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Don Juan said in Tales of Power, that “The basic difference between an ordinary man
and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or a curse,”
Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.
And so the great ones I have known seem to possess an intuitive understanding that the only way to reach something higher is to focus their attention on the multitude of seemingly insignificant, unimportant, and boring things that make up every business. (And that make up every life, for that matter!)
Those mundane and tedious little things that, when done exactly right, with the right kind of
attention and intention, form in their aggregate a distinctive essence, an evanescent quality that distinguishes every great business you’ve ever done business with from its more mediocre counterparts wh...
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Anthony Greenbank, who said in The Book of Survival, “To live through an impossible situation, you don’t need the reflexes of a Grand Prix
driver, the muscles of a Hercules, the mind of an Einstein. You simply need to know what to do.”
your business is nothing more than a distinct reflection of who you are.
So if your business is to change—as it must continuously to thrive—you must change first.
where were you before you started your business? And, if you’re thinking about going into business, where are you now? Well, if you’re like most of the people I’ve known, you were working for somebody else. What were you doing? Probably technical work, like almost everybody who goes into business.
whatever you were, you were doing technical work. And you were probably damn good at it. But you were doing it for somebody else.
It could have been anything; it doesn’t matter what. But one day, for apparently no reason, you were suddenly stricken with an Entrepreneurial Seizure.
“What am I doing this for? Why am I working for this guy? Hell, I know as much about this business as he does. If it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t have a business. Any dummy can run a business. I’m working for one.”
That Fatal Assumption is: if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that
technical work. And the reason it’s fatal is that it just isn’t true.
The real tragedy is that when the technician falls prey to the Fatal Assumption, the business that was supposed to free him from the limitations of working for somebody else actually enslaves him.
Suddenly the job he knew how to do so well becomes one job he knows how to do plus a dozen others he doesn’t know how to do at all.
And suddenly, an entrepreneurial dream turns into a technician’s nightmare.
everybody who goes into business is actually three-people-in-one: The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and The Technician.
And the problem is compounded by the fact that while each of these personalities wants to be the boss, none of them wants to have a boss.
The Entrepreneur The entrepreneurial personality turns the most trivial condition into an exceptional opportunity. The Entrepreneur is the visionary in us. The dreamer. The energy behind every human activity. The imagination that sparks the fire of the future. The catalyst for
change. The Entrepreneur lives in the future, never in the past, rarely in the present. He’s happiest when left free to construct images of “what-if” and “if-when.”
In business, The Entrepreneur is the innovator, the grand strategist, the creator of new methods for penetrating or creating new markets, the world-bending giant—
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...
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Living as he does in the visionary world of the future, he needs control of people and events in the present so that ...
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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...
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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?
To The Entrepreneur, most people are problems that get in the way of the dream.
The Manager The managerial personality is pragmatic. Without The Manager there would be no planning, no order, no predictability.
The Manager is the part of us that goes to Sears and buys stacking plastic boxes, takes them back to
the garage, and systematically stores all the various sized nuts, bolts, and screws in their own ...
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If The Entrepreneur lives in the future, The Manager lives in the past.
Where The
Entrepreneur craves control, The Manager...
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Where The Entrepreneur thrives on change, The Manager compulsively clings to the status quo. Where The Entrepreneur invariably sees the opportunity in events...
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The Manager creates neat, orderly rows of things. The Entrepreneur creates the things The Manager puts in rows.
The Manager is the one who runs after The Entrepreneur to clean up the mess. Without The Entrepreneur there would be no mess to clean up.
The Technician is the doer.
“If you want it done right, do it yourself” is The Technician’s credo.
If The Entrepreneur
lives in the future and The Manager lives in the past, The Technician lives in the present. He loves the feel of things and the fact that things can get done.
To The Technician, thinking is unproductive unless it’s thinking about the work that needs to be done.
Since most entrepreneurial ideas don’t work in the real world, The Technician’s usual experience is one of frustration and annoyance at being interrupted in the course of doing what needs to be done to try something new that probably doesn’t need to be done at all.
The Manager is also a problem to The Technician because he is determined to impose
order on The Technician’s work, to reduce him to a par...
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To The Manager, then, The Technician becomes a problem to be managed. To The Technician, The Manager becomes a meddler to be avoided. To both of them, The Entrepreneur is the one who got them into trouble in the first place!
The Entrepreneur would be free to forge ahead into new areas of interest; The Manager would be solidifying the base of operations; and The Technician would be doing the technical work.
