The E Myth Revisited or The Little Book That Builds Wealth

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

Author: Michael E Gerber

In this first new and totally revised edition of the over two million copy bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. Next, he walks you through the steps in the life of a business -- from entrepreneurial infancy through adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial perspective: the guiding light of all businesses that succeed -- and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether it is a franchise or not. Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.

Library Journal

Indicating that 40 percent of small businesses fail within their first year, Gerber, a small business expert, talks about how to be successful. In this revision of his 1986 book, he describes the "E-Myth," which basically states that a person with technical but few management skills can do well in business. Gerber describes developing a precise business system that produces consistent results because it has been tested and refined. He says that businesses thrive because of innovation, quantification, and orchestration. Visualize what is true success to you as a person, Gerber advises, and work from the ideal to the specific. While the author is a consumate salesman who reads his material in soothing tones, he offers too many abstract ideas and too few concrete plans. There is little useful content here.
-- Mark Guyer, Stark City District Library, Canton, Ohio

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Foreword
	Introduction	1
Pt. I	The E-Myth and American Small Business	7
Ch. 1	The Entrepreneurial Myth	9
Ch. 2	The Entrepreneur, the Manager, and the Technician	19
Ch. 3	Infancy: The Technician's Phase	34
Ch. 4	Adolescence: Getting Some Help	43
Ch. 5	Beyond the Comfort Zone	51
Ch. 6	Maturity and the Entrepreneurial Perspective	68
Pt. II	The Turn-Key Revolution: A New View of Business	77
Ch. 7	The Turn-Key Revolution	79
Ch. 8	The Franchise Prototype	91
Ch. 9	Working On Your Business, Not In It	97
Pt. III	Building a Small Business That Works!	115
Ch. 10	The Business Development Process	117
Ch. 11	Your Business Development Program	134
Ch. 12	Your Primary Aim	136
Ch. 13	Your Strategic Objective	149
Ch. 14	Your Organizational Strategy	166
Ch. 15	Your Management Strategy	187
Ch. 16	Your People Strategy	197
Ch. 17	Your Marketing Strategy	218
Ch. 18	Your Systems Strategy	234
Ch. 19	A Letter to Sarah	253
	Epilogue: Bringing the Dream Back to American Small Business	259
	Afterword: Taking the First Step	267

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The Little Book That Builds Wealth: The Knockout Formula for Finding Great Investments

Author: Pat Dorsey

To make money in today's dynamic market environment, you need to invest in companies that will perform in the face of sustained competitive pressure. But how can you accurately identify companies that are great today and likely to remain great for many years to come?

The answer to this question lies in competitive advantages, or economic moats. Just as moats were dug around medieval castles to keep the opposition at bay, economic moats protect the high returns on capital enjoyed by the world’s best companies. If you can identify companies that have moats, and you can purchase their shares at reasonable prices, you’ll begin to build a portfolio of solid businesses that will improve your odds of doing well in the stock market.

In The Little Book That Builds Wealth, author Pat Dorsey—the Director of Equity Research for leading independent investment research provider Morningstar, Inc.—outlines this proven approach and reveals how you can effectively apply it to your own investments. Step by step, Dorsey discusses why economic moats are such strong indicators of great long-term investments and examines four of their most common sources: intangible assets, cost advantages, customer-switching costs, and network economics. After establishing a firm understanding of moats, Dorsey shows you how to recognize moats that are eroding, the key role that industry structure plays in creating competitive advantage, and how management can create (as well as destroy) moats.

Along the way, Dorsey provides an informative overview of valuation—because even a wide-moat company will be a poor investment if you pay too much forits shares—and illustrates the issues addressed through case studies that apply competitive analysis to some well-known companies.

Although the moat concept is not a new one—it was made famous by Warren Buffett—the modern-day investor can benefit from what it has to offer. With The Little Book That Builds Wealth as your guide, you’ll quickly discover why moats should be an integral part of your analytical investment toolkit and learn how to leverage this approach to build a portfolio of high-performance stocks.

