The Bombay securities scam of 1991 occurred more than a year after this book was conceived and planned, underlining the importance and immediate relevance of the subject; the runaway success of the author's earlier work, Management by Values: Towards Cultural Congruence (OUP, 1991, 1992) demonstrated the widespread need Indian managers have felt for an integration of western management skills and systems with a holistic, home-grown cultural ethos and values-system.

In this work Professor Chakraborty, who has devoted over a decade-and-a-half to the writing, practise, and teaching of such integration through Vedantic psycho-philosophy, develops the themes propounded in his earlier work to provide a systematic presentation of the relevant Vedantic and allied principles in a conceptual and empirical framework.

From an overall perspective of Vedantic ethical vision and its application to managerial and corporate ethical morality, the book examines what the Vedantic ethical system, and indeed great thinkers like Tagore, Vivekananda, Gandhi, Aurobindo and others, Indian and foreign, can teach us about such questions as individual leadership, transformation of the work ethos, ethics and productivity, and others.

Throughout, the conceptual and the empirical are closely intertwined, and substantial graphic appendices on the Tata leadership crisis of 1991 and the securities scam of 1991-2 give an immediacy and relevance to the analysis. The book, the author says, is 'substantially idealistic at a time when idealism has fallen into disrepute. This calls for no apology... for if business organizations are claimed to be the lever for world transformation they cannot escape engagement with idealism.'.

For practising managers, students of management, and others precariously perched between two cultures, this book provides a refreshing and envigorating meeting ground.