The monk who managed the world
In the book Sing, Dance and Lead, Prof (Dr) Hindol Sengupta’s take on leadership feels a world away from those boring, stiff management books you usually find at airports. He follows the life of Srila Prabhupada to show how someone can actually build a massive, worldwide organisation while still staying as humble as a monk. It is pretty eye-opening to see how old-school Indian wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita still works for the messy corporate world we live in today. The best part of the book is watching him take these big-shot business theories and basically pull them apart using simple, timeless truths.
The author takes a fascinating look at the life of Srila Prabhupada, the man who built ISKCON from scratch after arriving in America with almost nothing at the age of 69. It is a deep dive into how ancient spiritual wisdom can actually fix the holes in modern management theories. Sengupta points out that while the corporate world loves the idea of servant leadership, Prabhupada took it to a deeper level through the Prabhu principle. He taught that true authority is not about power-it is a by-product of understanding that we are, at our core, servants of the Divine. This shifts the entire focus of a leader away from the ego and towards a genuine sense of service.
This book completely flips the idea of a leader on its head. It stops being about your own ego and starts being about actually serving people. One of the coolest parts is when the author talks about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He says that while Maslow stops at just feeling good about yourself, Prabhupada’s wisdom starts right there and pushes you even further towards spiritual peace. This is what he calls Total Bhakti Management. It basically means that a person’s real value is not just their technical skill, but their honesty and heart. It suggests that a boss who stays calm whether they are winning or losing is far more effective than someone just chasing numbers.
The story also shows how much guts Prabhupada really had. Sengupta describes him as the kind of leader who did the impossible-turning 1960s hippies into disciplined monks. He did not use some fancy boardroom slide deck to do it. He just lived simply and stayed true to his word. That kind of ‘leading by example’ is where real charisma comes from.
The book also talks about why a clean space and a clean mind matter so much. For Prabhupada, being clean was a way to get closer to God and keep the soul motivated. He even brings up Porter’s Five Forces, but looks at them in a totally different way. He points out that when you are on a spiritual mission, the whole idea of competition just fades away, since everyone is pushing towards the same shared goal. This total honesty helped him pick the right people-those with high integrity — to build a movement that covered the whole world.
If you are feeling burnt out by the modern hustle, this book is basically a toolkit. It gives you a ‘Monk’s Motto’, which says the only real failure is forgetting to offer your work to something higher. By the end, Sengupta makes you realise that connecting your job to a bigger purpose does not hold you back. It actually gives you a massive burst of energy to reach heights you never imagined. By doing things like keeping a ‘grace journal’, a leader learns that real impact comes from being humbleand having empathy, not just hitting targets.
The Sing ,Dance and Lead toolkit acts as the final anchor here, proving that true leadership is just a natural result of serving others. It teaches us that connecting our work to a higher calling taps into a level of motivation that money or titles simply fail to touch. At the end of the day, the book shows that once you stop chasing power and start offering up your hard work as a gift to the Divine, you become more effective than any business theory could ever make you.
