Ramakrishna Paramahamsa walked other people's paths before he would praise them

A village boy, a Kali temple and a circle of disciples

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay on 18 February 1836 at Kamarpukur, in the Hooghly district of Bengal, to Kshudiram Chattopadhyay and Chandramani Devi. His birthday is still celebrated by the Hindu calendar, so the festival moves from year to year. Devotees recount that at about six, walking in the fields, he saw a flight of white cranes against a dark cloud and lost outer consciousness in joy.

At about sixteen he went to Calcutta to help his elder brother Ramkumar. In 1855 he became priest at the new Kali temple that Rani Rasmani had built at Dakshineswar. That temple, the Panchavati where he practised and his room there would be the centre of his life for three decades.

He wrote nothing. What survives of his teaching was recorded by devotees, above all by Mahendranath Gupta, known as "M", in the Bengali Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita, published in English as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Sri Sarada Devi, his wife, was also his spiritual companion. In November 1881 he met a young man named Narendranath Datta, who would become Swami Vivekananda.

In December 1885, during his final illness, he moved to a garden house at Cossipore. Devotees recount that on 1 January 1886, though ill, he walked in the garden and blessed everyone present; the day is kept as Kalpataru Day. He died at Cossipore on 16 August 1886. Belur Math, headquarters of the Ramakrishna Order, now holds a temple in his name.

One summit, many sincere routes

Ramakrishna's best-known teaching is short enough to fit on a temple wall, and Belur Math gives it in its original Bengali.

Jato mat, tato path. (As many faiths, so many paths.)

Sri Ramakrishna, Bengali saying (19th c.), as given by Belur Math; English rendering prepared for this series

Read quickly, it sounds like polite tolerance. Read alongside the rest of his teaching, it is a more demanding claim. He held, as the Gospel's introduction records, that God can be seen and known directly, through longing and devotion. The goal was never vague. What he refused to accept was that only one route led to it.

That pairing, a fixed summit with many legitimate paths, is the part leaders tend to miss. Organisations that celebrate diversity often lose sight of the goal, and organisations obsessed with the goal often insist on one house method for reaching it. Ramakrishna kept both. He worshipped Kali as the Divine Mother, the living power behind the world, with total devotion, and he still held that sincere seekers of other faiths were climbing the same mountain.

A third teaching gives the first two their ethical weight. Belur Math records his ideal of serving creatures as manifestations of God, Shiva-jnane jiva seva, the idea that inspired Vivekananda's service work. Respect for every path rested, for Ramakrishna, on respect for every person walking it.

The priest who kept becoming a student

The most unusual fact about Ramakrishna is how he arrived at his teaching. He arrived at it by walking the paths himself, one after another, over roughly fifteen years:

• From 1861, Tantra sadhana under the Bhairavi Brahmani.
• From late 1864, Advaita Vedanta under the monk Totapuri, who also gave him sannyasa.
• From the mid-1860s into the 1870s, Islamic and Christian practice, each taken up in turn.

The Totapuri episode is the one devotees tell most vividly. They recount that when Ramakrishna could not go beyond the form of Kali in meditation, Totapuri pressed a sliver of glass between his brows, and that he then entered nirvikalpa samadhi and remained absorbed for three days. A temple priest of great devotion accepted instruction from a teacher whose philosophy asked him to go past the form he loved.

After Islam and Christianity he reported reaching the same realisation through each. That report is what gives "as many faiths, so many paths" its authority. It came from a man who had walked the paths in person, from the inside, under the discipline of each.

For a leader the lesson sits in the method more than in the conclusion. Plenty of executives say they respect other functions, other cultures and other generations. Far fewer have done the work of those groups even for a week.

Different methods, some of them machines

A senior leader today may run teams in several countries, across four generations, and alongside a growing set of AI tools, each with its own way of reaching an answer. The pressure in that setting is to standardise: one method, one dashboard, one way of working. Ramakrishna's teaching argues for holding the goal steady and letting the routes vary.

