The Eight Books to Read Before You Start Your Business
Published May 1999
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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:
"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.
