I have been thinking about ego lately. Straddling as I do the business world and the martial arts, I am familiar with two different conceptions of ego. I’ll call them Western (my corporate experience) and Eastern (my martial experience).

Freud, who originally set up the concept of ego referred to it as ‘das Ich’ or ‘the I.’ In short, it was the sense of self. Interestingly both Western and Eastern ego deal with the ‘I’ness of being but in different ways.

In corporate (Western) life, ego is necessary. We look up to people who have a strong sense of their ‘I’ness. In healthy doses, ego contributes to the confidence, drive and belief in one’s self that is critical to the entrepreneurial spirit. How can we build a business without the help of ego? “I have a vision,” “I am the CEO,” “I will help move this business into the future.” All statements of healthy ego.

Of course it’s a fine line. Too much Western style ego leads to arrogance, greed, myopia, self-delusion and any number of other dangerous traits recently demonstrated by Wall St.

Similarly, too little sense of self and a person is passed over and ignored. Without the confidence of a healthy ego, they may miss the opportunity to reach their greatest potential.

On the other hemisphere is the Eastern concept of ego. Here – and I am drawing particularly from Zen Buddhism which is the basis of most of my experience and reading – the ego is the sense of self as separate from the universe (read, everyone and everything else). In short, the belief is that we’re all born innately perfect and delude ourselves by seeing ‘I’ as different from ‘you/they/it’. This is the source of all suffering and ‘enlightenment’ is the realization that there is no ‘I’.

So in the Eastern sense, ego (or ‘I’ness) is something to be defeated and eliminated where in Western it is something necessary (in healthy balance) to success. Back to Freud, ego was the necessary reality filter in the Id’s wanton need for satiation.

All of this has been on my mind as I’ve watched Wall St. and Madhoff and overpaid executives, and the self-proclaimed ‘social media’ experts around me. I have to wonder if the Eastern concept of ego needs a little more face time and the Western conception a little more balance and scaling back.

I think the ‘social Darwinism’ (to introduce yet another reference point) that tends to come along with recessions is a healthy thing. I also like to speculate how a company might do if its leaders saw the company as a part of themselves.

In this way a poorly-performing employee would be seen as a weakness in the leader. A dysfunctional department would be seen as a vulnerability within the leader. To that end, the leader would strive to make each department healthy, each employee productive, and the business a success (vs. just getting a good salary and bonus for himself). It would be absolute accountability – full and complete.

This in turn would spawn a culture where the leaders would hold themselves accountable for the quality of work and conduct of the employees, not just to get their next raise or make their quarterly projections, but because there is a belief that ‘the manager must be blamed for the employees failures’ rather than just firing the employee. (This is a traditional view in a traditional martial arts school where the teacher holds him/herself responsible for the quality of every student).

It would also mean that the leader would sincerely want the employees to be better than s/he is. The leader would want them to grow to be smarter, more nimble, more resourceful and more productive than s/he is. If the leader can produce superior employees who go on to outperform that leader, then the leader has made the company better, which in turn has made himself better (being that he and the company are one in the same in his mind).

I’m sure there are executives like this out there, and certainly Japanese businesses are sometimes noted for the ‘company before me’ mindset they adopted from their own feudal culture; but the headlines have said otherwise lately.

And even among traditional martial artists supposedly steeped in this ‘Way’ of selfless striving for excellence, I continue to witness damaging displays of ego and politics and pettiness.

Maybe, then, it’s all hippy-dippy idealism.

Maybe its foolish to believe one can derive success from Eastern-styled egolessness instead of Western-styled egocentricity. But it’s an interesting idea nonetheless, and given the state of things today, might be worth some consideration.

After all, another martial concept tells us that ‘the journey is the destination’ and therefore the act of trying to get there, whether impossible of not, is exactly what ‘there’ is.