Pat Dorsey, CFA (Chicago, IL) is Director of Equity Research at Morningstar, Inc. He played an integral part in the development of the Morningstar Rating™ for stocks, as well as Morningstar’s economic moat ratings. Dorsey is also the author of The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing: Morningstar's Guide to Building Wealth and Winning in the Market (Wiley). He holds a master’s degree in political science from Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree in government from Wesleyan University. Please visit findingmoats.com.

Six Disciplines Execution Revolution or Legend of Colton H Bryant

Six Disciplines Execution Revolution: Solving the One Business Problem that Makes Solving All Other Problems Easier

Author: Gary Harpst

With all of the pressures successful business leaders have today, none is more urgent or challenging than learning to execute strategy.

While larger businesses have always had the luxury of budgets and resources to meet this challenge, small and midsized businesses now have a tremendous opportunity to level the playing field and leapfrog past the expensive, outdated approaches of the past. Today, they can attack the challenge of execution in a revolutionary way.

Based on breakthrough research, field testing, and proven best-practices, the vision described by Gary Harpst in Six Disciplines Execution Revolution sets a new course for how small and midsized businesses can finally confront the never-ending challenge of planning and executing strategy.

About the Author:
Gary Harpst, a highly successful entrepreneur and CEO, spent twenty years as the leader of Solomon Software, which implemented more than 60,000 business management systems in small and midsized businesses, across almost every industry imaginable, before it was sold to Great Plains and eventually Microsoft

Table of Contents:

Introduction     1
Business Excellence     5
The Biggest Problem in Business     23
Why Is It So Difficult?     33
The Leapfrog Opportunity     43
Requirements for a Next-Generation Program     63
The First Complete Strategy Execution Program     77
A Repeatable Methodology     91
Accountability Coaching     103
An Execution System     121
Community Learning     141
Make Solving All Other Problems Easier     157
An Enduring Pursuit     165
Final Thoughts     179
Notes     181
Resources     185
Index     189
Acknowledgements     192
About the Author     193
Ready to Join The Revolution?     196

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Legend of Colton H. Bryant

Author: Alexandra Fuller

From the bestselling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat, the unforgettable true story of a boy who comes of age in the oil-fields and open plains of Wyoming; a heartrending story of the human spirit that lays bare where it is that wisdom truly resides

Colton H. Bryant was one of Wyoming's native sons and grown by that high, dry place, he never once wanted to leave it. "Wyoming loves me," he said, and it was true. Wyoming—roughneck, wild, open, and searingly beautiful— loved him, and Colton loved it back. As a child in school, Colton never could force himself to focus on his lessons. Instead, he'd plan where he'd go fishing later, or he'd wonder how many jackrabbits he might find on his favorite hunting patch, or he'd dream about the rides he would take on the wild mare he was breaking. "At my funeral, you'll all feel sorry for making me waste so much time in school," he said to his best friend Jake—and it was true.

Two things got Colton through the boredom of school and the neighborhood "K-mart cowboys" who bullied him: His best friend Jake and his favorite mantra, a snatch of a saying he heard on TV: Mind over matter—which meant to him: If you don't mind, it don't matter. Colton and Jake grew up wanting nothing more than the freedom to sleep out under the great Wyoming night sky, to hunt and fish and chase the horizon and to be just like Colton's dad, a strong and gentle man of few words. When it was time for Colton to marry and make money on his own, he took up as a hand on an oil rig. It was dangerous work, but Colton was the third generation in his family to work on the oil patch and heclaimed it was in his blood. And anyway, he joked, he always knew he'd die young.

Colton did die young, and he died on the rig—falling to his death because the drilling company had neglected to spend two thousand dollars on the mandated safety rails that would have saved his life. His family received no compensation. But they didn't expect to—they knew the company's ways, and after all as Colton would have said: Mind over matter.

In Scribbling the Cat, Alexandra Fuller brought us the examined life of a Rhodesian soldier; now—in her inimitable poetic voice and with her pitch-perfect ear for dialogue— she brings before us the life of someone much closer to home, as unexpected as he is iconic. The moving, tough, and in many ways quintessentially American story of Colton H. Bryant's life could not be told without also telling the story of the land that grew him—the beautiful and somehow tragic Wyoming; the land where there are still such things as cowboys roaming the plains, where it's relationships that get you through, and where a just, soulful, passionate man named Colton H. Bryant lived and died.

