Karmic Management by Geshe Michael Roach Book Review (2009)
Karmic Management by Geshe Michael Roach, Lama Christie McNally and Michael Gordon is a 150-page hardcover published in September 2009 by Doubleday, under the full title Karmic Management: What Goes Around Comes Around in Your Business and Your Life. The book argues that your results at work are caused by whether you have helped other people succeed, and not by your strategy. Kevin Trudeau's fan club reading list carries it at number seventeen. Read it if you want the shortest available statement of a Buddhist theory of business causation. Skip it if you want evidence, or if you would rather not spend an hour with a business book whose lead author carries a heavily documented public controversy.
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It is the shortest book on the whole list. One sitting. One idea, stated eight ways.
What Karmic Management Actually Teaches
Doubleday's own description sets the frame. The publisher calls the book "readable in fifty-eight minutes" and says that "traditional Eastern wisdom and real-life business experience come together in this brief and practical guide, which offers a step-by-step plan that will help readers adopt a more successful way of working and living." That is marketing copy. It is also an accurate description of the format: a small book carrying a very large claim.
The Claim: Success Comes From Helping Others Succeed
The claim is causal. In the authors' telling, the reason a deal closes or a company survives a bad quarter is not the plan you executed. It is a karmic imprint planted earlier by an act of helping somebody else get what they wanted. Your customers, your suppliers, and in this framing even your competitors are the people whose success creates yours. The practical instruction that follows is easy to state and hard to do: help others succeed first, and treat your own tasks and projects as the second question rather than the first.
The authors assert that mechanism. They do not demonstrate it, and this review takes no position on whether karma works the way three Buddhist-trained writers say it does.
What the reframe changes is where you look. Most business writing sends you to the market or the product. Karmic Management sends you to your own conduct and treats that as the input. Even a reader who rejects the metaphysics ends up running a useful experiment, because helping customers and suppliers win tends to produce repeat business for reasons nobody needs karma to explain.
KM Rule Number Two and the Cause of the Causes
The second rule is where the logic is easiest to see. If a tactic worked because of the tactic, Roach argues, it would work every time anyone used it. It does not. Therefore the tactic is not the cause, and something upstream decides whether it fires. He calls that the cause of the causes.
The first half is sharp. Anyone who has watched an identical campaign succeed at one company and die at another has felt that gap. The second half asks for a great deal of faith, because it fills the gap with karmic seeds and never says how you would check.
The Eight KM Rules in Order
Karmic Management is built on eight numbered rules, one per chapter. The chapter titles are the rules.
- Stop doing things that don't work. Audit the tactics you repeat out of habit and stop paying for the ones with no track record.
- Find the cause of the causes. Look past the tactic to whatever decides whether it fires.
- Identify your karmic business partners. Work out which people your results actually depend on.
- Start from yourself. Change your own conduct first rather than waiting on anyone else.
- Stop making decisions. Set the causes in place, then let outcomes resolve instead of agonising at every fork.
- Load your stapler. A stapler only works when it is loaded, and in this analogy an action only works when the cause behind it is loaded.
- Ride your problems over the top. Treat difficulties as information about what was planted earlier.
- Re-invest the karma. When results arrive, put them back into helping the next group of people succeed.
Rule five is the one readers argue about. "Stop making decisions" reads like an instruction to stop steering the company. It is not, but the book is too short to close that gap properly.
How Geshe Michael Roach Organizes the Book
Eleven chapters, of which only nine carry teaching. It opens with "Success, Certain," then "The Factory, the University, and the Hair Salon," which introduces the three authors through three organisations. Then the eight rules, one chapter each. It closes with "Don't Stop Here: Going Further with KM," acknowledgments and a further reading list.
Each lesson opens with a quotation from a Buddhist text, then pulls the idea across into modern work. Short exercises and to-do lists, rather than argument. Fifty-eight minutes buys the shape of a system, not the system. The full version is The Diamond Cutter, published by Doubleday in 2000 at 228 pages.
Karmic Management at a Glance
| Detail | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| Full title | Karmic Management: What Goes Around Comes Around in Your Business and Your Life |
| Authors | Geshe Michael Roach, Lama Christie McNally, Michael Gordon |
| Published | September 2009 |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Length | 150 pages, hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780385528740 |
| Chapters | 11, of which 8 are the numbered KM rules |
| Publisher's reading time | Fifty-eight minutes, per the Doubleday description |
| Central claim | Your success is caused by having helped others succeed |
| Named mechanism | Karmic seeds, and the cause of the causes |
| Tradition | Tibetan Buddhist, Gelugpa lineage |
| Longer companion | The Diamond Cutter, Doubleday, 2000, 228 pages |
| Position on the fan club list | Number 17 of 97 |
| Our rating | 3.0 out of 5 |
One note before you read on. This review makes no claim that any reader will earn anything, and no claim that karma causes business outcomes. It reports what three authors say, and what the public record says about them.
The Factory, the University and the Hair Salon
Geshe Michael Roach and the Diamond Trade
Wikipedia's entry on Michael Roach records that he was born in Los Angeles in 1952, attended Princeton, and was ordained as a Gelugpa Buddhist monk in 1983. In 1995 he became the first American to qualify for the geshe degree, the Tibetan monastic equivalent of a doctorate, at Sera Monastery in South India. He is a translator of Sanskrit and Tibetan, and his published work includes The Essential Yoga Sutra.
The business half is the diamond trade. Wikipedia records that his teacher challenged him to take Buddhist values into the dirtiest business he could find and make it clean, and that Roach was involved with Andin International Diamond Corporation from the early 1980s. The book's author material credits him with taking that company from a start-up to a hundred million dollars a year. The public record adds a detail the book does not: Wikipedia has him leaving Andin in 1999 as a vice president. Both can be true. They are not the same story.
Lama Christie McNally and Diamond Mountain University
Lama Christie McNally became Roach's student in 1996 and later his co-author on several titles, The Diamond Cutter among them. The university in the chapter title is Diamond Mountain, a retreat centre Roach founded on a thousand-acre property south of Bowie, Arizona. It opened to students in 2004. Lama Christie McNally's name on a book about karma and business is not a neutral fact any more, and the next section explains why.
Michael Gordon and Bumble and bumble
The hair salon is Bumble and bumble, the New York hair care company Michael Gordon founded in 1977 and which was later acquired by the Estee Lauder Companies. Michael Gordon is the outsider on the cover: not a monk, not from the Tibetan tradition. His examples are ordinary and checkable in a way the metaphysics is not, and they give the reader something to hold. Without Michael Gordon this would be a sermon.
Common Criticisms of Karmic Management
The record on Geshe Michael Roach is contested
Roach and McNally married in a Christian ceremony in Rhode Island in 1998 and kept it secret, which sits badly with monastic vows. They later practised staying within roughly fifteen feet of each other at all times, a partnership the New York Times covered on 15 May 2008 under the title "Making Their Own Limits in a Spiritual Partnership."
In May 2006 the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote to Roach asking him not to come to Dharamsala to teach, on the grounds that his unconventional behaviour did not accord with the Dalai Lama's teachings and practice. He has also been uninvited from teaching at centres of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition.
Then 2012. A three-year retreat at Diamond Mountain began on 30 December 2010 with forty students and Lama Christie McNally as director. After an inquiry into allegations of violence, the board asked McNally and her husband Ian Thorson to leave. The couple camped in a cave on public land nearby, and Thorson died there in April 2012, aged 38, of dehydration and exposure. Police found no foul play and no criminal responsibility on Roach's part. Fernanda Santos covered the case for the New York Times in 2012, Nina Burleigh wrote it up for Rolling Stone on 6 June 2013 as "Sex and Death on the Road to Nirvana," and Scott Carney gave it book length in A Death on Diamond Mountain, Gotham Books, 2015.
None of that makes the eight rules wrong. It does mean you are reading about the ethics of cause and effect from an author whose own conduct became a controversy inside his own tradition.
