One of the most horrible personalities is one with a maths and international business degree after a severe culture shock. Well, that is me. Why would this be horrible? The culture shock put my live up side down. It got me into a deep, black personal problem. My marriage broke up, I was left to take care of my two small children, got all kinds of problems with local government authorities, lost my job, my house and was left with a huge debt. Mmmm, that is horrible, but what does it have to do with math or business, for that matter?

When dramatics things occur in ones life we either look for answers or hang our selves. In my case I just wanted to know what the hell had happened? But who cares? Pick up your life, lick you wounds and focus on the future! No big deal. Yeah, but this was different. I had traveled the whole world and lived/worked in many places, including 25 years in Spain! Adn the culture shock happened in my own country of birth! Can you believe it? Holland had changed so much in 27 years that it struck me and my family like lightning. What on earth could make a country go from a warm, social community into a cold, individualistic, complaining, materialistic society? In such a small time frame? I did not feel at home at home!

A mathmetician wants to find logic behind it and an international business man wants to know what risks and opportunities arise. Well first things first. Why did Holland cool down?

I developed a thought, spiritually. I woke up on morning with two lines in my head: a line for the material complexity of our lives, governed by systems, knowledge, organizations and above all: money. The second line refered to the moral complexity, governed by our self conscience of identity, equality, emancipation, trust and higher values. Of course I had to get this insight because I was asked to lecture for Prof. Paul de Blot, university teacher on Business Spirituality. I quickly wrote a book on it and started a new life letting people know what happens to them as it had happened to me. With my model I could predict the course of any organization. Wow, I had become a prophet.

Normal business analyst take key figures and by looking back they try to determine the future. Well, if the future is highly unstable as it is, you can look back as much as you want but your company will go down the drain. Looking at figures is safe for analysts, of course. They are correct, already past and cannot be disputed, just analyzed. Predicting the future means that you have to have knowledge of the outside world, what happens and how you can connect your competences to it. Or find out that you need to change business all together.

My model looks like this:

Human complexities

At the end of 2008 I pushed  three little booklets based on my theory and positioned companies along this axes and inside the quadrants. I used 120 different measurement points that I could simply find on internet. With the score on 10 different subitems (s.a. positioning, added value for customers, market definition, etc) and one total score in my hands I could predict the course of the organization by just continuing the clockwork lines of the cycle.

My predictions came true after already one year.

But I am a mathmetician too. What does that have to do with all this? Well, I listenend to Dr Bartlett and his excellent exposee on exponentials, captured on YouTube. His truth is a simple but a generally denied given. If I apply his maths to the same cyclic picture of mine I can prodict the level of sustainability of a multinational, a country or a region. In fact I predict (know for sure) that we are all structurally vulnerable right now and enter crisis after crisis as different sectors move from greed to chaos.

Try to figger it out by yourselves by applying my model to your country or company, using Dr. Bartlett. If you can not do it, ask me, I’ll do it for you.