The Value of the Mandate of Heaven
While oil creates trillions of dollars for the Arab nations, and cheap labor creates trillions for the Chinese, and raw materials create trillions for the emerging nations, and technology creates trillions for the developed nations, and the Federal Reserve creates trillions out of thin air, the imperative question is where to put all those trillions of dollars?
To answer that question, we must ask: how many people have the Mandate of Heaven to start or to manage a business? The answer is: very few. The sad truth is that there is a glut of money floating around the world and very few places to put it. The fact that the Chinese prefer to keep their trillions in US Treasuries rather than buy General Electric is very revealing. They study, recognize and revere the Mandate of Heaven. In my 44 years of helping people with the I Ching in their decision making process, I have also learned its true value. I have seen so many lose millions (in all kinds of industries and business) because they thought they had the wealth and the talent to set up a business even though they lacked the Mandate of Heaven.
Such Mandate cannot be forced. The FED like the BOJ or the ECB can keep the interest rates at 0% for many years to force people to invest. Yet, the investors will not move. They instinctively know that even though there might be a glut of money and perhaps even of talent, there is a lack of the Mandate of Heaven in the world.
It is not an issue of money. It is not an issue of talent. It is not an issue of keeping interest rates low and inundating the markets with liquidity by implementing the infamous Quantitative Easing in versions 1, 2, 3 or 4. It is an issue of Heaven giving someone the blessing or the Mandate to execute an idea. Where can we find another Jobs, Gates, Ellison, Dell, Jack Welch, etc.? How many are there in this world? And how easy is it to find them? When Warren Buffett says he prefers stocks to gold, he does not mean he prefers any stock. He means he prefers those stocks of corporations run by CEOs who have the Mandate of Heaven. He knows who they are. Maybe he is a real I Ching Master and does do not know it in the same way Ray Dalio is also a real I Ching Master (read Bridgewater’s Principles and compare them with the I Ching’s).
I know it is difficult to accept it, but there are very few good managers in this world who can successfully manage a business. Furthermore, there are a lot of foolish wealthy people who pretend to be good managers only because they have the money and the education. Many refuse to accept they lack the Mandate of Heaven. As I said, I am tired of people asking me about setting up a business, consulting the I Ching, getting a negative opinion from the Oracle and watching how they continue to carry out their projects and fail miserably just as the Oracle had predicted. Why waste millions in capital by insisting on executing projects which the I Ching had already predicted would fail, is one of the mysteries of the Universe which I have yet to understand. The fact that probably 80% of startups will go broke in the first four years of business should make people realize the Mandate of Heaven is of the utmost importance.
I have had the privilege of witnessing thousands of cases in the last 44 years:
1) Personal Cases: the purchasing of properties, the setting up of businesses, the relocation from one town to another, the choosing of a partner business or romantic one (e.g. I have no doubt the Oracle would have found the right lover for Adele and she would be very happy; but then again, perhaps the world would have never heard Rolling in the Deep). In any case, the categories related to the personal cases are just too numerous to count them here.
2) Investment Cases: the bankruptcy of many corporations including Pam Am (Hexagram 23 – Splitting Apart) or the demise of such icons as Sun Microsystems and Merrill Lynch.
3) Management Cases: the performance of thousands of CEOs and their mistakes such as the failure of the merger between ATT and NCR because they lacked Fellowship:
a) 0 Six in the second place means: Fellowship with men in the clan. Humiliation. There is danger here of formation of a separate faction on the basis of personal and egotistic interests. Such factions, which are exclusive and, instead of welcoming all men, must condemn one group in order to unite the others, originate from low motives and therefore lead in the course of time to humiliation.
b) Nine in the third place means: He hides weapons in the thicket; He climbs the high hill in front of it. For three years he does not rise up. Here fellowship has changed about to mistrust. Each man distrusts the other, plans a secret ambush, and seeks to spy on his fellow from afar. We are dealing with an obstinate opponent whom we cannot come at by this method. Obstacles standing in the way of fellowship with others are shown here. One has mental reservations for one’s own part and seeks to take his opponent by surprise. This very fact makes one mistrustful, suspecting the same wiles in his opponent and trying to ferret them out. The result is that one departs further and further from true fellowship. The longer this goes on, the more alienated one becomes.
4) Political Cases:
a) The failure of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait:
(Hexagram 56 – The Wanderer) Nine in the third place means: The wanderer’s inn burns down. He loses the steadfastness of his young servant. Danger. A truculent stranger does not know how to behave properly. He meddles in affairs and controversies that do not concern him; thus he loses his resting place. He treats his servant with aloofness and arrogance; thus he loses the man’s loyalty. When a stranger in a strange land has no one left on whom he can rely, the situation becomes very dangerous.
b) Bill Clinton’s women related problems:
(Hexagram 54 – The Marrying Maiden) THE MARRYING MAIDEN. Undertakings bring misfortune. Nothing that would further. A girl who is taken into the family, but not as the chief wife, must behave with special caution and reserve. She must not take it upon herself to supplant the mistress of the house, for that would mean disorder and lead to untenable relationships.
c) George W Bush’s inexperience:
(Hexagram 4 Youthful Folly) YOUTHFUL FOLLY has success. In the time of youth, folly is not an evil. One may succeed in spite of it, provided one finds an experienced teacher and has the right attitude toward him. This means, first of all, that the youth himself must be conscious of his lack of experience and must seek out the teacher. Without this modesty and this interest there is no guarantee that he has the necessary receptivity, which should express itself in respectful acceptance of the teacher. This is the reason why the teacher must wait to be sought out instead of offering himself. Only thus can the instruction take place at the right time and in the right way.
Why do so many CEOs fail so miserably when they know so much about management theory? Because management theory is an incomplete tool which lacks knowledge of the future. That is, because it relies on the past, it tends to apply one theory to every condition. They call this the man-with-a-hammer syndrome: to the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Management theory, for instance, could never imagine, admit or even take into consideration the future Time-Space the BOD chose for the corporation when they selected the CEO. Management Theory just assumes the BOD somehow chose the right CEO. It assumes that to select the CEO, the BOD hired a consulting firm which is supposed to be full of management experts and paid them a fortune to project the future as if consulting firms were oracles. The sad truth is that the consulting firms might pretend to be oracles but they are not oracles. The I Ching is an Oracle, one that can foretell the future Time-Space of the CEO and of the corporation, one that can show the BOD what will happen if a particular CEO is chosen. Only the I Ching can show the BOD what is wrong with the corporation, how that condition came to be, how to fix it and, what is of the utmost importance, whether or not the CEO has the Mandate of Heaven to fix it.
Can any management theory do all that?
The same is the case with Wall Street analysts. They write about the future of the corporations as if they were oracles. They base their opinions on the past as if studying the past guarantees knowledge of the future. If an analyst wants to know the future, he should ask an oracle and stop pretending to be one.
Even the FED pretends to be an oracle. By projecting to freeze the interest rates for the next three years, they are saying they can predict the future of the inflation rate. Of course to them it is easy to always report a low inflation rate because as inflation increases they just keep on removing from the inflation index the items that measure inflation such as energy, rent, and transportation (soon they will remove food) until the index becomes absolutely meaningless.
If forecasting what will happen in the next three months is challenging just imagine how difficult it is to forecast what will happen throughout the tenure of the CEO. Of course, for the I Ching, foretelling the future is easy. It is an Oracle and has been doing it for thousands of years. I can assure you that in my 44 years of consulting it in thousands of instances for thousands of managerial and investment cases, it has always been right.
