The E-Myth Debunked

MYOB 2008-04-21
Show #79
Release date: 21 Apr 2008

Notes

In this show Guy Kingston and John Richards discuss the concepts behind Michael Gerber’s best-selling book The E-Myth Revisited.

Is the concept behind the E-Myth really all that startling or revelationary? Or, is it just common sense and pretty obvious?

Having addressed these questions they then expand the discussion and go on to consider detailed systems, procedures manuals, delegation (is the One Minute Manager any better?) and enterprise skills.

Also in the show, we take a look at a marketing disaster case study – how failing to pay attention to seemingly inconsequential details not only renders a marketing campaign useless but inflicts huge reputational damage on the business concerned.

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The E-Myth Myth

The E-Myth is the “Entrepreneurial Myth”, the false assumption that someone who is a good technician automatically possesses the entrepreneurial skills necessary to run a successful business.

One would think that this is a fairly obvious truth. Yet it was dramatic enough for one Michael Gerber to write a book and several sequels, one of which sold three million copies in sixteen languages, and found a worldwide organisation, on the basis of that single truism.

Similarly, it was well known that large organisations needed to decentralise their management structures before Peter Drucker pointed it out. Yet his reputation as probably the most influential “management guru” of the last century was established when he did point it out.

It is equally self-evident that related businesses do well to group together in clusters, but Michael Porter gets the credit for putting it into words.

However, one should not begrudge these men for making their careers out of saying what almost anyone with a wide business experience could have said.

They deserve their status if only because they managed to put into words what many entrepreneurs and executives had long felt to be true but could never articulate. That is, after all, what all the great philosophers have done, no more, no less.

On a more prosaic level, it is also what management consultants do – or, at least, what the good ones are supposed to do. Nine times out of ten the entrepreneur has an instinctive grasp of what needs to be done, but communicating it is another matter altogether.

It is not just a matter of knowing – it is also the ability to say what one knows that distinguishes the consultant, or the “guru”, from the entrepreneur.