A look at eight books that won't give cut-and-dry answers about how to start a business, but will pose questions that aspiring entrepreneurs should ask themselves before taking their first steps.
The line about Boston art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner--"She had," wrote her biographer, "the weaknesses of her strengths"--is equally true of entrepreneurs. Their celebrated bias toward action before thought (ready, fire, aim) and their bullish self-confidence make many of them poor at reflection, never mind introspection. To a query I posted on Inc.'s Web site soliciting the titles of books that start-up entrepreneurs should read, one man, whose business had failed after the first year owing "to a variety of unforeseen circumstances," lamented that he might have spent "too much time reading and researching and not enough time doing." Perhaps it was not what he read that did in his venture but what he didn't read that made the oncoming circumstances, for him, unforeseen.
"If I were going to start a new business today," declares Harriet Rubin, who as founder at Currency/Doubleday made her living from the sale of business books for many years, "I wouldn't read anything on how to start a business." But she doesn't mean that--not literally. For aspiring entrepreneurs, good "how-to" books, of which there are many, can provide lots of practical information. (The SmartStart series of state-specific start-up guides from Oasis Press is one that many people recommended.) And the occasional "how-I" book can also be useful, even though I hesitate to recommend one. Most such books commit the sin of urging the reader to believe that there is one set of rules for success--the one that the successful entrepreneur followed--that works for every type of business. In any case, no how-to or how-I book can hold all the information a company builder is going to need. And so even the best ones fall way short of being the only books a founder should read.
What Rubin says she would read instead--or, at least, first--is Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, because in it Jung does not prescribe a set of one-size-fits-all answers but rather, as Rubin puts it, offers "a way of thinking." People about to embark on an entrepreneurial journey would be smart to take Rubin's point, even if they don't choose Jung's book.
In building a reading list that I'd feel comfortable recommending to would-be founders, I've woven into my selection screen some requirements that are often ignored. One is that having all the answers isn't what makes a person a good entrepreneur--it's having a powerful inclination to ask questions. And so only one of the books is on my list because it contains what you'd call practical information. Most are there because they provoke thinking, which is practical only in its consequences.
I looked for books that explore "why-to" questions rather than "how-to," because few of the entrepreneurs I've met (and few of the rest of us, for that matter) give enough thought to the why before plunging straight in. Why do I want my own business? Why do I want to own this business? Contrary to the conventional wisdom, starting a company is not the easiest way to earn a comfortable living. Owning a business is not the functional equivalent of having no boss. And some kinds of businesses just aren't compatible with a good family life or getting enough sleep, no matter how hard you try for balance. Better to sort through your motivations, aims, and priorities now, before you've created something you'll have to back out of--if you can.
It is not only in sorting through life-value issues that entrepreneurs can profit from an inquiring mind. It's in asking why or what if--Why do we do something that way? Why do we do it at all? What if we did it this way?--that most entrepreneurs get their ideas for the products, services, and process innovations they build new companies around. To ask how is to get someone else's answer; to ask why or what if--as Jerry Kaplan does in his book Startup --is to seek your own.
Another characteristic I screened for: the books should be short. Only one of the eight on the list should take more than a couple of days to read, which is not to say that a couple of days is all you should spend on these books.
And finally, as if to recommend just eight books out of the universe of published works weren't in itself an act of high conceit, I have compounded the sin by suggesting an order--the order of their appearance in the pages that follow--in which the eight might most usefully be read. The order proceeds from the most to the least abstract, from the general to the particular, and from the referential to the direct. It proceeds, if you will, from considerations of life to considerations of living. You could easily skip the first two books and ignore the questions they raise for now, but someday you'll have to find your peace with those issues. Starting now can't hurt.
1
Player Piano
By Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
There's a paradox in entrepreneurship that isn't easily captured. Kurt Vonnegut comes close in his first novel, Player Piano, originally published in 1952, which wouldn't have made this list but for the suggestion of Nancy Austin, a frequent Inc. contributor. She finds it a potent essay on the limits of control--managerial and technological. It also expresses a theme that runs through most of Vonnegut's work, namely, that people--which would include entrepreneurs--are ultimately their own worst enemies.
In the story, engineers and managers join entrepreneurial forces around the computer after World War II to create a more orderly and efficient world. Eventually, vacuum-tubed machines, tended by a handful of maintenance personnel and superintended by a hierarchy of upper-level managers, take over most of the jobs in the country, including those of many of the engineers who created them. The redundant people, who turn out to be nearly everyone, are assigned make-work, given pocket money, and housed and fed in proportion to their IQs.
In Vonnegut's imagined future, society, politics, the economy, and culture are all in stasis; rules, roles, and ideas are fixed, administered by managers and executed by machines. Everything is supposed to go humming right along, but the masses, robbed of the work that gave their lives purpose and dignity, attempt, unsuccessfully, to revolt.
Two of the managers who helped engineer the new society drop out to join the revolution. Now they sit drinking amidst the ruins of a sprawling automated factory complex that they had built and then helped to destroy. One of them, the book's protagonist, observes:
