Sadhguru Academy – Nurturing Leaders

Table of Content
1. “Isha Leadership Academy” Is Now “Sadhguru Academy”
2. An Undergraduate Program in Leadership
3. Leadership Programs for All

Sadhguru: People become leaders for various reasons – some because they are propelled by a powerful ambition, some because they stand up in situations of strife or large-scale injustice, some get elected or selected and some by default, having been born into the right family. But not everyone who becomes a leader necessarily has leadership qualities.

Right now, if you look at management schools, including the top ones, all they are teaching is tricks of management, marketing, finance and so on. Yes, you need them, but they can be easily learned by anyone with a little bit of support – most books can teach you this and it is all on the Internet. Besides handling the outside, how well a human being handles themselves within is a very core element of leadership and development. But building the human being to a certain level of resilience to go through any kind of situation and reach their goal is not happening.

Without upgrading a human being, you cannot upgrade their activity. If we try to upgrade our activity without enhancing ourselves, then people will become stressful. This is what is happening right now. I have been speaking at a variety of business schools and corporations across the world. What I see is that people in responsible positions are in a bad mental state.

Once you are in a leadership position, every thought and emotion that you generate and every action that you perform has an impact on many people - maybe a few hundred people or a thousand people or millions of people, depending on what type of leadership you are in. When this is so, it is extremely important that one who wishes to be a leader, in some way, focuses upon how you are within yourself too, not just about how you perform in the world.

Establishing the Isha Leadership Academy was an effort in this direction – to enhance leaders.

“Isha Leadership Academy” Is Now “Sadhguru Academy”

In 2023, we rebranded Isha Leadership Academy as Sadhguru Academy. We did an assessment and found that if 100 people in the world have heard of Sadhguru, only two people have heard of Isha. Moreover, when you say Isha, you have to explain what it is. If you say it means “formless divinity,” people think you are trying to preach a religion. So, the branding for the Academy has shifted to Sadhguru.

Though I am a very reluctant guru, I am taking up so many things in the world because there is a lot that needs to be done. When I first started teaching, if I taught one program, I would just vanish for months because I would feel embarrassed with all the attention. No one – neither my family nor the people who did the programs – would know where I was. Even now, people around me see that reluctance in me. So, they went about naming many things after Isha. But now, time is moving in a certain way and there are many more things to be done. If we do not utilize something that has leverage, it will be a waste of everyone’s time and energy. But "Sadhguru Academy" does not mean my academy. It is about you becoming a Sadhguru; that is, in some way, you come from within, not from accumulated knowledge.

Today, there are marketing experts, finance experts, and many other kinds of experts, but they know nothing about themselves. This is not a good way to be a leader. If you know nothing about yourself, you will know nothing about anyone or anything else. Sadhguru means someone who comes from within. That means you are not an expert in anything. You do not know the scriptures, traditions, rituals, or anything. You know just one thing – this piece of life from its origin to its ultimate. If you know this piece of life, by inference, you know everything that is worth knowing because everything else in existence is made the same way.

An Undergraduate Program in Leadership

Right now, business schools are run in such a way that on Friday afternoon, everyone is preparing for a party. On Monday morning, they are exhausted because they are partying till 4:30 AM. This has become the standard of university life these days, especially in the United States. If there are 100 students, only about 20 to 25 of them are focused on what they are doing. All the others are in different states of being lost, either because of intoxication or because they are in the midst emotional upheavals managing their boyfriends and girlfriends.

If you want to be of some capability, you must be absolutely focused. If you do not build human beings to a certain level of capability, where they function well in any kind of situation no matter what, then they are not leaders. They are just enjoying the existing situation. They are not going to create anything new or take a nation or the world towards a new possibility.

To build capable people who will do well wherever the hell life throws them, the Academy will offer a four-and-a-half-year undergraduate program in leadership beginning in 2025. If you want to draw parallels to how it will be run, there is something called the National Defense Academy in Khadakwasla, Pune, where 17-year-old boys and girls join. When they come out three-and-a-half years later, at the age of 20–21, they are competent enough to lead groups of 100–125 people into battle. That is not a small responsibility because what they do or do not do may kill people. But in three-and-a-half years, they become competent enough to take on that level of responsibility, not only in the skills of military warfare but as human beings.

The Sadhguru Academy may not be training students to take people into war, but if you become a business or political leader, what you do and do not do will make or break people's lives. When you have such a responsibility, you must be put through a serious grind. So, we want to run the program in such a way that once students come, it is on and on and on. This program is not about building a business. It is about building the human being to be capable of doing just about anything that is offered to them.

Leadership Programs for All

Besides the undergraduate program, the plan is to offer fortnightly programs for every aspect of business – marketing, finance, public policy, leadership and so on – for small groups of people. And as a continuation of that process, though we cannot run participants’ businesses, we can hand-hold them as people. There is no limit to how we can do this. If there are a few sensible people guiding the process, we can create various possibilities technologically for thousands of people who want to grow their businesses.

India is a tremendous pool of talent. Wherever else we go, Indians do phenomenally well, but we have not done well in our country because of a lack of leadership and organization. When we utter the word “leadership,” people always think of the Prime Minister and Chief Ministers. But leadership is not just at the top. We need leadership at every layer of society, which is completely missing.

So, the Academy aims to produce leaders of every kind – whether a homemaker or a grocer, a panchayat leader or an MLA – who can create a change in their respective spheres of life. I have identified eleven layers of leadership that we need in our society, and we are preparing courses for them. Empowered with insight, inspiration, inner wellbeing, integrity and humility, these graduates of the Academy will become active, successful leaders and entrepreneurs who can fit seamlessly into any organization and shape the society and world we inhabit.