Book review : The One Minute Entrepreneur
Ken Blanchard, the best-selling author of The One Minute Manager (13m copies sold), was the guest of the eBay Speakers Series last week, to present his new book, the One Minute Entrepreneur. I had such a great time listening to him that I read his book in an hour on the same day. Like most of the great speakers, it is really tough to sum up in an article what he said: he presented essentially life stories rather than business ones, without any PowerPoint (and I can tell you that it is pretty unusual in this kind of setting!), but with a lot of humor, modesty and wisdom. For those who are interested in great speakers, you can check out his impressive biography. Since it is hard to share those anecdotes, I’d rather highlight what I liked in his book.
If you want to purchase an entrepreneurship book to know how to approach VCs and start your business, just buy The Art of Start. If you want to understand the mindset of an entrepreneur from a psychological point of view, and how it translates operationally, just buy The E-myth revisited. But if you want something more inspirational, a story on entrepreneurship rather than a business book, then The One minute Entrepreneur is the right choice. It basically relates the story of an entrepreneurial adventure, and highlights the “one minute insights” that we can derive from this story. They can be summarized under 4 Ps:
- Passion: You need to love what you’re doing, otherwise you’ll never accept all the sacrifices that go with your venture; leadership is about love (loving your missions, your people, your customers)
- Profit: You need to find people willing to pay you for what you love, otherwise you have a hobby and not a job, and quickly eating becomes more important than having fun
- Priorities: this is the one I like the most. You should have your priorities in order, and find the right balance in your life. There is a good quote in the book, from the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People from Rabbi Kushner, who says that he never heard anyone on their deathbed say “I wish I had gone to the office more”. And Ken Blanchard seems to be really putting that into practice: he spoke more about his wife during the conference than about his job, he seems completely enthusiastic about his life, and has accepted the bad things that happened to him recently (loss of his house during the fires in San Diego) without too much pain because he has a clearly defined set of priorities.
- People:
- Entrepreneurship is about mentorship: you don’t have to do everything by yourself, you just have to send a positive energy and a lot of motivation to get people to help you. In the story of the book, it is clear that the entrepreneurs manage to find the advice of the right people at the right moment, and being able to ask for help appears in this case to be their main success factor
- You need to be a servant leader: you have to empower your people to take decisions (bottom up approach rather than top down). A leader can’t be there during all the interactions with a customer, so he has to give the right power to his employees to make the right decisions during the Moments of Truth of the customer relationship with the company. It reminded me of what Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, mentioned a few weeks ago about creating a strong culture so that your employees do the right thing without being obsessed by processes and rules.
- You need to help your people get an A: as a professor, Ken Blanchard never understood the need for a normal distribution, and mentions that nobody recruits according to a normal distribution, which is really true! He advocates that in companies, the role of a manager is to make his people get an A rather than grading them. Therefore evaluations shouldn’t be a surprise but only a collection of ongoing discussions.
This book is worth reading for many other insights, and apparently there is a free offer here, so you shouldn’t hesitate. Do you have any suggestions of good entrepreneurship books that you would like to be reviewed here on TIE?
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Books, Business strategy, Consulting, Education, Entrepreneurship, Organization, SME, USA, Uncategorized, Venture Capital, innovation
Well, I can recommend “What the CEO wants you to know” to learn about the metrics & financial equations that you need to know about your business… both as a CEO and as an employee. You can read that one in a day too.
Nice review, Fidji! Everything makes sense. I wrote about the first point on my blog some months ago, glad to see it validated.
Thanks for the heads up, Fidji. Nice one.
_Marc
[...] big fan of the easily digestible book™ format, like “The One Minute Manager,” “…entrepreneur,” and “What the CEO wants you to know,” all of which are excellent choices, if [...]