Product Description

Michael Gerber, the world's top business guru and bestselling author, shows would-be entrepreneurs how to get started, operationalize their winning idea, and design a business that will thrive.

Got a great idea to start a business? So now what? The E-Myth Enterprise explores the requirements that any new business must meet: the satisfaction of its four primary influencers—its employees, customers, suppliers, and investors—through four fundamental categories—visual, emotional, functional, and financial. Together these form the twin strategies every entrepreneur must use to design a business.

The latest book in the Gerber franchise, The E-Myth Enterprise, fits neatly into a training program all entrepreneurs can use to fulfill their dreams. The E-Myth Enterprise is an indispensable follow-up to Awakening the Entrepreneur Within, as it shows would-be entrepreneurs how to put a promising idea to work. Next, readers can turn to The E-Myth Revisited for tried-and-true advice about avoiding the pitfalls that prevent most small business owners from succeeding. Following this, The E-Myth Manager provides essential guidance for the management of any business. Finally, for advice on how to take an existing business to the next level of growth and opportunity, there's E-Myth Mastery. In The E-Myth Enterprise, Gerber completes the E-Myth series, to help transform every entrepreneur's dream into a reality.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102154 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-01
• Released on: 2009-06-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780061733697
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Gerber (Awakening the Entrepreneur Within) turns his attention to business invention in this slim, straightforward book that distills the essential knowledge needed to create a completely original company. He identifies four essential facets of building a new company—visual, emotional, functional and financial—and the five essential skills: concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication. Gerber shares success stories and insightful advice on how to conquer obstacles. He ends the book with a noble challenge to any company—to be a business with a conscience, to be responsible for the condition of the world it finds itself in and the condition of the people with whom it interacts, among others. Each chapter ends with takeaway points summarizing key ideas; the points are available as podcasts on a companion Web site. This quick, original, well-organized read is a valuable tool for budding entrepreneurs. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"This excellent book is a must-read for current and aspiring entrepreneurs." (Booklist )

"[A] straightforward book that distills the essential knowledge needed to create a completely original company.This quick, original, well-organized read is a valuable tool for budding entrepreneurs." (Publishers Weekly )

About the Author

Michael E. Gerber is the legend behind the E-Myth series of books, which includes The E-Myth Revisited, E-Myth Mastery, The E-Myth Manager, The E-Myth Physician, The E-Myth Contractor, and The E-Myth Enterprise. Collectively his books have sold millions of copies worldwide. Michael is also highly sought after as a speaker and consultant. He lives in Carlsbad, California.

Customer Reviews

Bizarre
Michael Gerber has cobbled together another book. On its back cover, his publisher has regurgitated the identical blurbs, verbatim, that were used on the back of Gerber's last book "Awakening the Entrepreneur Within." Sneaky, isn't it? Or dishonest? Blurbs have become burps.

But we must not judge the book by its back cover. Unfortunately, what's between the covers is bogus, boring, and outright bizarre. And the quality of writing hovers somewhere between Pompous and Dick & Jane.

BOGUS: At the outset, Gerber introduces the term "free market system" and, as he puts it, its "comings and goings." You may expect some explanations about a more or less enlightened version of capitalism; but no. A free market system according to Gerber's political philosophy is distinguished by the deplorable fact that "people are the problem," while in other systems "it does not matter what they (sc. the people) want." And what do they want? Gerber's one-word answer, repeated many times, is "MORE." More of everything. From whom? From business. And business is, so we are told, "an always frustrating, but sometimes enlightening, game, a game I call how do you provide an answer to a question that you know has no answer?" This may already put a reader's brain in a knot. Is it Zen? But let's read on. Most of these "games" are lost, because businesses fail at an alarming rate. True enough - but why? Here's Gerber's answer: "The weather changes. A new company moves in across the street. People stop having babies. Somebody comes up with a better idea ..." Wow! Better than having babies? On to the main part of the book.

BORING: We come to the systematic chapters, the meat, where in previous books the technician, the manager, and the entrepreneur appeared; where the seven essential disciplines for building a world-class company were explained; where entrepreneurs were urged to work "on" their company, not merely "in" it. You may even remember the quartet "innovation, quantification, orchestration, and documentation." This was not genius, but pretty good stuff. Forget all this. The main actors now are the "influencers": the employees, the customers, the suppliers, the investors. That's fine; but it's boring; everybody knows that. Yes, says Gerber, but these influencers are the target and beneficiaries of the "MORE" output that the game, a.k.a. the business, has to create. And to do that, there has to be in the business a "Position of One," an incredible vim and vigor, a "locus of energy," which must be "Like a star. Like the sun. Like the eye of a storm. That is the Position of One." Say what? Next come five capabilities: (1) concentration, (2) discrimination, (3) organization, (4) innovation, (5) communication. Also old hat: Same as focus, differentiation, etc. Gerber mentions Apple as an illustration for (1,2,4), and Starbucks for (3). Meager examples (the book doesn't give many). But to exemplify communication, he has this gem: "All of the great leaders in history have been great communicators. Abraham Lincoln. Winston Churchill. John F. Kennedy. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ronald Reagan. Some you may admire, some you may not. And then there's Adolf Hitler. Not a force for right action. Certainly not on anyone's list of most admired, but an effective communicator nonetheless." What does Hitler have to do with creating a thriving business? We are approaching the realm of the Weird here, entering the domain of the Bizarre.