The Washington Post - Carolyn See

At first it would seem that The Legend of Colton H. Bryant marks an extraordinary change of pace for accomplished writer Alexandra Fuller, whose earlier books, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat, are detailed, realistic narratives, both set in Africa, in some of its most inhospitable climes and dire circumstances. The Legend of Colton H. Bryant is set in Wyoming (where Fuller now resides with her husband and children). It is short, incantatory and, although true, cast as a fable, a story of why-things-are-the-way-they-are, a little like Rudyard Kipling's "How the Leopard Got His Spots." But this short "legend" has a great deal in common with the African books. They all concern men who fall helplessly in love with impossible landscapes and hopeless situations. Something within them connects to the hard times outside them, and that connection increases in strength until it snaps.

Publishers Weekly

Fuller, author of the bestselling Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, narrates the tragically short life of Colton H. Bryant, a Wyoming roughneck in his mid-20s who in 2006 fell to his death on an oil rig owned by Patterson-UTI Energy. A Wyoming resident herself since 1994, Fuller is expert in evoking the stark landscape and recreating the speech and mentality of her adopted state's native sons. Along the way, she sheds light on the tough, unpredictable lives of Wyoming's oilmen and the toll exacted on their families. Though the book is wonderfully poignant and poetic and reads more like a novel than biography, Fuller acknowledges that she has taken narrative liberties, composed dialogue, disregarded certain aspects of Colton's life and occasionally juggled chronology "to create a smoother story line," leading readers to wonder what is true and what invented for dramatic purposes. As such, it is difficult to assess Fuller's simplistic conclusion that the company's drive to cut costs killed the young man, though she is right to highlight the strikingly high number of fatalities in the industry. As a touching portrait of a life cut short and a perceptive immersion in the environment that nurtures such men, Fuller's volume excels, but in terms of absolute veracity it should be read with caution. (May 6)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

A lyrical paean to an unsung . . . well, not exactly hero, but one of life's unsung people. If this book were a country song, it would be by Merle Haggard. Whether British-born Fuller (Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier, 2004, etc.) knows from Haggard is a matter of speculation, but what is clear is that she has an unfailing eye for common people caught up in uncommon events. This story of a young Wyomingite named Colton H. Bryant is also that of the oil and gas boom wrought by deregulation in these rapacious years of Bush, "a tragedy before it even starts because there was never a way for anyone to win against all the odds out here." Alternately bullied and ignored-"Retard" is a slur-cum-nickname that figures often in these pages-Colton did most of the things a young man in the heavily Mormon southwestern corner of the state is supposed to do: ride and rope, fish and hunt, cruise around in pickup trucks. Moreover, like young men in Evanston, Colton "was born with horses and oil in his blood like his father before him and his grandfather before that and maybe his grandfather's father before that." Having endured adolescence thanks to a good friend named Jake and a slightly misquoted creed borrowed from television ("Mind over matter"), Colton followed the second birthright to the oil patch, where he quickly found work as a roughneck, an unforgiving job. "They have to keep drilling hour after hour--storm, heat, sleet, ice, sun--no matter what," writes Fuller. "They'll slap another beating heart on the rig to take your place if you're so much as five minutes late." Diligent and aware of the dangers, but needing to support a wife and baby, he fell into the well, as so manyothers have, just one of 35 Wyomingites to die on the rigs between 2000 and 2006. The petroleum company, in the meanwhile, boasted record profits-while Colton's family "received no compensation for his loss."A latter-day Silkwood, quiet and understated, beautifully written, speaking volumes about the priorities of the age.

The Power of Focus or The Heart of Change

The Power of Focus

Author: Jack L Canfield

Whether they are corporate professionals, budding entrepreneurs, or own a home business, most people are looking to achieve more in less time, while earning enough money to live comfortably. This book reveals the proven techniques thousands of people have used to attain all of the money they wanted while living healthy, happy and balanced lives. The Power of Focus is a practical, no-nonsense guide that shows readers how to reach their business, personal and financial goals without getting burned out in the process.