What goes around comes around in your business is not testable
If results come from karmic seeds you cannot observe, planted at a time you cannot identify, then a success proves the system and a failure proves your seeds have not ripened. Nothing counts as evidence against it. That is a closed loop, and a closed loop is a belief rather than a business method.
Fifty-eight minutes buys a slogan, not a system
The brevity that makes the book readable also makes it thin. Rule five says stop making decisions and rule six says load your stapler, and neither chapter is long enough to tell a manager what to do on Monday with a real payroll. The Diamond Cutter does more of that work. This is the trailer.
The criticisms at a glance
| What the book claims | The objection | Who made it, or where it is documented |
|---|---|---|
| The authors model ethical conduct | Roach's behaviour did not accord with the Dalai Lama's teachings and practice | Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, May 2006 |
| The lineage is orthodox Gelugpa | Roach was uninvited from teaching at FPMT centres | Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition |
| Diamond Mountain applies the method | The 2012 death of Ian Thorson after the retreat expulsion | Fernanda Santos, New York Times, 2012; Nina Burleigh, Rolling Stone, 6 June 2013 |
| The system is documented | Book-length investigation of Diamond Mountain | Scott Carney, A Death on Diamond Mountain, Gotham Books, 2015 |
| Roach built Andin from a start-up | The record has him leaving in 1999 as a vice president | Wikipedia entry on Michael Roach |
| Karmic seeds cause business outcomes | Unfalsifiable: success confirms it, failure defers it | This review |
Is Karmic Management Worth Reading?
Yes, with your eyes open, and for one reason. Strip the metaphysics off and what remains is an instruction to make other people's success your operating priority, and to look at your own conduct before you look at the market. That is uncommon in business writing and cheap to test.
What you should not do is treat it as a plan. The publisher promises a step-by-step plan and delivers eight slogans with short essays attached. Set it beside Russell Conwell's Acres of Diamonds, which makes a related point about opportunity underfoot without asking you to accept a causal theory, or Napoleon Hill's sixteen-lesson Law of Success, which is the opposite kind of book entirely. Karmic Management is finishable to a fault.
Why Kevin Trudeau's List Carries Karmic Management
It sits at number seventeen of the ninety-seven books on the fan club reading list, one place after Les Giblin and one before The Go-Getter. Roach's longer book, The Diamond Cutter, turns up separately at number thirty. That ordering is the interesting part. Kevin Trudeau's list puts the fifty-eight-minute version thirteen places ahead of the full one, which is how somebody sequences a list they expect people to actually work through.
The clearest connection is the Teachability Index, which Trudeau describes as willingness to learn multiplied by willingness to change. Notice that it is multiplication in his telling, not addition. Karmic Management scores enormously on the first factor, because an hour is nothing to give, and it asks a great deal of the second, because acting on it means putting other people's outcomes ahead of your own for long enough to see whether anything returns. In Trudeau's framing that combination produces a reader who finishes the book in an afternoon, agrees with all of it, and changes nothing on Monday.
His second lever is what he calls counterintentions, the subconscious programs he says run quietly against the goal you just wrote down. Roach has no equivalent concept. When the method appears not to work, his answer is that the seeds were planted differently than you thought, which restates the theory rather than diagnosing anything. Trudeau's account at least names a specific place to look, and it names it inside the reader rather than somewhere in an unobservable past.
Then there is the Training Balance Scale, Trudeau's claim that the overwhelming majority of what produces a result is not the action itself. Read the two side by side and something worth noticing appears: a Tibetan-trained monk and a direct-response marketer, arriving from completely different directions, are both arguing that visible effort is the small part and that the real cause is upstream and invisible. They disagree entirely about what that upstream cause is. They agree that it is not your to-do list, and that agreement is why this book earns a place on the list.
Where It Sits Next to the Global Information Network
Trudeau founded the Global Information Network in 2009 as a private membership club built around his claim that the most useful knowledge about wealth and success was deliberately kept out of general circulation. His own material, including Your Wish Is Your Command and the four-step manifestation formula, is built as a sequence rather than a single insight, which is exactly the structural feature Karmic Management lacks.
