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

by Michael E. Gerber

The Entrepreneur is our creative personality—always at its best dealing with the unknown, prodding the future, creating probabilities out of possibilities, engineering chaos into harmony. Every strong entrepreneurial personality has an extraordinary need for control. Living as he does in the visionary world of the future, he needs control of people and events in the present so that he can concentrate on his dreams. Given his need for change, The Entrepreneur creates a great deal of havoc around him, which is predictably unsettling for those he enlists in his projects. As a result, he often finds himself rapidly outdistancing the others. The farther ahead he is, the greater the effort required to pull his cohorts along. This then becomes the entrepreneurial worldview: a world made up of both an overabundance of opportunities and dragging feet. The problem is, how can he pursue the opportunities without getting mired down by the feet? The way he usually chooses is to bully, harass, excoriate, flatter, cajole, scream, and finally, when all else fails, promise whatever he must to keep the project moving.