The trust problem is real. Edelman's 2026 Trust Barometer, which surveyed 33,938 respondents in 28 countries, reports that "seventy percent are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone who has different values, facts, problem-solving approaches, or cultural background." The same study finds employers best positioned to broker trust across those divides.

Research also suggests why the effort pays. In a computational model, Hong and Page showed in 2004 that under certain conditions a team of randomly selected, diverse problem solvers outperforms a team of the best-performing individuals, because the best performers tend to be similar to one another. Scott Page developed the argument in The Difference, published in 2007.

The AI angle is specific. When different tools, and the people who build and use them, reach the same goal by different routes, a leader who has worked with several of them can combine their strengths. One who knows only the house method will referee between them without understanding any. Ramakrishna's practice of walking another path is the best cure for that.

The WCRC Many-Paths Model

Created by Abhimanyu Ghosh · A proprietary model of Abhimanyu Ghosh and WCRC

WCRC calls this the Many-Paths Model. The diagram above shows several routes, different functions, cultures, methods and generations, converging on one shared summit. The building blocks below set out what that requires: one clear summit, many legitimate paths, a leader who walks another path personally, service to every person on every route and joy in the climb. It is a model for integration, and it scores highest on people leadership and global mindset.

The Many-Paths Model holds the goal fixed and treats the routes to it as many and legitimate. The leader learns other paths by walking them in person, which turns tolerance into understanding and makes the leader a trusted integrator of different functions, cultures and methods.

The building blocks

1. 01One clear summit

   The goal is fixed and shared, so variety in method does not become confusion about purpose.

   In practiceState the organisation's goal in one sentence that every function and region can repeat.

2. 02Many legitimate paths

   Different teams, cultures and methods can reach the same goal; no single route has a monopoly on truth.

   In practiceLet regions and functions choose their own methods once they commit to the shared outcome.

3. 03Walk the other path yourself

   Real understanding of another view comes from practising it, which earns the trust of the people who hold it.

   In practiceThe leader spends real working time inside another function or market each year, doing the work.

4. 04Serve beings as the DivineShiva-jnane jiva seva

   Respect for every path rests on respect for every person on it.

   In practiceTreat the people on the least favoured path in the company with the same care as those on the dominant one.

5. 05Joy in the climb

   Diversity of route is a source of delight and learning, not a problem to be managed away.

   In practiceCelebrate cases where a different method reached the shared goal better than the standard one.

A CEO who has worked the other side of the house

The first demand on a CEO is clarity about the summit. If the goal of the organisation cannot be stated in one sentence that every function and region can repeat, freedom of method becomes drift. Ramakrishna's tolerance rested on a goal he never doubted. Without that, many paths is simply many directions.

The second demand is personal. The model asks the leader to spend real working time each year inside another function or market, doing the work. The difference between visiting and working is the whole point. A CEO who has spent a week answering customer complaints, or shipping code, or running a regional sales territory, carries an understanding that no briefing gives.

Murphy's 2012 paper in Human Resource Management describes reverse mentoring, in which a younger, junior employee mentors an older, senior colleague. It is the generational version of walking another path, and it costs little more than humility.

The service teaching, Shiva-jnane jiva seva, has a direct reading in a CEO's diary. Look at whose meetings you accept and whose you delegate. In many companies the dominant path, often the function the CEO came from, gets far more of the leader's time than the others. Serving every person on every path starts with noticing that imbalance and correcting it, week by week.

The blind spot is the opposite of rigidity. Respect for difference can be used to avoid hard calls when one path is plainly failing the shared goal. Ramakrishna's teaching honoured sincere paths. It never required pretending that every method works equally well for a particular business purpose.

Founders, one sentence and many small teams

Founders usually have the summit clearly in mind and struggle to let others choose the route. The early habit of deciding everything personally becomes, at twenty or thirty people, a bottleneck. The model offers a trade. Write the goal down in one sentence, share it, and then let each small team pick its own way there.