So the fit is a specialist one. The reading list is not asking you to run your company on eight rules from a hundred and fifty pages. It is asking you to spend an hour on one narrow question, which is what you owe the people you do business with, and Karmic Management handles that question better than most books three times its size. Trudeau's material carries the sequencing and the troubleshooting that Roach leaves out. This book carries one idea, loudly, in less time than a commute. Read in that order it works. Read as a standalone method and it will disappoint you.
Who Should Read Karmic Management, and Who Should Skip It
Read it if you run something, you have hit the ceiling of tactics, and you will give an hour to an argument from outside the usual canon. Read it if you already work with Trudeau's material and want the same claim about unseen causes arriving from a Tibetan monastery. Read it for Michael Gordon's half, the most grounded writing in the book.
Skip it if you want evidence, because none is offered. Skip it if you need operational detail, because eight chapters at fifty-eight minutes cannot carry it. Skip it if the author's record is a dealbreaker, which is a reasonable position and not one this review will argue you out of.
Our rating: 3.0 out of 5. Full marks for compression, for an unusual priority that costs nothing to test, and for putting a working businessman on the cover. Real deductions for a mechanism that cannot fail, for a plan that is not one, and for an author record the book never raises.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Karmic Management by Geshe Michael Roach worth reading?
Yes, if you take it as one idea rather than a plan. It states a clear and unusual priority, that helping others succeed is what causes your own results, and it states it in under an hour. No evidence is offered for that mechanism, so read it as an argument rather than as a finding.
How long is Karmic Management and how long does it take to read?
The Doubleday hardcover runs 150 pages across 11 chapters. The publisher's own description calls it readable in fifty-eight minutes, which is close to accurate. Eight of the eleven chapters are the numbered KM rules, and each is short enough to finish in a few minutes.
What are the eight rules in Karmic Management?
Stop doing things that don't work. Find the cause of the causes. Identify your karmic business partners. Start from yourself. Stop making decisions. Load your stapler. Ride your problems over the top. Re-invest the karma. Each rule gets one chapter, and the chapter titles are the rules themselves.
Who are Lama Christie McNally and Michael Gordon?
Lama Christie McNally became Geshe Michael Roach's student in 1996 and co-wrote several books with him, The Diamond Cutter included. Michael Gordon founded the New York hair care company Bumble and bumble in 1977, later acquired by the Estee Lauder Companies. Michael Gordon supplies the book's business examples.
Do you have to be Buddhist to use Karmic Management?
No. The book quotes Buddhist texts at the start of each lesson, but the instructions themselves are behavioural. A reader who rejects karma entirely can still act on the priority the book sets, which is to make other people's success the thing you work on first.
What is the difference between Karmic Management and The Diamond Cutter?
The Diamond Cutter came first, published by Doubleday in 2000 at 228 pages, and it carries the full argument along with translated passages from the Diamond Sutra. Karmic Management is the short version, published in 2009 at 150 pages, and it compresses the argument into eight numbered rules.
What are the main criticisms of Karmic Management?
Three recur. The mechanism cannot be tested, since success confirms it and failure only defers it. The book is too short to deliver the step-by-step plan the publisher promises. And the lead author's record is contested: the Office of the Dalai Lama asked him not to teach in Dharamsala in 2006, and Diamond Mountain drew heavy press coverage after a student died in 2012.
Where does Karmic Management sit on Kevin Trudeau's reading list?
It is number seventeen of the ninety-seven books on the fan club reading list. Roach's longer book, The Diamond Cutter, appears separately at number thirty. The shorter title comes first, which fits a list built to be worked through rather than browsed.
Karmic Management by Geshe Michael Roach Book Review: The Short Version
One hundred and fifty pages, eleven chapters, eight rules, fifty-eight minutes. The claim is that helping others succeed causes your own success, and the rules are a way of acting as though that were true. The compression is the book's best feature and its worst, because you finish it without a method. The mechanism cannot be falsified, the promised plan is a set of slogans, and the lead author's record is a public dispute the book never raises. Read it for the priority it sets. Do not read it for proof.