Two Birds in a Tree summary

The Upanishads tell another story about a boy who wants to understand Ātman, or the essence of the world and all beings. So, his father instructs him to place a piece of salt in a glass. The following day, the boy’s father asks if he can see the salt. When the boy says he can’t, the father tells him to sip the water and describe its taste. Naturally, the boy says that it’s salty.

The point is that just like the salt invisibly permeates the entire glass, so does Ātman permeate all being. That means that since we’re all beings, we’re all part of Ātman. For instance, think back to the two birds: the one in the lower branches is focused on material objects and experience, but the bird on the top is different. It’s our universal self, in other words, Ātman.

Did you know that the english word right stems from the Vedic concept of Rta? It’s the idea about how worldly things fall into the right order. For instance, night follows day, summer comes after spring and a balance is maintained between gods and humans.

The manifestation of this order is called Dharma, or the balance within and between systems.

So we, as the lower bird, have seen that there’s a higher reality, a larger system that we’re inside of. But what we’ve seen so far is just a brief glimpse. Then how can we see further?

By aspiring to a higher sense of self through the work we do. That’s because work is the realm in which we develop skills and the aspects of our material selves that are important to us. This fact is abundantly clear in startups, work environments in which people give their work everything they’ve got, often investing more hours to work than sleep or any other activity, with the drive to change the world in whatever way.

Another story told in the Upanishads is that of Bhrigu, a boy who endeavors to understand reality’s mystery. He meditates over what could be essential to humanity and comes to the realization that joy is foundational to our lives. Well, the same is true of business.

That’s because joy means happy employees, and happy employees mean long term profitability. For instance, a business has lots of different stakeholders from customers to employees, but in the hectic capitalist world, plenty of companies devote all their energy and attention to the shareholders. The problem is that this strategy is unsustainable because it lacks dimensionality.

Have you ever read an article on a major corporation’s quarterly report? It’s likely you have and that’s because the businesses of today are obsessed with pleasing shareholders. In fact, it’s common for successful business leaders to hold fast to this ideal.

For instance, a study of over 70,000 quarterly conference calls on the topic of earnings found that leaders were more focused on producing short term profits to attract investors interested in quarterly earnings. However, there’s another route and it goes back to Being-centered leadership, which brings employees to the table as key stakeholders.

Having been inspired by the Upanishads, Mahatma Gandhi died in possession of only ten things, amongst them were an eating bowl, sandals and spectacles. His commitment was based on the intention to have as small a negative impact as possible; that the world is not here for us to take from, but to care for. Unfortunately, this sentiment is rarely shared by the businesses of today.

In fact, business as it’s done today, doesn’t account for the true costs of its actions. For instance, we overuse nature, but don’t see the costs because the environment doesn’t send an invoice. So, at present, the global economy receives $72 trillion in “free goods”, like natural resources, per year and does annual damage that costs about $6.6 trillion. Not just that, but by 2050, the costs of that damage will likely have grown to $28 trillion!

Have you ever heard of a sage? It’s essentially a wise person whose physical self, as represented by the lower bird, is perpetually connected to the higher bird. As a result, they can be extremely inspirational.

In fact, even some CEOs are sages. Just take Paul Polman, CEO of a gigantic consumer goods corporation called Unilever. For Polman, the 2008 financial crisis was a “crisis of ethics” that lead him to reevaluate the way Unilever operates. He decided to stop quarterly reporting and focus the company on long-term growth.

The key message in this book:

There’s a different way to do business, a departure from the status quo that supports instead of harming nature and humanity. It’s called Being-Centered leadership and it works by linking the goals of a company to the interests of the planet in which it operates.