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.

Drawing on lessons he learned in the diamond business and years in Buddhist monasteries, Roach shows how taking care of others is the ultimate path to taking care of oneself, even--especially--in business. As he puts it, you have to engage in "mental gardening," which means doing certain practical things that will form new habits that will create an ideal reality for you. If this sounds a little outrageous, his very precise instructions are down to earth and address numerous specific issues common to the business/management world.

Through this practice, you will become a considerate, generous, introspective, creative person of immense integrity, and that will be the key to your wealth...

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.

The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Strategies for Managing Your Business and Your Life by Geshe Michael Roach (Author)

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