Today my good friend and reverse mentor Pragnya pointed me to an excellent news article on the building of the New Delhi subway.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/world/asia/14delhi.html

This is the project managers dream. Quoting from the article

“Much of the credit for its success is usually laid at the feet of one man, Elattuvalapil Sreedharan, a 77-year-old technocrat who serves as the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation’s managing director. Mr. Sreedharan has a reputation for fearlessness and incorruptibility. At the Metro he has tried to create the culture of a private start-up business in the most unlikely of petri dishes: the epicenter of India’s sprawling bureaucracy.”

Every project has a management philosophy.

For the sub way project they really went back to the principles of management in ancient times.

Quoting again

“Instead of dry procedural manuals, senior managers are given a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita, one of Hinduism’s most important texts. But its significance is not religious, said Anuj Dayal, a spokesman for the Metro.

“It is a management text,” he said of the book, which is taken from the Mahabharata, an epic poem at the heart of Hindu philosophy. “It is the story of how to motivate an unmotivated person.”

This led me to another interesting link on Management and the Bhagavat-Gita

http://www.boloji.com/hinduism/073.htm

In essence the theme is

“No doer of good ever ends in misery’. Every action should produce results: good action produces good results and evil begets nothing but evil. Therefore always act well and be rewarded.”

How much easier can it get?