The E-Myth re-revisited #3

For every person who starts a business of their own, or has a small business, Michael E. Gerber’s book, “The E Myth Revisited” should be a required read. I’m going to post once a week on ideas from this book. For those who have never read it, I’ll boil it down for you, although you should get a copy anyway, I’m only going to talk about the lessons, yet there is much more. Gerber is a wonderful story-teller. For those who have read it, this will be a refresher of a wonderful business-self-help classic that stands the test of time, and it is one of those few books that you find yourself reading over and over…

Now that we know of the 3 aspects of personality that make up a businessperson to one degree or another, let’s look at how the tension between them looks. I once heard of an interesting way to look at human behavior, when we question why people act as they do- especially when it does not make sense or is odd behavior, it’s root is two opposing ideas trying to exist at the same time inside our head. When we are acting in a confused manner, it is because we are trying to hold two opposing thoughts or emotions simultaneously. We have a battle inside.

When looking at the three aspects of personality referred to in E-Myth, the conflicts look something like this; the entrepreneur lives in future possibilities, and creates chaos, the manager grimices at the idea dealing with another one of the entrepreneur’s bright (or goofy) ideas, yet the manager would’nt have anything to manage were it not for the entrepreneur. The manager lives in the past and craves order, cleans up the messes left by the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is irritated that the manager always pours cold water on ideas and says why things won’t work. The technician is the doer, living in the present. The technician just wants to go to work and be left alone. To the technician, the Manager is a meddler to be avoided. The technician certainly hates to be managed, and also has no patience for listening to the entrepreneur talk ideas, not when there is work to be done. 

Gerber says if all three aspects of business personality were in balance, you would be an incredibly effective business person. Very few of us are that lucky. So what do you do? Gerber says the answer lies not in hiring incredibly talented people to fill the gaps in your personality, but rather to create systems that can be run by low skill people. Have people run the system, and the system runs the company. That’s what we’ll get into next time…

Tagged as: E-Myth, Gerber, small business