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* Flop of the month. You may recognize the name of A. David Silver. He has written widely on entrepreneurship, and the bio accompanying his latest book, The Silver Prescription (John Wiley & Sons, 1987), modestly asserts he "has raised more venture capital for more entrepreneurs since 1970 than any other venture capitalist in the country." Reason enough to see what he has to say.

Forget it. Prescription is the kind of book that gives entrepreneurship a bad name.

Silver begins with the suggestion that you start "exercising your entrepreneurial muscles." Watch Johnny Carson and write down the topics he jokes about -- they're business opportunities in disguise. Think about world problems from the entrepreneur's point of view. When Silver did so, he realized how Israel could solve its ever-growing indebtedness problem: this "entrepreneurial" country could sell itself to stodgy France. "I recommend a French-Israeli merger," he writes, a bit too earnestly for comfort.

From there it's all downhill. The chapters on starting a company rely on an alphabet soup of gobbledygook: GEOs (generic entrepreneurial opportunities), SDMs (solution delivery methods), DEJs (demonstrable economic justifications). These concepts are supposed to help you evaluate business ideas. Here's a better one: DRTB (don't read this book).

If you take that advice, however, you'll miss Silver's formula for success. A company's ultimate valuation, he writes, is equal to P (the size of the problem it addresses) times S (the elegance of the solution) times E (the excellence of its team). Aren't formulas scientific! Too bad there's no conceivable way of attaching numbers to these only-too-subjective concepts.

Finally, Silver describes how entrepreneurship can solve 25 social problems, from incompetent government officials to teenage alcohol abuse to, yes, terrorism. ("Using present technology, the entrepreneur could develop a microchip-based sensor programmed to pick up the scent of a PLO terrorist training camp.") Maybe these glib treatments of serious problems were intended as parody. If so, I missed the joke.