The MoneyMuseum is backed up by the Sunflower Foundation as its supporting trust. Its name was not chosen haphazardly. It expresses the philosophy on which the MoneyMuseum and quite generally the work of Jürg Conzett, the founder of the trust, are based. The sunflower stands for munificence, balance, harmony and abundance in the positive sense, but also for chance and individuality.
Jürg Conzett is a generous person – by conviction, but not out of calculation. During his life he has been searching for balanced relationships and partnerships, in which giving and taking are based on reciprocity. When two businessmen get on well together – that is his conviction – this balance leads to a spiral which helps both partners to be successful. Generosity, however, must not be used in a deliberate and calculating way. Just as the sunflower scatters its seeds profusely and haphazardly, so business success is something that falls into one’s lap without one’s knowing in advance from where it came.
The funds used for the MoneyMuseum were largely acquired by Jürg Conzett on financial markets. In doing so he uses a financial tool based on mathematical algorithms. They are something that fascinated Jürg Conzett even as a school boy: he collected a large number of books on the Fibonacci sequence or the golden section in nature, architecture and music. As in music, he realised that in the financial market there are also cycles, repetitions, reversals and variations.
The sunflower, too, is built up on a mathematical algorithm: the seeds of its flower-head are arranged in different groups of spiral rows which follow the Fibonacci sequence – so for instance 34 on one side and 55 on the other.
Jürg Conzett is an observer. In order to summon up the necessary patience to observe the financial markets and at the same time to sharpen his attention he turned, for example, to his coin collection, which he had been given as a child, and asked a numismatist friend of his whether she would like to help him. Thus the idea emerged for the MoneyMuseum – almost by accident, perhaps the result of a certain play instinct. Jürg Conzett’s interest was focused from the beginning on the processes, the significance of money; coins were always only a symbol for him.
He is distrustful of what is static; for him conserving has something to do with rotting. The tendency towards what is new, special, individual is important for him. When chaos research emerged in the eighties he proved to be right: he was familiar with the fractal growth, in which the individual aspect is always present. Even today he would rather do something his own way and take responsibility for the risk of being wrong than doing it the right way, but only by copying. Here, too, the sunflower, of which every specimen deviates from the others, is for him a model.
The sunflower idea is not a closed system, not a system theory, nor is it a recipe for success. Although there has been no lack of success, Jürg Conzett calls the sunflower idea a philosophy, an attitude, which he could never have abandoned, even if it had not brought him success. What is most important – of this he is convinced – is that there is a philosophy behind the activities on the financial markets. The idea of buying shares solely and exclusively to generate a profit is a horror vision for him. Jürg Conzett prefers to derive pleasure from the company or its products, and he always wants to know precisely why he has a certain share in his portfolio. It has to be a new and socially positive product, something that also benefits the general public.
In growth there is flow, not inertia. In growth there are also the algorithms. A flower does not grow according to any existing master plan, but from the outset emerges steadily, the last positions determining the next. The neuronal networks, which surfaced in the eighties in connection with the world of finance, were so complex that a programmer could no longer keep track of what he had programmed. What is interesting in this context is the title of a book by György Doczi, who points out how simple patterns of order always repeat themselves in nature. It is entitled The Power of Limits. Limit means “on the border between two forces.” That is the algorithmic approach, which consists of quite simple steps that escape to zero or infinity, like the Mandelbrot set – very few leading to stability. What interests Jürg Conzett is: to find the algorithm which, when applied to the world of finance, results in stability.
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