UdyamGita

This verse talks about two things.

How an entrepreneur should build a system that empowers employees to do their best.

Why one should be empathetic toward an employee’s approach to a given task and how to ensure they move toward the right approach.

First part: The entrepreneur should not get into delegating each and every task to employees. The culture of the organization should be such that each employee understands the work in front of them and picks it up automatically. When they pick the work, the entrepreneur should not tell them how to do it. It should be left to the individual to deliver the result in the way they find best. Each person has a different approach, and allowing them to choose the approach best suited to them gives a sense of ownership and responsibility.

When the task is executed, there are direct and indirect consequences, good, bad, or mixed. The entrepreneur should not sit and analyze each outcome personally. The process should take care of rewarding good results and correcting poor results. These processes should be impartial, transparent, and empowering. When employees clearly know the outcomes of their actions, they become more careful and conscious about delivering the right results. The process should also include damage control mechanisms so that individual actions do not negatively impact the organization. The entrepreneur’s job is to create strong systems, tools, and processes that enable employees to give their best, empower them to excel, and ensure that if the system is misused, the consequences are clearly known without the entrepreneur getting directly involved.

Second part: Each employee acts based on their background, past experiences, and current environmental conditions. Judging them purely on the approach they take is unfair. If someone is doing a task incorrectly, they should be provided with platforms and tools to correct their beliefs and skills. They should be allowed to experiment with different approaches to understand what works best. Such systems should help employees upgrade themselves without damaging organizational outcomes. Assigning mentors, providing simulated environments, or running internal pilots can help them improve significantly.

For different types of tasks, different types of Guna oriented people are needed. Having the right mix of Guna based individuals is crucial for running a business. There is nothing right or wrong about Gunas. Just as a king uses different methods to keep the kingdom balanced, an entrepreneur must deploy people with different Gunas for different roles and responsibilities.

Krishna dismantles a subtle illusion—the belief that outcomes are centrally “controlled” by a single authority. Doership, action, and results arise from nature operating through individuals, shaped by their tendencies and conditioning. Freedom and responsibility coexist, but neither rests on ego nor on divine micromanagement.

Business Insight

This verse speaks directly to system design in entrepreneurship.

A founder’s real job is not to delegate every task or supervise every move. It is to build a self-operating system where:

• Work presents itself clearly
• People pick up responsibility naturally
• Execution paths are chosen by the doers themselves

When individuals decide how to execute, ownership emerges. With ownership come outcomes—good, bad, or mixed. The founder should not personally arbitrate every result. Instead, processes must:

• Reward good outcomes
• Correct poor ones
• Be impartial, transparent, and predictable

Equally important are damage-control mechanisms—so individual missteps do not cascade into organizational harm. Systems absorb shocks; leaders need not.

Leadership Lesson

Empathy becomes essential when we recognize that people act according to their background, experience, and current conditions.

Judging employees solely by their approach is unjust. When someone chooses a suboptimal path, the leader’s role is to upgrade capability, not assign blame:

• Provide tools and learning pathways
• Enable experimentation in safe environments (pilots, sandboxes)
• Offer mentoring without humiliation

Over time, beliefs evolve, skills mature, and better approaches emerge—without risking core outcomes.

A crucial insight here is the role of guṇas. Different tasks demand different temperaments. There is no “right” or “wrong” guna—only fit for purpose. Just as governance requires varied methods to maintain balance, organizations require the right mix of people for the right roles.

Key Takeaways

• Leaders build systems; systems produce outcomes.
• Ownership grows when people choose their execution path.
• Processes—not personalities—should handle rewards and corrections.
• Empathy enables capability building without compromising results.
• Different roles require different temperaments; alignment matters more than judgment.