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THE FACTORY, THE UNIVERSITY, AND THE HAIR SALON

The boss has put together a project team of 12 people and made you project manager. The task: Get 100,000 units of the new product out the door, and sold through, within six months--starting today.

Or maybe your spouse has decided that the kitchen needs remodeling, and you've got one month to get it done.

Maybe you've just given yourself the job of losing five pounds by next Monday.

The 100,000 units could be books or pizzas or online software sales; it doesn't really matter. The point is that a specific project or task has to get done by a certain date. And you're responsible to see that it does get done, on time.

Let's face it, life is one long string of jobs. We need a way to get them done right; we need a surefire recipe for success. Financial success, sure--that's what we're talking about. But at the same time we want to be a success as a person: a good person, a truly happy person, a person who's mentally and physically healthy. And if we're doing things right we also help all the people around us--the world--at the same time.

This little book gives you a completely new way of getting tasks and projects done. It's not something you've ever heard of before, but it works--it always works. Give it a try. All you need to invest is an hour of your time. We believe that if an idea is right, it can be explained in just a few words--and then the rest is up to you.

We'll be taking you through the Eight Rules of Karmic Management, proving to you how what goes around really does come around, in both your business and your life. We always start with a quote from one of the ancient books of wisdom that provide the source for Karmic Management. Although these books come from many different places, they all ended up in Tibet and for a thousand years helped build her priceless culture of wisdom. A radical new business approach that has survived a millennium's test of time.

And so first you'll be seeing a pearl like this one, from the 6th-century Buddhist sage named Chandra Kirti:
Then we go on to explain how the quote is going to help you get the 100,000 pizzas out on time and become the star of your company (or your home, which is sometimes harder).

We think that a book about how to be a success should be written by people who are already successful, and so every now and then you'll see a little box like the one that follows, with a real-life story about how we ourselves used a KM rule to reach our own goals:

Real Life

LAMA CHRISTIE:

I was trained in the Eight Rules of Karmic Management from day one, at the Asian Classics Institute of New York. My dream was to help build a new kind of university, one that made a real difference in the world. And KM has done the job.

We started with no money at all, and our Diamond Mountain University is now up and running on a beautiful one-thousand-acre campus nestled in the foothills of southern Arizona. We have several hundred students from all five continents of the world, and our off-campus programs have been attended by thousands of people internationally. Karmic Management really did make my dream come true, at an age when most people are still just finishing up graduate school.

MICHAEL G:

I'm at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from Lama Christie. I had never even heard of Karmic Management. My dream was to build a high-scale hair salon in New York City, from scratch, without knowing a single person there. People in the business would call this Mission Impossible, but over the last 30 years the firm I founded--Bumble & bumble--has grown into one of the world's largest and most successful hair care and products companies, with over $50 million in annual sales.

I got into Karmic Management through the back door: once I learned about it I looked back on my business career and realized that it was exactly what I'd been doing all along, and why we've been so successful. For me, KM has always been natural and intuitive: it just felt like the right thing to do. So now I'm excited about seeing the Eight Rules actually laid out in a book that can be shared with other people, to make them successful too.

GESHE MICHAEL:

I'm somewhere between Lama Christie and Michael Gordon. I spent many years studying in Tibetan monasteries, and of course we were taught all the different ancient books of wisdom that Karmic Management comes from. But nobody ever sat down with us and told us how to actually apply this wisdom in day-to-day tasks and projects, at home or at work. We were supposed to figure it out on our own. It was a process of trial and error for me, but in the end it was clear what to do, and as one of the founders of Andin International Diamond I used KM to help bring this manufacturing company from zero to $100 million in annual sales.
Finally you'll see another section that gives you a specific job that you've got to get done on your own, if you want Karmic Management to work for you. We can help tell you what you need to do to be successful, but it's your job to take these little "to-do" lists seriously. Here's an example.

YOUR TO-DO LIST

*Don't pick up this book and read it through once quickly with some vague notion that you'd like to be a success. Right now, before we go any further, decide on one specific task or project that you're going to use as a test case for your Karmic Management. If it works, then you have a friend for life in KM, and you can go ahead and use it for every job you ever want to get done, big or small.       

