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MICHAEL E. Gerber's message in E-Myth Mastery, from HarperBusiness (www.harpercollins.com) is simple: "Don't work IN your business, work ON it." Gerber is a man with a mission to help you make your small enterprise a world class one. The secret lies in opening the doors to `creative entrepreneurial energy', he reveals.

But most small businesses fail, don't they? That's because of a crisis of vision, diagnoses Gerber; consequence is "an inevitable cloud of misdirected activity". You may have lot of self-belief but remember, "each and every single one of your people conspires to make your company great or not." Greatness is achieved "only when the entrepreneurial leadership in your company is passionately committed to inspiring every one of your people to plumb their entrepreneurial depths." That's a powerful message you can make a poster of.

It's an entrepreneurial myth or E-myth to think that entrepreneurship is a trait possessed by a rare and special few. Break that! For, entrepreneurship belongs to each and every one of us. "It lives inside us all," reassures Gerber. His definition of entrepreneurship is simple: First of all, it is "the power to create."

Before you start a business, ask yourself if you're just a technician suffering from "an entrepreneurial seizure". Knowing how to do technical work is one thing, but building a business is another. This may seem simple, but most enterprises flounder despite the best CVs that their founders flaunt.

Chapter 2, titled `passion, purpose, and practice' begins with a quote of J. Krishnamurti: "You need to have passion to end sorrow, and passion is not bought through escape. It is there when you stop escaping." Tragedy is that we often let our passions down, writes Gerber. "We start a million projects... Half-completed projects become a way of life."

A different chapter, `the purpose of purpose' explains the essence of purpose as `vision'. And, "purpose, in the sense of a vision, is what passion serves." Gerber bombards you with more one-liners, such as: Managers have purpose, and entrepreneurs have vision. Vision leads, and purpose follows. I'd put it this way: Gerber leads, you follow!

Part two of the book discusses `the seven essential disciplines'. Entrepreneur must have `leadership resonance' — to make the connection with the world. But first he must learn "how to live with being alone". Learn how to accept "the hollow reality of it, the tiny sound of your own voice in your self-induced vacuum." Also, remember that your job is to manage the business, not just parts of it.

On `the discipline of the financial leader', the author writes, "Money is where the rubber meets the road." He confronts you with blunt truths: "We live in a world that expects us to `get' money but doesn't teach us anything of real value about it. People who don't have it long for it... People who have it feel they never have enough, allocate it poorly, live in fear of losing it, mistrust other people's intentions around it."

It's the job of the management leader to ensure a `high-performance environment' to create "a game worth playing". Such places "engage people fully" and they start using all of their skills "to reach higher levels of personal and professional competence with each new challenge."

For them, it's fun to win, but what's more important for them is "to keep playing".

Great read, if you're not suffering from what may be called the T-myth — that is, the myth of not having time!

ManageMentor@TheHindu.co.in

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