A founder can also walk other paths cheaply. Spend a few days a year actually doing sales, support and engineering. Most founders come from one of those paths and treat the others as service functions. A day on the support queue changes that.

The model's fifth building block, joy in the climb, is the easiest to forget under pressure. When a team reaches a target by an unexpected route, celebrate the route as well as the result, and say what the rest of the company can learn from it. Ramakrishna's own story begins with delight, a boy lost in joy at the sight of white cranes against a dark cloud, and the teacher he became kept taking up new paths for years. Founders who treat every departure from their method as a threat will build companies that never discover a better one.

Watch for tourism. A morning on the shop floor with a photographer counts for nothing here. The test is whether you produced something real while you were there.

Mergers, regions and the methods register

Large companies feel the Many-Paths problem most sharply after acquisitions and in international expansion. The acquiring company's method is usually imposed, and the people who built the acquired business, often by a different route to the same kind of customer value, leave. The model offers a different default: hold the shared goal and outcome measures fixed, and approve local methods that meet them.

That approval needs a record. A register of approved team methods that differ from the house standard yet meet the shared outcome measures turns tolerance into something auditable. It also lets the company learn, because a method that works better in one region can be offered to others.

Boards can ask for one telling number: the gap between the highest and lowest trust-in-leadership scores across functions, regions and age bands. If one group trusts the leadership far less than others, a path is being treated as second-class. Ramakrishna's service teaching asks that the people on the least favoured path get the same care as those on the dominant one.

The final risk is the one named first among the failure modes: many paths with no summit. Each year, the board should check that the shared goal is still sharp enough to hold the variety together. A summit that has blurred can no longer hold any path to account, and the variety it once organised turns into noise.

The business model

The operating model below starts with a clearly stated shared goal, teams with different methods and cultures, leaders willing to work in other functions and respect for every person and route. Its practices are freedom of method under a common outcome, leaders rotating through other paths, cross-path reviews of what worked and reverse mentoring across generations. The outputs are fewer turf wars, leaders trusted by many groups, a wider set of tested solutions and faster integration after mergers or expansion. Over time, the company builds a global mindset in its leadership and a cohesive culture that does not depend on uniformity.

The benefit model

The leader gains credibility as an integrator, because rival views are understood from the inside. Employees can reach the goal in ways that suit their craft and culture without being judged for departing from one house method. Customers in different markets are served in ways that fit them, and investors see a company that keeps a single strategic goal while adapting its methods, which lowers execution risk. Society gains a business that models harmony across faiths, cultures and generations.

How to implement the WCRC Many-Paths Model

If you are the founder or CEO

1. 1

   State the summit in one sentence

   In the first week, write the shared goal in one plain sentence and test it with people from different functions until all can repeat it. Hold it fixed from then on.

2. 2

   Free the methods

   Tell each function or region that it may choose its own route once it commits to the shared outcome measures. Intervene only when a route is plainly failing the goal.

3. 3

   Walk another path yourself

   Spend real working time each year doing the work inside another function, market or generation, not visiting it. A founder can rotate through roles for a few days; a large-company CEO takes a longer stint in a unit far from their own background.

4. 4

   Take a reverse mentor

   Pair with a junior colleague from a different background and meet every month to learn how they see the work. Act on at least some of what you hear.

5. 5

   Celebrate a different route

   Each quarter, publicly recognise a case where a non-standard method reached the shared goal better than the house way. Treat people on less favoured paths with the same care as the dominant group.

Rolling it out across the company

The execution roadmap

Four phases, each closed by a gate. Do not move on until the gate is met.

1. Days 0–30

   Phase 1 · Diagnose and commit

   Fix the one clear summit and map the paths and trust gaps that exist today.

   • Write the organisation's goal in one sentence and test it with every function and region until each can repeat it.
   • Map the methods teams actually use to reach that goal, including the ones head office does not favour.
   • Break the trust-in-leadership score down by function, region and age band and record the gap between highest and lowest.
   • Record how many days each senior leader spent working inside another function or market last year.

