["The E-Myth Revisited"]

[fiefoe]

When is there a non-fiction book without a subtitle? This book's is "Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It." The introduction consists of mostly one sentence paragraphs and makes confident claims like '(the process) will change your business and it will change your life.' Can you just tell Michael E. Gerber is an exciting public speaker?

The first couple of chapter-opening quotes were funky, but then we got down to business:

• They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are. [Aldous Huxley]
• Thus, in the course of his life, one man acquires many personal qualities, many personages, many 'I's'... Jean Vaysse (That leads to 'The problem is that everybody who goes into business is actually three-people-in-one: The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and The Technician.' For instance, 'In science, the entrepreneurial personality works in the most abstract and least pragmatic areas of particle physics, pure mathematics, and theoretical astronomy.')
• ...my Uncle Sol had a skunk farm but the skunks caught cold and died and so my Uncle Sol imitated the skunks in a subtle manner ... [e. e. cummings]  (But what does that have to do with 'The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people'?)
• Systems theory looks at the world in terms of the interrelatedness of all phenomena, and in this framework an integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of its parts is called a system. [Fritjof Capra]
• It is these "relatively fixed points of reference" that an orderly business provides its customer and its employees in an otherwise disorderly world.