Ancient Philosophy, Quantum Reality and Management

Abstract

The romanticism of management for numbers, metrics and deterministic models driven by mathematics, is not new. It still exists. This is exactly the problem which classical physicists had in the late 19th century until Werner Heisenberg brought the uncertainty principle and opened the doors of quantum physics that challenged the deterministic view of the physical world mostly driven by the Newtonian view. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty principle of management and then list a set of factors which capture this uncertainty quite well and arrive at a new view of scientific management thought. The new view which we call as the Quantum view of Management (QVM) will be based on the major tenets from the ancient philosophical traditions viz., Jainism, Taoism, Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, Greek philosophers (like Hereclitus) etc.