Traditional Chinese Knowledge Meets Western Management Methodology

Abstract

The Western culture and its established paradigms lead the world economy and structure the global market. The backbone of this culture roots in a technocratic vision of the world, based on the principle of causality. This understanding of the economic and societal reality has shown great success with continuous achievements. Nevertheless, today our society is facing big problems. More specifically, the globalization of markets has substantially complicated the process of mak-ing the right decisions. A different approach to problem solving may help design a better solution. This approach has to overstep the too obvious true-false logic and offer a holistic frame for a new way of analyzing the economic and social realms. Looking back at the ancient Chinese philosophers, they had developed an astonishing method-ology called the Yi Jing, which was used to support government officials in making the right decisions. This article attempts to link the PDCA Deming cycle to some special elements of this framework.