A Look at Management from the Shaolin Temple

If you ask an ordinary resident of Russia what he knows about the Shaolin Temple, that was hiding for a long time from human eyes in the Songshan Mountains, he will surely remember numerous colourful films on martial arts exercised by the monks. What else? The most advanced will say that Shaolin Monastery is associated with the name of one of the patriarchs of Chan Buddhism, the Indian monastic warrior Bodhidharma, who passed to the Shaolin inhabitants a method that fundamentally changed their practice of perceiving spiritual experience and improving physical health. Meanwhile, Shaolin is an integral harmonious philosophical system based on ancient Eastern wisdom, not at all contradicting Western knowledge (and we will prove it!), but harmoniously complementing the latter. And if we are talking about philosophical system, that is, a picture of how the world works, it is natural to build management approaches within this picture. It is really possible, which is confirmed by experience of the article authors as coaches and organizational development consultants.

ThinkTeam

People make decisions all the time. They make decisions alone; they make decisions together with others. Some fields have been focusing on the process of decision making and have attempted to help people make decisions. Psychologists, trainers, and organizational development consultants are aiming to develop decision- making theories and methodologies and train people to use them in business, economics, urban-planning, and more areas of management and personal life. Computer-based decision support systems emerge in various fields. These fields are mainly interested in the actual process: helping people make better decisions. This article is about an indirect use of decision-making methodology: we use it as a learning task. As technology can process large quantities of integrated information while presenting results in a visualize manner, technology was harnessed to aid decision makers in various ways. Decision support systems (DSS) have been used to present decision makers with all possible relevant knowledge so they can take into account as many variables as they can before making an informed decision.