to enhance their work in an increasingly volatile and diverse world. The three traditions, whose foundational concepts are outlined below, share some common themes.

Buddhism emphasizes three mindful practices:

• Meditation enhances awareness of the impermanent nature of everything and the interconnected reality in which we live. Buddhists hold that we can cease our suffering and acquire happiness only if we release our attachments and aversions, which serve as the sources of most of our miseries.
• Non-harming is embedded in the awareness of interconnectedness. Once we accept that we are all interconnected and interdependent, we have no incentive to cause harm to another.
• Interdependent causation helps us remember that our acts, both positive and negative, come back to us in unexpected ways. Popularly known as karma, this concept can encourage us to be mindful of what we do, given that every action has consequences.

Daoism is virtue-driven, calling on people to treat one another with great respect. It embraces the following ideals:

• The notion that everyone we encounter is a teacher in our lives. For that reason, we should treat every person we meet with respect, even if that person’s perspectives deviate from our own.
• The idea of our oneness in the wholeness of life. As in Buddhism, this awareness can help us transcend shortsighted aggravations and separations that lead to regression instead of progress.
• A focus on cultivating inner tranquility, which helps us avoid conflict and embrace mutuality.

Hinduism invites us to see the sacredness of everything around us. It emphasizes these ideals:

• There is no distinction between ourselves and others.
• We must respect both living and non-living entities. As in Daoism, this mindset leads us to value everything we encounter and fosters tolerance of our individual differences.
• We must focus on our duty and tasks at hand without obsessing about the results. Known as dharma, this belief holds that focusing on excellence will lead naturally to unexpected rewards. That means we have no reason to stress over the rewards beforehand.

As the points above suggest, these three frameworks easily complement each other. Faculty could introduce any or all of them in the classroom as a way to help students develop a range of more intuitive and human-oriented behaviors, which will serve them well in uncertain business environments.

A Path to Tread Carefully

As much as these ancient traditions have to offer, however, we must proceed thoughtfully as we introduce them to students. Students who are used to the sober contemporary learning environment—where finance, accounting, marketing, technology, and management are presented as steadfast strategies—might require us to take a sensitive approach.

I have found that, while mindfulness dialogues and exercises are applicable in any learning environment, they might be most easily integrated into management-related courses. For example, I have implemented conversations about mindfulness, brief meditation practices, and other sensitivity-enhancing exercises in courses on topics ranging from organizational behavior and business ethics to leadership and creativity in management.

Even if only a small group of our students apply these practices, we will make a positive difference in the world by sharing the insights these ancient frameworks have to offer.

By teaching these concepts, I aim to plant seeds of insight that can lead my students, as future business leaders, to practice greater compassion and mindfulness throughout their careers.

Will integrating mindfulness concepts into our teaching guarantee that every student takes these lessons to heart? Does it guarantee that every student will become a more responsible, compassionate leader? No, I do not take such a utopian view, nor do I expect that all students will embrace these practices. Ultimately, the outcomes depend on what each individual takes away from these conversations.

Nevertheless, it is gratifying to know that, even if only a small group of our students apply these practices in their working and personal lives, we will make a positive difference in the world by sharing in our classrooms the insights these ancient frameworks have to offer.

This brings to mind the well-known starfish story, which reminds us of the power of individual impact: One day, after a storm, a man is walking on the beach and sees that a large number of starfish have been stranded on the sand. He encounters a little girl tossing starfish back into the sea, one by one. He chuckles as he tells her that what she is doing is senseless because there are simply too many starfish for her actions to make a difference. The girl simply picks up another starfish and throws it into the water, before responding, “I just made a difference for that one.”

The ancient traditions remind us that, as teachers, we too can make a meaningful difference.