Business success models for the 21st century.

Janet Ilacqua

We will discuss the following success models.

•Geshe Roach’s experiences in a Wall Street diamond company as recounted in the Diamond Cutter.
•ezboard.com, a customizable Web-based communities developed in 1998 by Vanchau Nguyen, Founder and Chief Executive Officer.
•Hewlett-Packard Company.

Two of these models were started by Buddhists. Hewlett-Packard, the seed company of Silicon Valley, even though it was not started by Buddhists, has been, in the past, noted for its generous and benevolent treatment of employees, the “Hewlett-Packard Way.” All these success models reinforce the concept that the seed of success and must be watered with more generosity along the way.

Success Models: Geshe Michael Roach and the Diamond Cutter

Geshe Michael Roach is a Princeton graduate and a Buddhist monk. After graduation, he spent seven years studying the wisdom of Tibetan Buddhism. At the suggestion of his teacher, he joined a fledgling diamond business in New York to test his ideals in real life. He stayed with the business as a member of the core management team for seventeen years.
The company grew from a start-up with two owners and two employees to $100 million in sales and five hundred employees in offices around the world. The Diamond Cutter. The Buddha on Strategies for Managing Your Business and Your Life tells the story of how Geshe Michael Roach built the diamond division of this company, using principles culled from ancient Tibetan Buddhism as the driving force behind his decision making.

Some of the many insights in The Diamond Cutter are as follows:

•A business should be successful; it should make money. There is no conflict between spirituality and success in business. Successful business people have the resources to do more good in the world than those people without the same resources do. In addition, the very people who are attracted to business are the same people who have the strength to grasp and carry out the deeper practices of the spirit.
•Money should be made honestly and with absolute integrity. How we make money matters more than anything else does. It determines our ability to keep making money as nobody can indefinitely run a business built on dishonesty or deception. It also significantly affects our ability to enjoy the money we make.
•Nothing is good or bad in and of itself; everything has a hidden potential. This is what the Buddhists call emptiness. What is bad news for you may be good news for someone else, and vice versa. We must not leap to conclusions about events, but must stop to consider what potential they really have for us. Even competitors can be seen as fairy godmothers challenging us to find the correct path to greater accomplishment. It is a matter of perception. With the right state of mind, we can turn our problems into opportunities.
•We should look ahead to the inevitable end of our days in business, and put ourselves in a position where we can honestly say our years in business had some meaning. The idea here is to anticipate our future, and move in a direction that will allow us to look back on our past with total joy and satisfaction.
Success Model: ezboard.com

San Francisco, Calif. -- August 1, 2002 -- ezboard, Inc., a subscriber-based online community based in San Mateo and founded in 1998 by Vanchau Nguyen, announced that it recently surpassed the 10 million registered user level. At the present, ezboard.com has over 400,000 active communities, covering everything and 40,000 communities are being added a month!
In a 2000 interview about the start of the website Vanchau describes planting the seeds of success and watching them grow.

How did you go about promoting your web site?
Mostly by planting some seeds about ezboard in existing online gathering places and then watching them grow by word-of-mouth. Most of our new users are referred by an existing user, which is the best way to attract loyal customers and a great testimonial about the value and fun offered by ezboard.

His vision, even in the beginning, was of the expotential growth promised by the Korwa cycle.
In a 2001 interview with Judy Vorfield of Web Builder ezine(, Vanchu noted that

In the recession, ezboard.com had some rough times, but its management was able to reverse the trend and continuing growing. In a 2002 interview with Jim Cashell Vanchu remarks:
ezboard came into existence during the peak of the Internet boom, a glorious but frivolous time. 18 months ago, we realized that we were on the road to bankruptcy and we needed to change course. We did that. In a short year, we shifted our revenue model from purely advertising to almost entirely subscription. We also doubled our number of communities created to over 1 million and tripled our number of registered users, now over 8 million.

Ezboard has a very strict Terms of Use but relies upon its user community to report violators and to enforce the terms, thus freeing up its time and resources for more valuable community-building activities. As Vanchau notes:
We do not actively go out and look for content that violates our TOS. We take a more passive stance, but if we are notified of violations, we then go and take a look. Usually, we'll send a warning to the administrator. Now and then we have to remove a post, ban a user, or on very rare occasions (in fact, I believe only once so far), shut down the community.

Ultimately, the key to ezboard.com’s abiding success and exponential growth in a highly competitive field is its focus on community-building as its most important value above everything.

Success Model: Hewlett-Packard Co.

In the beginning of the company's history, the founders did not focus on growth per se, but focused instead on manufacturing quality products. As HP grows, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard create a management style that forms the basis of HP's famously open corporate culture and influences how scores of later technology companies will do business. Dave practices a management technique — eventually dubbed "management by walking around" —, which is marked by personal involvement, good listening skills, and the recognition that "everyone in an organization wants to do a good job.” As managers, Bill and Dave run the company according to the principle later called management by objective — communicating overall objectives clearly and giving employees the flexibility to work toward those goals in ways that they determine are best for their own areas of responsibility.
HP also establishes its open door policy — open cubicles and executive offices without doors — to create an atmosphere of trust and mutual understanding. The open door policy encourages employees to discuss problems with a manager without reprisals or adverse consequences.
Bill and Dave make other important management decisions: providing catastrophic medical insurance, using first names to address employees (including themselves), and throwing regular employee parties and picnics.
.In 1957, these guidelines became encapsulated within a vision statement known as the 'Hewlett Packard Vision'. As part of the vision statement, the values statement the HP Way focused on a 'belief in our people’, which incorporated
Confidence in and respect for our people as opposed to depending upon extensive rules, procedures and so on; which depends upon people to do their job right (individual freedom) without constant directives. ('The HP Way')
Over the years, the HP Way has taken on the image of the Apostles' Creed: a shared statement of beliefs, but one that can be interpreted in many different ways in a broad, catholic sense. It is almost as though its shared symbolic image is more important than living it as a shared reality. One senior manager called it an 'an assumed culture'. This perhaps is its strength: as a corporate ideology, it allows for different interpretations of its words.
On May 3, 2002, HP and Compaq officially merged, beginning operations as one unified company. The new HP serves more than one billion customers across 162 countries, and is a leading global provider of products, technologies, solutions, and services to consumers and businesses. The company’s offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing.
In this age where large corporations are coming under increasing moral scrutiny, HP has come out relatively clean. The Packard Foundation is the world’ largest corporate foundation with grant awards totalled approximately $230 million in 2002. Carly Fiorina, its CEO, is respected in the world of business, it is respected abroad, and it has no antitrust suits against it. As Ms. Fiorina remarked, “Our bodyguards carry no Uzis.”

About the Author

Bio: Janet K. Ilacqua is a freelance writer based in Tracy, California. She specializes in academic writing and ghostwriting of books and manuals for individuals and small businesses. For more information about her services, check her website at http://www.writeupondemand.com.