BIZARRE: Shortly after Gerber mentions, yet again, his old "great business" heroes Walt Disney and Ray Kroc, he lashes out, unaccountably, at the people behind Cheez Balls, Ritz Crackers, and Jell-O as having "no inherent value", no "dignity", and then insults a marketer he calls Murray ("you know who you are!") as the worst person on earth, simply because "Murray believes in himself and what he does," "Murray sits in a big fat chair at the heart of American business" and more, activities one would have thought a marketer (just like Gerber himself) would be expected to do and enjoy. But no; Murray gets tongue-whipped for a whole page. Until suddenly, Gerber stops and without transition muses: "These words won't let me go. Attention, concentration, Intention, discrimination,..." and more of this. Why this motley of jumbled words again? "These words are values; these values are words. They are at the heart of the subject at hand." Zen? You may feel lost too. But it gets even more grotesque. In Chapter 9, from p. 168 to p.183, Gerber suddenly erupts in a rant, reciting a report of his deep depression, his abject scorn for the world, even for gurus like himself, who are all asleep and, at the same time, "full of themselves" (p. 170). He confesses in ragged sentences his disappointments about how stupid kids are who don't know where electricity comes from (p. 175), bemoans that pets are systematically abandoned - in conclusion: "We are a walking disgrace" (p. 176). Then, in a freaky turn, a staccato of "No excuses, No defenses ..." and the voice softens until on p. 181 we are at "The wish to touch something quieter, finer, deeper ...", and there's a final whimper about the quality of life, about having a conscience, about creating a better world - and it's over!

WRITING: Gerber has always been an inspiring speaker, at least to his fans, but a dull and clumsy writer. His made-up stories, beginning with "Sarah" in the "E-Myth" book, then "Manny Espinosa" in "Awakening" and here with "John Anderson" and "Merle", are tedious and smarmy. Gerber doesn't have the rhetorical skills, stylistic tools, or vocabulary to express in writing when he wants to stress a fact or thought, become more emphatic, surprise the reader, or - least of all - display some wit, humor, or modesty. Instead, when he gets warm, he repeats the same thing over and over again, in breathless variations, but without rhythm or word music that may enchant and take the reader with him. And when he gets all emotional or "poetic", he resorts to the style of Dick and Jane: ""If you don't believe me, see the car! See the garage! See John Anderson!"

CODA: Towards the end of the book, on p. 168, where the rant begins, there is a rare sentence of self-contemplation: "Although I obviously am not an optimist, neither am I a pessimist. Nor would I call myself a realist; I am too far gone for that."

Rambling, poor writing, weak conclusion
The introduction and first chapter of this book are written fairly well and it seems that at least on these first couple of chapters the author had a plan in mind.

After that, the last 1/2 to 3/4 of the book falls apart. The book nose-dives into what sounds like a stream-of-consciousness that is difficult to follow and generally does not hold together.

It's as if the author _Jerry Maguired_ the book. Remember, the movie? In a night of deep introspection Jerry writes a theory of how people should treat each other.
It seems the same thing happened with this book. It's as if one night the author was feeling extremely deeply about humanity and he spewed the last half of the book, but never returned to edit it. [warning spoiler] So, he creates this treatise on the human condition and then his final great idea is _be nice_.[/warning spoiler] Uh, yeah.

The tag line to selling this book is, "How to turn a great idea into a thriving business." Then, the author concludes, "be nice." Not exactly an earth-shattering conclusion.

The problem isn't knowing _what_ the right thing to do is(the easy part), but knowing how to _do_ the right thing(the difficult part). People know they should _be nice_, however, unless you provide some details on how to _be nice_ (the difficult part) then you're not offering much.

As he rambles through those last chapters, one of his theories is that people cannot get outside of themselves enough to notice that they are not noticing what they don't notice. I'm serious. But, then, since the author is a person, he wouldn't be able to do that either. It's all part of human condition problem related to not doing the things that you wish you did, and continuing to do the things that you wish you didn't. It's the Romans chapter 7 problem. We all got it. 8:1 gives the solution.

Nothing new in this book
This is the first book I've read in the E-Myth franchise, and it was incredibly disappointing. First, the subtitle "How to turn a great idea into a thriving business" is misleading since he doesn't really offer any concrete advice. Some of the ideas caught my interest but were really nothing new and were not explored very deeply. This book is a business/pop-spirituality book. The stories in it were vague and uninspiring and most of the book is composed of lists in which he takes a sentence and repeats it over and over only changing the last word or phrase. He also extolls the virtues of Steve Jobs, Ray Kroc, and Walt Disney, as if we needed another book that does so. Then he rants about people who sell products like Cheese Balls and how they can never achieve fulfillment. The end of the book is a rant about the awful state of the world and its awful spiritual values. It concludes with the idea that no one, not even he, is enlightened enough to run a business but there's no way we can possibly become enlightened so we'll just have to wish for it and run them anyway. My advice is to just read the summaries at the end of each chapter but if you really have a burning desire to read this book at least you can finish it in about 2-3 hours.