   Deliverable

   The one-sentence summit and a path map showing methods, trust gaps and cross-path exposure.

   Gate to proceed

   Every function and region can repeat the summit sentence, and a baseline is recorded for every KPI.

2. Days 31–90

   Phase 2 · Pilot and prove

   Prove that different routes to a shared goal work when leaders walk each other's paths.

   • Two business heads with the same goal each choose their own method and commit to the same outcome measures.
   • Each head spends real working time inside the other's function, doing the work rather than visiting it.
   • Start reverse-mentoring pairs between each pilot head and a junior colleague from a different group.
   • Celebrate in public any case where the less favoured method reached the goal better than the standard one.

   Deliverable

   A pilot comparison of both methods against the shared outcome measures, with a keep, adapt or stop decision for each.

   Gate to proceed

   Both pilot methods are measured on the same outcomes, both heads have completed working time in the other's area, and a decision is recorded for each method.

3. Days 91–180

   Phase 3 · Embed and scale

   Make freedom of method and walking other paths normal for every senior leader.

   • Set up a rotation so every senior leader spends working days each year inside another function, market or generation's work, with a real output.
   • Create a register of approved methods that differ from the house standard but meet the shared outcome measures.
   • Extend reverse mentoring to every senior leader.
   • Train managers as integrators who can hold teams with different methods to one goal, and treat people on the least favoured path with equal care.

   Deliverable

   A cross-path rotation programme, a methods register and a trained group of integrator managers.

   Gate to proceed

   Rotation is scheduled for every senior leader, and the methods register is in use for approving new team methods.

4. Month 7 onwards

   Phase 4 · Sustain and renew

   Guard the summit so tolerance of many paths never becomes lack of direction.

   • Review every method in the register once a year against the shared outcome measures.
   • Stop methods that have failed the shared goal across agreed review points, and say why in public.
   • Re-test the summit sentence when strategy changes, keeping it to one sentence.
   • Track the spread of trust across groups and act on the lowest-scoring group first.

   Deliverable

   An annual paths review covering exposure, method diversity, trust spread and reverse-mentoring participation.

   Gate to proceed

   The trust gap between the highest and lowest groups is narrowing or holding, and every registered method has been reviewed against the goal in the year.

Implementation risks and how to handle them

By stage of company

Habits to start this quarter

1. 1

   Write the summit, then test it

   Write your organisation's goal in one sentence and read it aloud to three people in different functions. Ask each what it means for their work. If the answers point in different directions, rewrite it.

2. 2

   Book a working week elsewhere

   Before the quarter ends, book five working days in a function or market you have never worked in, with a real piece of output agreed in advance.

3. 3

   Ask a junior colleague to teach you

   Choose one tool or habit that younger colleagues use and you do not. Ask one of them to teach you over four short sessions, and do the homework.

4. 4

   Lunch with the least favoured path

   Once this quarter, share a meal with a team whose work is usually treated as secondary in your company. Ask what they wish leadership understood about how they reach the goal, and listen without correcting.

5. 5

   Collect a different route

   Find one case this quarter where a team reached a shared target by a method other than the standard one. Write it up in half a page and send it to your leadership team.

What to measure

Where the model goes wrong

• !Many paths with no summit: tolerance of every method becomes a lack of direction.
• !Walking other paths becomes tourism, a short visit for photographs rather than real work.
• !Respect for difference is used to avoid hard calls when one path is plainly failing the shared goal.

The summit stays where it is

WCRC's view is that the Many-Paths Model answers one of the hardest questions in modern leadership: how to hold a varied organisation together without flattening it. Ramakrishna's answer was to be unbending about the goal and generous about the route, and to earn that generosity by walking the routes himself.

Most leaders already say they respect other paths. Ramakrishna practised them. The summit stays where it is; the leader's job is to know more than one way up.