Recently, Financial Times’ most popular column, “Lunch with the FT”, published an exclusive interview with Guo Guangchang, Chairman of Fosun Group. Written by Patti Waldmeir with additional reporting by Zhang Yan, the interview casually portrays Guo Guangchang’s personal experiences and development strategy for Fosun as well as Taichi culture and corporate values. Below is an extract of the article.

When a Chinese businessman is about to enter a room, my radar usually picks it up well in advance – the give-away is the sound of underlings tripping over themselves in the corridor to get out of the great man’s path.

But there’s no scurrying and kowtowing before Guo Guangchang arrives for lunch in the management canteen of his headquarters at the unfashionable end of the Shanghai Bund. Suddenly he’s just there, a slight bespectacled man looking like a cross between a librarian and the migrant worker he might have been – if he hadn’t built a total asset of USD50 billion investment group.

　　
According to Guo, his philosophy is a mixture of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Warren Buffett. He says he finds inspiration for his investment decisions from China’s oldest sages (and that other one from Omaha). He is also a devotee of Taichi, the Asian martial art that he practises as often as he can.

Taichi is about keeping the extremes of yin and yang in balance.What, I ask, has all this got to do with buying Portuguese insurance companies? Guo takes a stab at explaining how it applies to his investment decisions.

“The aim of Taichi is not to strike first to gain dominance over an opponent but to wait and hit at the right moment,” he says. “That is, to be the first one to take action after feeling the change in momentum. Investing is similar to doing Taichi. No one holds a permanent speed advantage in the market due to the limits of human intelligence and vision. Your advantage comes from your ability to feel the change faster and take decisive action faster.”

The influence of eastern spirituality on his investment strategy doesn’t end here. Buddhism, Guo explains, teaches you that “everything starts from your heart, and feeling the heart of others is the most important doctrine in Buddhism. In doing business that means seeing things through other people’s eyes. I feel that doing business is just like practising Buddhism. Money is not your only purpose. Your purpose is to make things better for other people, and in the end, money will come as a result.”

Guo has been quoted as saying that intelligence isn’t the key to wealth. Instead, this is something known as xinli. It’s a term that many otherwise articulate people struggle to translate; this is how Guo explains it: “Some people make the wrong decisions but that’s not because they don’t have superior intelligence but because they can’t resist the temptation of the monsters hiding in their heart.”

Guo also uses the example of Warren Buffett, the man on whom he has modelled his strategy of building the Group that uses insurance funds to invest in widely diverse businesses. “I don’t think he’s been successful because he is smarter than others,” says Guo. It’s more about investment discipline, sensitivity to the market, and taking the long view, he adds. Those things, it seems, are also xinli.