The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

by Michael E. Gerber

The Entrepreneurial Perspective adopts a wider, more expansive scale. It views the business as a network of seamlessly integrated components, each contributing to some larger pattern that comes together in such a way as to produce a specifically planned result, a systematic way of doing business. Each step in the development of such a business is measurable, if not quantitatively, at least, qualitatively. There’s a standard for the business, a form, a way of being that can be translated into things to do today that best exemplify it. The business operates according to articulated rules and principles. It has a clear, recognizable form. With The Technician’s Perspective, however, the scale is narrower, more inhibited, confined principally to the work being done. As a result, The Technician’s business becomes increasingly oppressive, less exhilarating, closed off from the larger world outside. His business is reduced to steps that fail to take him anywhere other than to the next step, itself nothing more than a replica of the one before it. Routine becomes the order of the day. Work is done for work’s sake alone, forsaking any higher purpose, any meaning for what needs to be done other than the need to just do it. The Technician sees no connection between where his business is going and where it is now.