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Unfortunately, our experience shows us that few people who go into business are blessed with such a balance. Instead, the typical small business owner is only 10 percent Entrepreneur, 20 percent Manager, and 70 percent Technician. The Entrepreneur wakes up with a vision.
The Manager screams “Oh, no!” And while the two of them are battling it out, The Technician seizes the opportunity to go into business for himself. Not to pursue the entrepreneurial dream, however, but to finally wrest control of his work from the other two. To The Technician it’s a dream come true. The Boss is dead. But to the business it’s a disaster, because the wrong person is at the helm.
The Technician is i...
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“In short, you would see how The Entrepreneur in you dreams and schemes, The Manager in you is constantly attempting to keep things as they are, and The Technician in you drives the other two crazy.
“All I do is bake pies. All I ever wanted to do was to bake pies, just like The Technician you described.
“You would begin to say to yourself, ‘It’s time for me to create a new life. It’s time for me to challenge my imagination and to begin the process
of shaping an entirely new life. And the best way to do that anywhere in this whole wide opportunity-filled world is to create an exciting new business. One that can give me everything that I want, one that doesn’t require me to be there all the time, one that has the potential to be stunningly unique, one that people will talk about long after having shopped in it the very first time, and, as a result of that delightful experience, will come back to shop there again because it has such a special flavor to it. I wonder what that business would be?’ “I wonder what that business would be?” I
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most businesses are operated according to what the owner wants as opposed to what the business needs.
And what The Technician who runs the company wants is not growth or change but exactly the opposite. He wants a place to go to
work, free to do what he wants, when he wants, free from the ...
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Unfortunately, what The Technician wants dooms his business before it even begins. To understand why, let’s take a look at the three phases of a business’s ...
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In a flash, you realize that your business has become The Boss you thought you left behind. There’s no getting rid of the Boss!
Infancy ends when the owner realizes that the business cannot continue to run the way it has been; that, in order for it to survive, it will have to change. When that happens—when the reality sinks in—most business failures occur.
When that happens, most of The Technicians lock their doors behind them and walk away. The rest go on to Adolescence.
“I guess I still don’t get it,” she said. “What’s wrong with being a Technician? I used to love the work I do. And if I didn’t have to do all these other things, I would still love it!” “Of course you would,” I answered. “And that’s exactly the point! “There’s nothing wrong with being a Technician. There’s only something wrong with being a
Technician who also owns a business! Because as a Technician-turned-business-owner, your focus is upside down. You see the world from the bottom up rather than from the top down. You have a tactical view rather than a strategic view. You see the work that has to get done, and because of the way you’re built, you immediately jump in to do it! You believe that a business is nothing more than an aggregate of the various types of work done in it, when in fact it is much more than that.
If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job.
And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!
“And, besides, that’s not the purpose of goin...
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“The purpose ...
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into business is to get free of a job so you can create job...
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The exciting thing is, that once you begin to, once your Technician begins to let go, once you make room for the rest of you to flourish, the game becomes more rewarding than you can possibly imagine at this point in your business’s life.”
But at the same time—unaccustomed as you are to being The Manager—your newfound freedom takes on an all too
common form. It’s called Management by Abdication rather than by Delegation.
And the reason is that The Boss always changes his mind about what needs to be done, and how. What Harry doesn’t know, however, is why—why you’re such a madman. That it’s not your people who are driving you crazy. That it’s not the complaining customer who’s driving you mad. That it’s not the banker, or the vendor, or the incorrectly wrapped package that’s driving you up the wall. That it’s not that “nobody cares,” or that “nothing gets done on time” that’s driving you insane. No, it’s not the world that’s the problem. It’s that you simply don’t know how to do it any other way.
Every Adolescent business reaches a point where it pushes beyond its owner’s Comfort Zone—the boundary within which he feels secure in his ability to control his environment, and outside of which he begins to lose that control.
The Technician’s boundary is determined by how much he can do
himself. The Manager’s is defined by how many technicians he can supervise effectively or how many subordinate managers he can organize into a productive effort. The Entrepreneur’s boundary is a function of h...
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They see the pattern, understand the order, experience the vision. Peter Drucker The New Society
A Mature business knows how it got to be where it is, and what it must do to get where it wants to go.
Therefore, Maturity is not an inevitable result of the first two phases. It is not the end product of a serial process, beginning with Infancy and moving through Adolescence.
No, compani...
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McDonald’s, Federal Express, and Disney didn’t end up as Mature companies. They started out that way! The people who started them had a totally different perspective about what a business is and why it works. The person who launches his business as a Mature company must also go through Infancy and Adolescence. He simply goes thr...
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His Entrepreneurial Pe...
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The Entrepreneurial Perspective asks the question: “How must the business work?” The Technician’s Perspective asks: “What work has to be done?” • The Entrepreneurial Perspective sees the business as a system for producing outside results—for the customer—resulting in profits. The Technician’s Perspective sees the business as a place in which people work to produce inside results—for The Technician—producing income. • The Entrepreneurial Perspective starts with a picture of a well-defined future, and then comes back to the present with the intention of changing it to match the vision. The
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The Entrepreneurial Model looks at a business
as if it were a product, sitting on a shelf and competing for the customer’s attention against a whole shelf of competing products (or businesses). Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is.
When The Entrepreneur creates the model, he surveys the world and asks: “Whe...
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“How will my business look to the customer?” The Entrepreneur asks. “How will my business stand out from all the rest?” Thus, the Entrepreneurial Model
does not start with a picture of the business to be created but of the customer for whom the business is to be created. It understands that without a clear picture of that customer, no business can succeed.
To The Entrepreneur, the business is the product.
To The Technician, the customer is always a problem. Because the customer never seems to want what The Technician has to offer at the price at which he
offers it. To The Entrepreneur, however, the customer is always an opportunity. Because The Entrepreneur knows that within the customer is a continuing parade of changing wants begging to be satisfied.
in the future. As a result, the world is a continuing surprise, a treasure hunt to The Entrepreneur. To The Tec...
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place that never seems to let him do what he wants to do; it rarely applauds his efforts; it rarely appreciates his work; it rarely, if ever, appreciates him. To The Technician, the world al...
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the Business Format Franchise is built on the belief that the true product of a business is not what it sells but how it sells it.
Ray Kroc was the consummate entrepreneur. And like most entrepreneurs, he suffered from one major liability. He had a huge dream and very little money.
Driven by his desire to buy a business, the franchisee only wanted to know one thing: “Does it work?” Ray Kroc’s most important concern then became how to make certain his business would work better than any other.
Forced to create a business that worked in order to sell it, he also created a business that would work once it was sold, no matter who bought it.
A systems-dependent business, not a people-dependent business.
