"Most fascinating game there is, keeping things from staying the way they are."
"If only it weren't for the people, the goddamned people," said Finnerty, "always getting tangled up in the machinery."
That's the paradox--that it's possible, even likely, that successful entrepreneurs will build the very kinds of organizations and institutions that drove them to entrepreneurship in the first place. In the interest of maintaining control, they become the kinds of managers in the kinds of organizations that they once reviled. In other words, you end up in the place you thought you were running away from.
In Player Piano, Vonnegut shows why it happens, if not exactly how to prevent it from happening to you.
2
On Not Knowing How to Live
By Allen Wheelis
"I have come to a strange land," Allen Wheelis's little book begins. "I do not understand the language."
This book is California psychoanalyst Wheelis's cogitation on the relationship of individuals to spirit--whatever is greater than man and is infinite in time.
The strange land that Wheelis has found is not entrepreneurship per se, of course, but life--the time-space we occupy between birth and death. "To live at all is to be doomed," he points out. Happy thought. So we stay busy.
But building a company, even one that succeeds by mammon's measure, is an imperfect hedge against despair. We seek a legacy, but Stone wears away, and who will read Proust in a thousand years? And what's a thousand years to the appetite for immortality?
This book is a lyrical reminder that we search futilely for meaning in the ephemeral institutions that man has built--including our own creations. A business does not a life make. Take care that you don't rely upon company building for rewards it can't deliver. And remember that to equate your business with your self is to court disaster.
3
Future Perfect
By Stan Davis
They say nothing's faster than change in business today. So what could Stan Davis's Future Perfect, a book about the future written 11 years ago, say to today's entrepreneur? Plenty. Maybe more, in fact, than when Davis wrote it.
If Vonnegut ignites a flare that throws a harsh light on the sociological context of entrepreneurship and Wheelis stumbles with a dim candle through the spiritual corridors, Davis shines a laser on the business setting.
The book's title connotes a perspective: the view from that point in time at which the anticipated or imagined future has already arrived. From the future-perfect perspective, the present is already the past. It's a mind game that Davis plays, but not just a mind game: entrepreneurs and managers with a future-perfect perspective think and behave differently from those who, because they are present oriented, must settle for catching up. The present instantaneously becomes the past, so entrepreneurs with a present perspective will always be behind; to them, time is a constraint. For those with a future-perfect perspective, it's a resource; they've got time to get ready. Present-thinking company founders are late even as they start.
Today's present validates much of the future-perfect thinking that Davis himself engaged in when writing his book. Products and services have leaped toward mass customization and instantaneity--consider Levi's custom-made jeans delivered in days. "There is a competitive advantage in providing the same product or service, at the same price, in 20% less time," Davis wrote. No surprise there; incremental improvements do have value. But incremental thinking will leave a company--or a founder--falling behind because it is by definition self-limiting. The results at best can only be incremental. What competitors need to be thinking about is not, say, reducing the time from order to delivery but eliminating it; not the miniaturization of mass but its elimination; not many-place delivery but any-place delivery. Davis would call this "transformative" thinking because it imposes no limits on its own results. It seems to be the only kind of framework that will keep a company competitive these days. "Speaking practically, what-ever your business, think about how you can create products and services in real time that you can deliver instantly. Even in the slowest-moving company, this contextual shift will speed things up."
Of course, you've heard all those admonitions before, but Davis creates standards against which would-be business builders ought to measure their own thinking about how their companies are going to work. To some readers, some of Davis's chapters--those on "any-place" and "no-matter" in particular--may sound old hat, but I'd be careful about skipping over them. One has only to be a customer in America today to know how far short most companies still fall of future perfect.
4
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
By Michael E. Gerber
The problem with most failing businesses I've encountered is not that their owners don't know enough about finance, marketing, management, and operations--they don't, but those things are easy enough to learn--but that they spend their time and energy defending what they think they know.
--Michael E. Gerber,
The E-Myth Revisited
We begin our discussion of Gerber's book with a quote about owners of failing businesses because that's what most founders quickly become. But starting a company isn't like shooting craps, in which winning is all in the luck of the throw. More companies would succeed, says Gerber, but for the E-Myth, "a romantic belief that small businesses are started by entrepreneurs, when, in fact, most are not." Most businesses, Gerber says, are started by technicians--people who know how to do something. The barber starts a barbershop and the cook, a restaurant--on the fatally erroneous assumption that to understand the technical work is to understand the business that does it.
So technicians should not start businesses? No, that's not Gerber's message. "Everybody who goes into business," he claims, "is actually three-people-in-one: the Entrepreneur, the Manager, and the Technician." The technician in you can do the work, but it can't run the business, and it certainly can't grow it. Those are the jobs of the manager and the entrepreneur. Owners need to get their roles straight--their job is to work on the business, not in it.