Canfield, Hansen, and Hewitt have taken the best ideas from their own successful careers (seventy-nine years of combined business expertise), and distilled them into ten powerful focusing principles. The result is a treasury of insights that is enjoyable to read and easy to understand. At the outset, the book identifies the three most important fundamentals for consistent success: developing unusual clarity; understanding that habits determine your future; and using a "no exceptions policy" approach to focus on what you want. Numerous anecdotes and inspiring stories help to reinforce each principle.

Table of Contents:

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The Heart of Change: Real Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations

Author: John P Kotter

John Kotter's international bestseller Leading Change struck a powerful chord with legions of managers everywhere. It acknowledged the cynicism, pain, and fear they faced in implementing large-scale change-but also armed them with an eight-step plan of action for leaping boldly forward in a turbulent world.

Now, Kotter and coauthor Dan S. Cohen delve deeper into the subject of change to get to the heart of how change actually happens. Through compelling, real-life stories from people in the trenches, in all kinds of organizations, the authors attack the fundamental problem that underlies every major transformation: How do you go beyond simply getting your message across to truly changing people's behavior?

Based on interviews within over 100 organizations in the midst of large-scale change, The Heart of Change delivers the simple yet provocative answer to this question, forever altering the way organizations and individuals approach change. While most companies believe change happens by making people think differently, Kotter and Cohen say the key lies in making them feel differently. They introduce a new dynamic-"see-feel-change"-that fuels action by showing people potent reasons for change that spark their emotions.

Organized around the revolutionary eight-step change process introduced in Leading Change, this story-driven book shows how the best change leaders use not just reports or analysis, but gloves, video cameras, airplanes, office design, and other concrete elements to impel people toward positive action. The authors reveal how this appeal to the heart-over the mind-motivates people to overcome even daunting obstacles to change and produce breathtaking results.

For individuals in every walk of life and companies in every stage of change, this compact, no-nonsense book captures the heart-and the how-of successful change.

Author Biography: John P. Kotter, world-renowned expert on leadership at the Harvard Business School, is the author of many books, including the award-winning, best-selling Leading Change. Dan S. Cohen is a Principal with Deloitte Consulting LLC.

Publishers Weekly

"Never underestimate the power of a good story," Kotter and Cohen testify in this highly readable sequel to Kotter's groundbreaking Leading Change. Practicing what they preach, they have culled, from hundreds of interviews conducted by Deloitte Consulting, the 34 most instructive and vivid accounts of companies undergoing large-scale change. With chapters organized by each of the eight stages of change Kotter identified in his 1996 bestseller, the authors deftly contrast success stories with fumbles, then utilize the compare-and-contrast format for lively "how-to/how-not-to" discussion. Throughout, they pepper their discussion with arresting (and quotable) aphorisms, such as "Dying will not help" and "Honesty always trumps propaganda," to ensure that readers remain on task, engaged and awake. Viewed in stages with concrete examples and convenient end-of-chapter summaries, the challenges and opportunities of the change process emerge in sharp relief. Kotter and Cohen demonstrate the critical difference that focus, faith, leadership, commitment and creativity make in winning employees' hearts, offering good stories that truly apply to each topic. "The single biggest challenge in the process is changing people's behavior," they insist, while providing convincing evidence (as well as examples of the effectiveness of videos and creative visual displays) that their method of "see-feel-change" will enable a company to overcome resistance lurking in its midst. (Aug. 1) Forecast: Author appearances and a national marketing and advertising campaign will alert Leading Change's huge audience (it is HBS Press's all-time bestseller) to this practical no-nonsense guide that pumps up, orients and keeps on track companies struggling with change. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Prolific author and change management expert Kotter (emeritus, Harvard Business Sch.) and consultant Cohen join forces in this timely update to Kotter's successful Leading Change (1996), which set the standard for books on the subject. This earlier work revealed why efforts at change so often end in failure and outlined the eight critical steps needed to turn things around. Having researched more than 100 organizations in the midst of major changes, Kotter and Cohen now reveal the core problems people face at each of these eight stages and provide straightforward solutions. Their main finding is that the central issue concerns not structure or systems but changing the behavior of people. An overview of how people see and meet change is followed by chapters on the steps to successful, large-scale change, including increasing urgency, building a guiding team, getting the vision right, communicating for buy-in, empowering action, creating short-term wins, and persistence. The inclusion of many firsthand, personal stories from people involved in change efforts makes this a useful book for any organization. Highly recommended for all academic libraries supporting business curricula. Dale Farris, Groves, TX Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Based on interviews within some 100 business organizations, this work explores how business leaders implement large scale change within their businesses. The book is organized around the eight stop process introduced in the author's earlier work, and contains case studies of leaders making change. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