*So here we start on what's called Quiet Sitting--sort of a warm-up to the formal meditation that we'll be talking about later. Get out of the house and go somewhere you personally consider relaxing, a place where you can just sit down and think on your own. It could be a bench in a nearby park, a table at your local coffee shop, or just a certain block that you enjoy walking down.

*Carry along a little pocket notebook and a pen. Stay calm and silent in yourself, and ask your mind this question: What is the one job or project that I would really like to get done in my life right now? When would I like to finish it by? What exactly will it look like if I'm really successful at this task?
KM Rule #1

STOP DOING THINGS THAT DON'T WORK

ANCIENT WISDOM

All failure comes from misunderstanding.

--The Wheel of Life, 500 BC

PLAYING THE ODDS

We almost called this part "Fifty Thousand Years of Flops." It's estimated that organized human activity has been happening here on Earth for about fifty millennia. That is, people trying to work together to get some job or project done: dragging around huge blocks of rock to make the Pyramids, or creating and supplying 100,000 units of software.

Billions upon billions of jobs, big and small, finished by human hands. Billions upon billions of transactions: I will give you this ear of corn if you move that rock for me. Every single one of the actions aimed at getting something done.

And all of them a failure. 100% of them a failure.

How's that? The Pyramids still stand; computers run software.

But look more closely. Anyone who's helped start a business can tell you that nine out of ten new business ventures just flop or fade away within the first three years. It's safe to say that, if the quotation from the Wheel of Life is correct, almost all of us misunderstand how to get something done.

But what about the successes? What about the Googles and the Microsofts and the Walmarts?

Ah, this is where things get interesting. We're going to have to define "success" here. What does it mean when you "succeed" at something? We'd say it's when a job or project that you undertake works out the way you planned, because of how you did the job or project. And that gets us into odds.

We are a strange people, these people of Earth, over the last 50,000 years. After all this time we're not really quite sure why anything works.

Will your car start today when it's time to go to work? If you're honest with yourself--and in KM Rule #1 you've got to be honest with yourself--then you have to answer "I think it will." Because you know you can't answer "I know it will." Even if your car was working fine when you turned it off last night, you know from experience that you can't say for sure if it's going to work this morning.

And so we play the odds. Our whole life is a game of chance. There is some chance, a certain percentage chance, that I will die in a car accident on the way to work today. There is some chance that I'll get fired today even if I do make it to work. And there is some chance that no matter what decisions I make today at work, some of them just won't succeed.

And so we're a sad people, these last 50,000 years. Success in big business is often defined not as what goes the way you expected it to, but rather how "flexible" we can be: how fast we can change course when things don't go the way we expected. We think a wise person is someone who knows that things will never always go the way you expect them to, because they simply don't, for anyone.

The point is that 50,000 years of experience prove one thing. We still don't know how to make things happen--we still don't know why things happen--because if we did know then there would be no failure in the world. The successful few would tell us how to make things work every time--but even they are playing the odds. Not even they are sure if their car's going to start in the morning, or if their next big business decision isn't going to be the one that ruins them. Successes or flops, we're all still just playing the odds, hoping for the best.

THE PERSONAL TOLL OF PLAYING THE ODDS

And so we take every action we ever take just playing the odds. To the best of my knowledge, this is the one thing I can do now that has the biggest chance of getting me what I want. And in my heart, I also know that there's a risk of failure: some odds of failure.

What kind of life is this? We're not just talking about little things--a kitchen remodel, getting to work half an hour late because the car didn't start. The decisions of our life, in the end, decide whether we will live or die. A lifetime of playing the odds takes a personal toll on all of us--the personal anguish within each of us as we come up against decision after decision in life, knowing that we don't know what will happen, knowing that we are just doing what we hope will work out.

Imagine, simply imagine for a moment, that this whole game of odds was completely unnecessary: a tragedy that we got stuck with early on in life, but then straightened out later. And now my mind is free. What percent of the unhappiness of the world--what percent of the time we spend inside our own thoughts--is wasted on worrying about whether something that we're doing might or might not work out? What if we were just sure it would work out?

This is the promise of Karmic Management.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Karmic Management"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Geshe Michael Roach.
Excerpted by permission of Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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