Corporate kathakalakshepam: Where management studies meet Indian epics

If you think your team's management is messy, try the Mahabharata: 100 cousins, one kingdom, zero HR policies. The Ramayana wasn’t much better. Half the mission brief was, “Find Sita… somewhere.”

But as a matter of fact, Rama ran a 14-year remote-work project to a successful conclusion. Hanuman pulled off a mission impossible (with no salary) and Krishna’s chat with Arjuna still beats every TED Talk on leadership.

What does it mean? Workshop!

Earlier this August, our co-founder Ayyappan Ramchandran and Divya Iyer (MIT fellow, global projects manager, and passionate storyteller) took these “ancient best practices,” stripped away the incense smoke, and turned them into a workshop material that blended Hindu epics with project management.

Divya’s brainchild is called corporate kathakalakshepam – imagine the storytelling you would hear in a South Indian temple, but swap the oil lamps for an audience of MBA students and business leaders. Same drama, same morals, but this time, the lesson was only one: “Deliver your project on time.”

Bringing ancient stories into modern business training  

We called one of our regular clients SIGC – a women’s college in Trichy – and pitched a session for their MBA students.

The college gave one better! They brought in: MBA students, class 11-12 commerce students from their sister co-ed schools and all the HODs of their college. Basically, everyone they could find who has ever complained about management and deadlines.

We promised them a session on project management with bonus stops at leadership, team management, self-management, AI… told through heavyweight characters from Hindu epics.

How mythology connects theory to real-world skills

Everyone in the room knew the textbook stuff – initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, closure. They had memorised it by heart. But when we connected these textbook topics to stories they had grown up with, things clicked like never before.

• Matsya became the gold standard for risk management and foresight.

• Hanuman’s Lanka mission was the ultimate lesson in clarity of goals and flawless execution.

• Krishna and Arjuna? The OG lesson in “managing a team member having a mid-project meltdown.”

It stopped being a textbook concept. It became real. They could see it, understand it, and, most importantly, feel it.

Why storytelling works for teaching leadership and management   

By the end, the students told us something we hadn’t planned for: These weren’t just project management lessons anymore. They had turned into life skills.

And it was all because we didn't tell them what to do. We SHOWED them what great leaders in the epics did. And somewhere between Kurukshetra and the Kanban board, the theory stuck to their neurons.

Even the professors loved it – probably because this was the first management session in years where the presentation deck didn't include bar graphs and pie charts.

In a corporate world obsessed with “future-ready skills,” maybe the best hacks are a few thousand years old. And if a story about a monkey-god can help someone close a project with a bang, what's wrong in that?

If you want your students or team to learn management without their eyes glazing over or if you secretly think your office politics could use a little bit of Krishna’s diplomacy, let’s talk!

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