If you have ever tried to change anything, you know how hard it is. How do you go about getting your message across to truly change people's behavior? While most companies believe change happens by making people think differently, according to John Kotter and Dan Cohen, this is not the case. Instead, the authors write that change happens when you make people feel differently.

They write that those who want to promote change must appeal more to the heart than the mind.

The authors write that people change what they do because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings. This is especially so in large-scale organizational change, where you are dealing with new technologies, cultural transformation, globalization and e-business. In an age of turbulence, when you handle this reality well, the authors explain, you win.

To understand why some organizations are leaping into the future more successfully than others, the authors write that companies first need to see the flow of effective large-scale change efforts. Change is an eight-step process that few handle well. These steps are:

1. Create a sense of urgency so that people start telling each other, "Let's go, we need to change things!" In successful change efforts, the first step is making sure sufficient people act with sufficient urgency - with on-your-toes behavior that looks for opportunities and problems and energizes colleagues, that beams a sense of "let's go." Without urgency, large-scale change will not happen.
2. Pull together a guiding team powerful enough to guide a big change. The team you put together to guide change needs a sense of urgency. When there is urgency, more people want to lead, even if there is personal risk and few short-term rewards. But urgency isn't enough. Large-scale change does not happen without a powerful guiding force. A fragmented management team cannot do the job, and a hero CEO does not work either. There are not enough hours in the day for even the strongest executive to accomplish change single-handedly. Your challenge is to put together an effective guiding team.
3. Create clear, simple, uplifting visions and sets of strategies. In successful large-scale change, a well-functioning guiding team answers the questions required to produce a clear sense of direction. What change is necessary? What is our vision for the new organization? What should not be altered? What is the best way to make the vision a reality? What change strategies are unacceptably dangerous? Good answers to these questions position an organization to leap into a better future.
4. Communicate the vision through simple, heartfelt messages sent through multiple channels so that people begin to buy into the change. In successful change efforts, the visions and change strategies can't stay locked in a room with your team. They must be communicated with as many people as possible, who in turn must buy in. The goal: to get as many people as possible acting to make the vision a reality.
5. Empower people by removing obstacles to the vision. When people begin to understand and act on a change vision, you need to remove barriers in their paths. One example: Take away a pessimistic skipper and give the crew an optimistic boss. Often the biggest obstacle to change efforts is a boss - an immediate manager or someone higher in the hierarchy. Subordinates see the vision and want to help, but are effectively shut down.
6. Create short-term wins that provide momentum. Empowered people create short-term wins -- victories that nourish faith in the change effort, emotionally reward the hard workers, keep the critics at bay, and build momentum. Without early wins that are visible, timely, unambiguous and meaningful, change efforts invariably run into serious problems.
7. Maintain momentum so that wave after wave of change is possible. After the first set of short-term wins, a change effort will have direction and momentum. In successful situations, people build on this momentum to make a vision a reality by keeping urgency up and a feeling of false pride down; by eliminating unnecessary, exhausting and demoralizing work; and by not declaring victory prematurely.
8. Make change stick by nurturing a new culture. Tradition is a powerful force. Leaps into the future can slide back into the past. Change sticks only if you create a new, supportive and strong organizational culture. A supportive culture provides roots for new ways of working. Making it stick is difficult. If this challenge isn't met at the end of the change-process, enormous effort can be wasted.

Why Soundview Likes This Book
The Heart of Change reveals a new dynamic - the "see-feel-change" dynamic that fuels action by showing people potent reasons for change that spark their emotions. Built around the eight steps of change first introduced in Kotter's bestseller, Leading Change, The Heart of Change gives straight advice on successful change - and true stories of companies making change happen. Copyright (c) 2002 Soundview Executive Book Summaries