One reason this book is fourth on the reading list is that it wrings a methodology out of the metaphysical. You've been speculating about your place in God's universe and in man's, indulging in the daydream of yourself as the successful entrepreneur, and along comes the unromantic Gerber, who says, OK, it's time to make some choices. What are your aims in life? How much money do you need? And so on, from big choices to small ones--from your organizational strategy (you've thought about that, haven't you?) to how you'll decide what color to paint your product or logo.
There are no answers in Gerber's book; it's a framework that guides you along a logical path of inquiry.
One piece of advice that Gerber keeps coming up with: "Your business is not your life." Shades of Wheelis.
5
The Practice of Management
By Peter F. Drucker
You are about to become the manager of the business you will soon create. But what does it mean to manage? Better to ask now than to wait until the task is upon you.
There's a hint at what's involved in The E-Myth Revisited, but you'll sense when you're reading it that Gerber's language is too spare, clipped, epigrammatic--just short of glib--to be authoritative. The value he adds is the business-development framework. For substance and depth on management there's only one writer to read: Peter Drucker. But which Drucker book? He's written a couple dozen.
Not a few people promoted Innovation and Entrepreneurship, published in 1985, for inclusion here on the grounds that this is, after all, a reading list for entrepreneurs. But I'm suggesting instead The Practice of Management, published in 1954, which is the more inclusive work. (It got its own fair number of recommendations.) No other book that I'm aware of captures so thoroughly and yet so succinctly the principles of business management. Reading Drucker won't make anyone a manager--he's more scholar than trainer--but without having read and absorbed the wisdom of Drucker, it would be substantially more difficult for entrepreneurs to understand the roles and duties of managers and to evaluate the worth of the countless management techniques that they'll hear touted.
What, for instance, have Theory Z, MBWA, Anita Roddick, or reengineering changed about the truth of this short excerpt from Drucker's introductory chapter?
The final function of management is to manage workers and work....This implies organization of the work so as to make it most suitable for human beings, and organization of people so as to make them work most productively and effectively. It implies consideration of the human being as a resource--that is, as something having peculiar physiological properties, abilities, and limitations that require the same amount of engineering attention as the properties of any other resource, e.g., copper. It implies also consideration of the human resource as human beings having, unlike any other resource, personality, citizenship, control over whether they work, how much and how well, and thus requiring motivation, participation, satisfactions, incentives and rewards, leadership, status and function. And it is management, and management alone, that can satisfy these requirements.
6
New Venture Creation: Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century
By Jeffry A. Timmons
Now, after Drucker on management, comes the book about entrepreneurship: Jeffry Timmons's New Venture Creation. But it's dry, dry, dry, you say. Yes, and it's also full of information you don't need right now. (And it's printed on annoyingly shiny paper.) So why read it?
Because no one can teach you or anyone else how to be an entrepreneur, but a good teacher can describe the process. Timmons, who teaches courses at Harvard Business School and at Babson College, is a good teacher, and he draws on lots of experience, from both the classroom and the real world.
Actually, there are four good reasons for slogging through New Venture Creation now, even if you don't read every word of it or work through all the exercises. The first reason is that it's all here. Not the artistry of entrepreneurship, of course. That's where the entrepreneur comes in. But Timmons covers the tools and techniques. Even if you don't need all of them now, isn't it better to know they exist and that you can look them up when you do need them? Second, a casual cruise through the book is sobering: there are maelstroms you could fall into (see, for instance, on page 562, "IRS: Time Bomb for Personal Disaster") and really hard problems you're going to have to solve (see, for instance, "The Family Venture Team," on page 288). The third is that lots of people have already done what you propose to do--that is, start a company--and Timmons has collected many of their experiences here. Why should you stagger through the entrepreneurial process blind when others have already explored and mapped it, and why not at least be aware of what they've learned? The fourth reason for reading the book now is that once you're into the start-up process, you'll never take the time. "Couldn't someone have warned me about this?" you'll be asking yourself someday. Someone did, but if you haven't pushed yourself through Timmons's book, you may miss the message.
7
Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure
By Jerry Kaplan
By chapter two, Jerry Kaplan had me hooked. I already knew the ending of Startup, just as I knew the ending of Titanic. It was finding out how, exactly, the ship and Kaplan's new venture both went down that held my attention. You want real-life entrepreneurial adventure? This is it, without the banal generalizations that most CEO authors attach to their particular experiences.
The magical "aha," the moment of conception, comes early in the book (on page 13, to be precise). Early in 1987, Kaplan, who had a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, was working for Mitchell Kapor, founder and then CEO of Lotus Development Corp., on a program that eventually would become Lotus Agenda. Kapor and Kaplan were on a small private jet, and Kaplan saw Kapor typing stuff into a PC. Kaplan stared at him:
