The E-Myth (Revisited) by Michael Gerber

The basic difference between and 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. - Don Juan

The Fatal Assumption: if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does technical work. 

To the "Entrepreneur [part of the psyche]" most people are problems that get in the way of the dream.

An Entrepreneur does the work of envisioning the business as something apart from you, the owner. 

'I wonder what that business would be?' is the truly entrepreneurial question. The dreaming question...I wonder is the true work of the entrepreneurial personality. 

If your business depends on you, you don't own a business - you have a job.

The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people. 

[As a business owner] your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.

Companies like McDonald's, FedEx, and Disney didn't end up as Mature companies. They started out that way.

The very best businesses are fashioned after a model of a business that works.

The Entrepreneurial Perspective: 

...how must this business work? 

...sees the business as a system for producing outside results - for the customer - resulting in profits.

...starts with a picture of a well defined future and then comes back ot the present with the intention of changing it to match the vision.

...envisions the business in its entirety, from which is derived its parts.

...an integrated vision of the world

...the present day world is modeled after his [future] vision.

The Entrepreneurial Model: a business that fulfulls the perceieved needs of a specific segment of customers in an innovative way.

The Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created by 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.  [how can i make a business that is so desirable, people will fight over buying it?]

The Entrepreneur knows that within the customer is a continuing parade of changing wants begging to be satisfied. All the Entrepreneur has to do is find out what those wants are and what they will be in the future. 

The system isn't something you bring to the business. Its something you derive from the process of building the business.

Business Format Franchise: It is a proprietary way of doing business that successfully and preferentially differentiates every extraordinary business form every one of its competitors. 

[A business is] an organism that will live or die according to how well it performs its sole function: to find a keep customers. 

Pretend that the business you own is the prototype for 5,000 more just like it. 

The rules of the Franchise Game: 

1. The model will provide consistent value to your customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders beyond what they expect.

2. The model will be operated by people with the lowest possible level of skill.

3. The model will stand out as a place of impeccable order.

4. All work in the model will be documented in Operations Manuals.

5. The model will provide a uniformly predictable service to the customer.

6. The model will utilize a uniform color, dress, and facilities code.

So what could your Prototype do that would not only provide consistent value to your customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders but would provide it beyond their wildest expectations.

How can I create a business whose results are systems dependent rather than people dependent?

When you intentionally build your business around the skills of ordinary people you will be forced to ask the difficult questions about how to produce a result without the extraordinary ones. 

Structure [order] provides the relatively fixed points of reference we need. It is these relatively fixed points of reference that an orderly business provides its customer and its employees in an otherwise disorderly world. 

The Operations Manual is therefore best described as a company's How To Do It guide.

What you do in your model is not nearly as important as doing what you do the same way, each and every time. 

The difference between creativity and innovation is the difference between thinking about getting things done in the world and getting things done. 

Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.

To the franchisor, the entire process by which the business does business is a marketing tool, a mechanism for finding and keeping customers. Each and every component of the business system is a means through which the franchisor can differentiate his business from all other businesses in the mind of his consumer. Where the business is the product, how the business interacts with the consumer is more important than what it sells. 

The next time you want somebody to do something for you, touch him softly on the arm as you ask him to do it. You will be amazed...

What is standing in the way of my customer getting what he wants from my business?

Begin by quantifying everything related to how you do business. I mean everything. 

Orchestration is the elimination of discretion, or choice, at the operating level of your business.

The definition of a franchise is simply your unique way of doing business. 

Then the system must provide the vehicle to facilitate predictability...to give your customer what he wants every single time. 

Innovate, Quantify, and Orchestrate. Because the world, moving as it does, will not tolerate a stationary object. The world will collide with whatever you've created, and sooner or later destroy it. 

There needs to be a set routine. Because without it, there would be nothing to improve upon. And without improvement, there would be no reason to be. 

While going to work on their business, people begin to realize that it is a powerful metaphor for going to work on their lives. 

To imagine that some will walk through your door with the intention of buying your business - but only if it works. Imagine your smile inside as you say "Let me show you how it works."

The Business Development Program:

Primary Aim

Strategic Objective

Organizational Strategy

Management Strategy

People Strategy

Marketing Strategy

Systems Strategy

The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. 

After all, here was a man who had lived a life that baffled good reason. Whatever he chose to do, he did. Whatever he did, he was good at. 

Until you move beyond your Comfort Zone, you will never know what it is you were missing out there. 

Once you realize that what you and I really want is to have the room, the openness, to expand, to grow, to be more of ourselves, whatever that means, and to find out what that means is what's most important to us. Once you see that you can then turn to the business that's going to help you get there. 

In the factory Revlon manufactures cosmetics, but in the store Revlon sells hope. 

The truth is, nobody's interested in the commodity. People buy feelings. How your business anticipates those feelings and satisfies them is your product. 

Stratedgic Objective:

When is your prototype going to be completed?

Where are you going to do business?

How are you going to be in business; retail, wholesale etc?

What standards are you going to insist upon?

[Fruit from own gardens] is going to be something unique about All About Pies that differentiates it from every other bakery or small pie shop. Truly homegrown. With homegrown gentle care. 

Most companies organize around personalities rather than around functions.

A Position Contract is a summary of the results to be achieved by each position in the company, the work the occupant of that position is accountable for a list of standards by which the results are to be evaluated, and a line for the signature of the person who agrees to fulfill those accountabilities. 

In creating their Organizational Chart, Jack and Murray had also generated the blueprint for their Franchise Prototype.

Only when the Sales Operations Manual is complete does Murray run an ad for a salesperson.

Management System: The more automatic that System is, the more effective your Franchise Prototype will be.

This is our Operations Manual. As you can see, its nothing but a series of checklists. 

If you want it done, you are going to have to create an enviroment in which 'doing it' is more important to your people than not doing it. 

The most menial work can be a piece of art when done by an artist. 

Its the first place I've gone to work where there was an idea behind the work that was more important than the work itself. 

What was important was how seriously I took to playing the game he had created here. 

There is nothing more exciting than a well conceived game. 

That is what a business can do; it can create a Game Worth Playing.

And so I see my experiences...as the beginning of a philosophy for my business, a philosophy that my business needs if I'm ever going to offer anything of true value to my employees and my customers. 

You need people who want to play your game. Not people who believe they have a better one. 

Hierarchy of Systems

-How we do it here

-How we recruit, hire, and train people to do it here

-How we manage it here

-How we change it here

the 'It' is the stated purpose of your business. (i.e. caring)

It is the system, not only the people, that will differentiate your business form everyone else's.

Your marketing strategy starts, ends, lives, and dies with your customer. 

If you know who your customer is (demographics) you can determine why he buys (psychographics). 

Find a perceived need and fill it. 

The challenge of our age is to learn our customer's language. And then to speak that language clearly and well so that your voice can be heard about the din. 

The owner of a business must start out by asking marketing questions.

That is what marketing is. That is what your business must be. Alive, growing, committed to keeping a promise no competitor would dare to make. 

A system is a set of things, actions, ideas, and information that interact with each other, and in so doing, alter other systems.  Everything is a system.

One powerfully effective message: that you are All About Pies, and that there is no one, absolutely no one else like you. 

You must analyze your business as it is today, decide what it must look like when you've finally got it just like you want it, and then determine the gap between where you are and where you need to be in order to make your dream a reality. 

The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman

American was going to be challenged...but the challenge would be good for America because we are always at our best when we are being challenged. 

Blogs have given the people a chance to stop yelling at their TV and have a say in the process.

The fall of the Berlin Wall...if you were not a democracy or a democratizing society, if you continued to hold fast to highly regulated or centrally planned economics, you were seen as being on the wrong size of history. 

People will change their habits quickly when they have a strong reason to do so, and people have an innate urge to connect with other people. 

There is no future in vanilla for most companies in a flat world...the commercial future belongs to those who know ho to make the richest chocolate sauce,  the sweetest lightest whipped cream, and the juiciest cherries to sit on top, or how to put them all together into a sundae. 

Companies that design their software, systems, website, and encyclopedias to encourage participation will be the ones that draw the most users. 

More than ever, we can all now be producers, not just consumers. 

Wal-Mart today is the biggest retailer in the world and it does not make a single thing. 

Building a process that delivers stuff across the globe is not only difficult, it's very very hard to duplicate. 

Either you get flat, or you get flattened by China. 

In this world, a smart and fast global supply chain is becoming one the most important ways for company to distinguish itself from its competitors. 

While its competitors guarded sales information, Wal-mart approached its suppliers as if their were partners, not adversaries. 

What I think I have to do is institutionalize the sense of obligation to society to the same extent that we have institutionalized the commitment to the customer. 

Companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and TiVo have learned to thrive not by pushing products and services on their customers so much as by building collaborative systems that enable customers to pull on their own and then responding with lighting quickness to what they pull. It is so much more efficient.

The big spurts in productivity come when a new technology or a new platform of technologies is combined with new ways of doing business.  

It is this triple convergence - of new players, on a new playing field, developing new process and habits for horizontal collaboration - that I believe is the most important force  shaping global economics and politics in the early twenty first century. 

Americans have consistently led in innovation over the last century. Americans wining [about outsourcing] we have never seen that before. 

Now, I would rather be a genius born in China than  an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.

More and more, politics in the flat world will consist of asking which values, frictions, and fats are worth preserving - which should, in Marx's language, be kept solid - and which must be left to melt away into the air. 

There may be a limit to the number of good factory jobs in the world, but there is no limit to the number of idea-generated jobs in the world. 

If you believe human wants and needs are infinite, then there are infinite industries to be created, infinite businesses to be started, and infinite jobs to be done, and the only limiting factor is human imagination.

The way to succeed is not by stopping the railroad line from connecting you, but by firing up your imagination, by upgrading your skills, and by adopting those practices, rules, policies, and educational institutions that will enable you and your society to claim a healthy slice of the bigger but more complex pie. 

Today's workers need to approach the workplace...like someone preparing for the Olympics but doesn't know what sport they are going to enter. They have to be ready to do anything. 

Perhaps people skills will become more valuable than computer skills. The geeks may not inherit the earth afterall. 

Now that foreigners can do left brain work cheaper, we in the US must do right brain work better. 

When you hear your parents or your college graduation speaker telling you to "do what you love," they are not giving you some syrupy pabulum. They are giving you a survival strategy. 

In China today Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today Britney Spears is Britney Spears - and that is our problem. 

The muscles workers need more are portable benefits and opportunities for lifelong learning...Because they are the most important assets in making a working mobile and adaptable. 

We all have to be owners as well as wage earners. That is where public policy has to be focused - the make sure that people have wealth producing assets as they enter the twenty first century. 

Instead of just being focused on protecting those with existing capital...let's focus instead on widening the circle of capital owners. 

The Indians, for instance, take the view that the Moguls come, the Moguls go, the British come, the British go, we take the best and leave the rest - but we still eat curry and our women still wear saris, and we still live in tightly bound extended family units. Thats glocalizing at its best. 

It is simply too easily forgotten that when it comes to economic activities, one of the greatest virtues a country or community can have is a culture of tolerance. 

The whole article was about why we are giving them are glue, when the right attitude would be How much more glue can we sell them? We still need to break some mental barriers. 

When the world is flat, whatever can be done will be done. The only question is whether it will be done by you or to you. 

You will differentiate your company from the others by how you do business.

The most popular food in the world is not the Big Mac. Its pizza. And what is pizza? It is just a flat piece of dough on which every culture puts its own distinctive foods and flavors. 

My belief is that the global is going to be interesting only if it is a range of the local. 

We are operating under the old rules and then the old rules changed, but nobody put up a sign. 

If your arguments or video or photos or voice are compelling, you'll eventually find an audience or it will find you.

Too often we have anti poverty debates but not proentrepreneurship debates. The inspiration al power of a local business success story in incalculable: there is no greater motivator for the poor than looking at one of their own who makes it big and saying: "If she can do it, I can do it. "

Two people and a computer were able to create better lives for three hundred people (in Cambodia), Two people and a website can now do anything. 

There is a iron law in American politics: The party that most quickly absorbs and adopts the latest technology dominates politics. FDR dominated the radio through the fireside chat; JFK triumphed over Nixon in televised debates; Republicans rose to power on talk radio; Karl Rove mastered the use of direct mail and computerized databases. 

I learned that the way you get big change is by getting the big players to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

The disease of the Internet age: continuous partial attention. 

No wonder people have to do online dating: Your chances of a chance encounter now on a ski left or on a train or a bus are so much lower today than they used to be, because the chances that the person sitting next to you will be absorbed in a handheld device rather than being open to engaging the person next to him or her, are so much higher. 

When we think about health problems in the developing world, the men are almost invisible, except as a source of part of the problem. Its all about the women.

When people, particularly people who are illiterate, say something and it gets immediately represented on the wall, they feel really validated, and therefore they get more animated and more engaged. 

This humiliation is key. It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money. It is spawned by the poverty of dignity. 

Most middle class Arabs and Muslims, I am convinced, were not celebrating the death of three thousand innocent Americans on 9/11...but many Arabs and Muslims were celebrating the idea of putting a fist in American's face - and they were quietly applauding the men who did it. 

Green is the new Red, White, and Blue

Let's leave the cave dwelling to bin Laden. We have to be masters of our imaginations, not the prisoners. 

Europeans and others often like to make fun of American optimism and naivete - our crazy notion that every problem has a solution, that tomorrow can be better than yesterday, that the future can always bury the past. But I have always believed that deep down the rest of the world envies that American optimism and naivete. It needs American optimism. 

Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?

When you are part of a community that you feel ownership in it is different. You have a stake. 

The French revolution, the American revolution, the Indian democracy and even eBay are all based on social contracts whose dominant feature is that authority comes from the bottom up, and people can and do feel self empowered to improve their lot. People living in such contexts tend to spend thir time focusing on what to do next, not on whom to blame next. 

One good example is worth a thousand theories. 

Confessions of a Serial Entrepeneur by Stuart Skorman

A large ego is not just good for an entrepreneur, its necessary. 

The essence of an entrepreneur is the diehard belief that we are the only ones able to make things happen. 

In business you can't accept the status quo. When something doesn't add up you have to delve deeper in search of an answer.

The more ambitious you are the more help you'll require. (Mentors)

One mistake business owners make is thinking they know best...listen to the audience. Objective market research. 

If you want to earn a living you must be paid by someone who values your services. 

When creating a new business design it to attract publicity from the beginning. The name should elicit strong reactions. 

I knew I could vastly improve the video store status quo. 

A strong brand comes from one person's clear vision. 

Get to know your customers. 

I didn't want to call them, I wanted them to call me. I sought out and landed a cover story in...the nations biggest trade magazine. 

Three rules to business and poker: be aggressive, play tight, hone opportunism.

Amazon.com = buy a sales list from the world's biggest bookstore, put it online, and advertise as the world's biggest bookstore. 

Do's and Don'ts for choosing a business:

Base your decision on logic, not emotion

Stick with the familiar

Prioritize fun

Choose a business within your grasp. A stepping stone.

Enter an established field. 

Know your risk tolerance. 

Focus on short term goals. 

You better have a plan to make a profit. 

You need to foresee potential problems, not just the good things. 

"I'm not sure I have time to take any free classes, but I will shop in the store because of them."

When you start a business you need to focus on profit. Pick a model where helping people is profitable. 

Never ever underestimate technology. 

Seek out business owners with similar likes, dislikes, and lifestyles. 

Buy-ology by Martin Lindstrom

Consumers memory of a product...is the most relevant, reliable measure of an ad's effectiveness.

We have no memory of brands that don't play an integral part in the storyline of a program. Coke and Cingular are interwoven with contestants/judges (American Idol) lives and their day to day, where Ford is "just" commercials. We have no emotional engagement with it. 

Mirror Neurons - they fire when an action is performed and also when that same action is being observed. When we watch someone do something active our brains fire up as if we are performing these activities ourselves. Its as if seeing and doing are one in the same. 

Its unfortunate irony that as a result of government bans, tobacco companies have fast forwarded into the future and moved into alternative media, methods, and mediums as a way to drive their business. In effect, cigarette companies were forced to develop a whole new set of skills. 

Rituals help us form emotional connections with brands and products. They make the things we buy memorable. 

The mere suggestion that a sweater had been worn by a killer makes people shy away. We ascribe similar power to objects such as a lucky coin, wedding rings, and so on. 

Collecting something gives children a sense of mastery, completion, and control; while at the same time raising their self esteem, elevating their status, and just maybe compensating for earlier years of difficulty.

Every religion has ten common pillars underlying its foundations:

- a sense of belonging

- a clear vision 

- power over enemies 

- sensory appeal

- storytelling

- grandeur

-evangelism

- symbols

- mystery

- rituals

So do major successful brands: Apple, Disney, Nike, McDonalds

Somatic Markers: cognitive shortcuts, bookmarks in the brain. Since they are typically associations between two incompatible elements, they are far more memorable and lasting than other associations we form throughout our lives. Which is why advertisers aim to create surprising or shocking associations between two wildly disparate things. 

Fear...spreads faster than anything else. 

Sensory Branding: smell and sound are substantially more potent than anyone had ever dreamed of. 

Controversy - even more than sex - sells. 

Sex in advertising is all about fulfillment; about planting dreams inside consumers' brains. 

When fear based advertising plays less on our generalized anxieties and more on our insecurities about ourselves, it can be one of the most persuasive and memorable types of advertising out there. 

Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy Kawasaki

Great leaders are paradoxical. They catalyze, rather than control, the work of their teams. 

A good starting point for revolutionaries is to find fault with existing products or services and do something BIG to change them.

Sometimes you have to "hear" what people would say of only they knew better.

The most basic rule of product development: design what you would like to use. 

Is the new product or service as big of a leap as: banana leaves to plastic bags; slide rules to calculators; MSDOS to Macintosh; Caterpillar to Butterfly; Crumbled leaves to toilet paper?

Improve your product for people who are already buying it, not those who aren't. 

Or even better, create the bandwagon and enable other revolutionaries to jump on yours. 

Selling = evangelism

Develop a multi-appeal approach or evangelism pitch, explain it briefly and then observe what resonates because people will tell you how they want to be evangelized.

Sow many seeds and let a thousand flowers bloom. Let people use and abuse your product in ways you never envisioned. 

Always search for the cause of something unexpected.

Don't ask, just watch. People don't tell the truth about what they think. But they behave truthfully. Actions speak louder.

Re: accumulating information. Don't worry about your files, worry about your perceptions. 

The more inevitable your type of product or service is, the more you should strive to establish a standard, make less money per unit and make the big money on volume. 

A virtual community:

- community before commerce

-communication comes next

-community's interests first

-tolerate criticism

- encourage personalities

...their approach is not acquiring market share but capturing the lions share of the customers ongoing lifetime business.

The great role that life can bestow upon you is to be a revolutionary. 

First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung

I realize brothers are all the same. Their whole purpose for being is to pick on you and provoke you. 

They're not nice people. Look at their shoes. They wear sandals made from car tires...it shows that these people are destroyers of things. 

Entering the woods at night is a haunting experience, especially for someone with a vivid imagination. 

I do not care why or how the Angkor plans to restore Cambodia. All I know is the constant pain of hunger in my stomach. 

The chief told us the Angkor would take care of us and would provide us with everything we need. I guess the Angkor doesn't understand that we need to eat. 

It is the best thing in the world to have someone love you. 

I hope she won't be reincarnated here. 

We are starving to death. Many people are dying in the village. Yet the government trades our crops to buy guns to kill more people. 

His government has created a vengeful, bloodthirsty people. Pol Pot has turned me into someone who wants to kill.

Underneath the plastic sheet covered in fish, I enter Vietnam. 

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Its not use waiting for things that only appear at a distance and...a spirit of adventure will usually suffice. 

One has only a life of one's own. 

I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow white conscience. 

Africa: the animal kingdom making hay in the kingdom of glory. 

Father does approve of contingencies. For it was God who gave man alone the capacity for foresight. 

So Noah cursed all Ham's children to be salves for ever and ever. That's how come they turn out dark. 

It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people as nearly as I can tell. 

Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes. Its hard to say which is worse; seeing it run out and waste the water or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes. 

All evildoers in the bible are spectacularly dumb.

Here, bodily damage is more or less considered to be a by-product of living. 

If God amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked his own socks off with the African parasites. 

I can understand a wrathful God...and I can understand a tender unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. 

Curiousity killed the cat, I know, but I try to land on my feet. 

While little boys ran around pretending to shoot each other and fall dead in the road, it appeared that little girls were running the country. 

I could see that the whole idea and business of childhood was nothing guaranteed. it seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown up life like a frill on a dress. 

Missionary work is a great bargain for Belgium but it is a hell of a way to deliver social services. 

Adah feels no obligation to have good thoughts on behalf of her mortal soul in the hereafter, or even the here and now. She can simply watch without caring. 

Admission to heaven is gained by luck of the draw.

The lonely look down upon the hungry, the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged. Those of questionable righteousness speak of cannibals, the unquestionably vile, the sinners, and the damned. it makes everyone feel much better. 

You know things are bad when a woman without legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you. 

The gods who you do not pay are the ones that can curse you the best. 

Bible: God's word brought to you by a crew of romantic idealists in a harsh desert culture eons ago, followed by a chain of translators two thousand years long.

When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day. 

To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. 

Where does she think home is? Where you are happiest.

When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up. 

But hasn't our life together meant more to the world than either of us could have meant alone? 

Democracy and dictatorship are political systems. Capitalism and communism are economic systems. 

All human odes are essentially one. My life = what I stole from history and how I live with it. 

You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it over to the Christian style without expecting the jungle to change you right back. If it were as easy as they said it was going to be, why, they'd be done by now and Africa would look just like America with more palm trees. 

They declined to invent the wheel because it looked like nothing but trouble in this mud.