Book Review: E-Myth Manager by Michael Gerber

I finished E-Myth Manager by Michael Gerber yesterday.  It was a good book that left me with some good takeaways, application points for myself, and some questions.  I’ll share the takeaways which are mostly quoatables, which caused me to pause or were central points of the book.  I condensed them to for pages of bulletted notes…kind of a Cliff’s Notes for E-Myth Manager.

Download the e-myth-manager-by-michael-gerber-takeaways Document here.

Or, check out the bulleted comments with poor formatting here:

•    An unchallenged idea can be a dangerous idea.
•    An E-Myth Manager is an entrepreneurial manager who acts as if he owns his organization, separate and distinct from the organization at large.
•    Companies and their missions do not motivate people.  Some person does.
•    Greed and fear run rampant in most organizations.
•    Until you conquer greed and fear in your own life, this will remain true in your organization.
•    When you look at your organization, ask “where is the greed and the fear?”
•    7 Rules of Management Independence:
o    Know what you want.
o    Know you have the power to get it.
o    There can be now causes other than your own.
o    If you cannot manage yourself, you cannot manage anything.
o    There are no simple answers, only complex questions.
o    Before it gets better, it is going to get worse.
o    These rules must become the defining principles of your life.
•    Once you know what you want, only you can get it.  You can’t delegate the responsibility for inventing your own life.
•    Before you think in terms of standards, you must first have a vision for yourself.
•    The vision should encompass who you wish to become, not who you are.
•    There are no small people, only small visions.  We’re too easy on ourselves, too gentle.
•    Tension around the little things in life is a sure sign of our lack of a bigger vision.
•    We are too ready to give ourselves up to the ordinary.
•    DIMINISHED MANAGER: He does to/with you what others have done to/with him.
•    A diminished manager says only, “watch me and do what I do” with no conversation between levels.
•    For the Diminished Manager, making the boss look good is never enough.  Making the boss look great is to him what a true team player always does.
•    You need to manke the Diminished Manager look good to himself.  Fail at that and it doesn’t matter how great a job you’ve done for him, he will never forgive you.
•    If an organizations mindset is shaped from the top-down, then the manager’s organization must be shaped in the very same way.
•    In the managers organization, the mantra is not “watch me and do what I do.”  But, rather it is “forget about me and let’s see what it does.”
•    Most managers don’t want the truth; the truth can be dangerous because if it is a truth that you don’t want to hear, you’re stuck with the fact of it.
•    Once the truth is out, you have to do something about it.
•    Show me an organization in which critical focus is developing managers with passion and objectivity and I will show you an organization that is not only fully alive itself, but is a force for the birth of countless extraordinary ventures that themselves will multiply and flourish.
•    The 1st step in becoming an E-Myth Manager is to think about this organization as if it truly were your own enterprise in its own right.
•    2nd step involves a courageousness…a willingness to embrace what being an entrepreneur really means.
•    Most companies don’t have a system.  Without a system, people have no understanding of what is expected of them or what the nature of their work is.
•    Delivering results is the last great objective of the Entrepreneur.
•    7 STEPS TO BECOMING AN E-MYTH MANAGER:
o    your primary aim.
o    Your strategic objective
o    Your financial strategy
o    Your organizational strategy
o    Your management strategy
o    Your people strategy
o    Your marketing strategy
•    The most common problem among managers is that they’ve let their organizations shape their lives.
•    What you do and where you do it is not who you are.
•    Your PRIMARY AIM is the vision you have of the kind of life you would like to live.
•    To create a successful enterprise, to fulfill its vision and get results, you have to understand what makes the people who work for you tick.
•    You must see yourself as others see you.
•    Until you understand the impact you have on people around you, you cannot really understand who you are.
•    You must understand the people and processes around you.
•    The E-Myth Manager must be passionately committed to knowing the truth about his/her world.
•    You must compose an impartial description of the life you intend to lead.
•    To fashion your STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE you must think about your ideal organization.  If you could invent it, what would it be?
•    CONSCIOUS ORGANIZATIONS are those that possess a clear vision, manifest that vision through highly integrated systems, and hold their people accountable for the effective utilization of those systems.
•    UNCONSCIOUS ORGANIZATIONS are those that are unclear about their vision, possess few highly integrated systems, reveal little focus on how those systems are to be used to produce results, create deviously political relationships between people and the work they are expected to do and are experienced as chaos, confusion, disruption, and disorder.
•    A CONSCIOUS ORGANIZATION seeks intelligence.
•    AN UNCONSCIOUS ORGANIZATION seeks solutions.
•    Organizations have 4 PRIMARY INFLUENCERS:
o    Customers,
o    Employess,
o    Suppliers, and
o    Lenders.
•    You PRIMARY INFLUENCERS make decisions based on:
o    Emotional preferences, functional preferences, visual preferences, and financial preferences.
•    To be an E-Myth Manager, you have to think like an owner, not like a driver.
•    1st job of the E-Myth Manager is to get people to view themselves as a profit center.
•    2nd part is to understand the 3 kinds of organizational money: 1. Income, 2. Profit, and 3. Equity.
•    Income is what everyone is paid.
•    Profit is what’s earned after after everyone is paid.
•    Equity is what the business is worth.
•    Priority is 1. Equity, 2. Profit, and 3. Income.
•    Profit finances growth.
•    Equity is close to the heart of the owner.
•    Income is close to the heart of the driver.
•    The E-Myth Manager should teach everyone in his organization about money and especially personal solvency.
•    An E-Myth Manager knows that you don’t organize people, you organize work.
•    Never create a position for a person.
•    Organize work across the organization in one fell swoop as a comprehensive system of work.
•    Create systems first, positions second.
•    Every organization must do one thing: make a promise and keep it.
•    EVERY E-Myth ENTERPRISE HAS 7 ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:
o    Marketing
o    Management
o    Money
The three above are the work you do inside the organization to determine what the organization does outside in the world.
o    Lead generation
o    Lead conversion
o    Client fulfillment
Tactical functions. Represents the work managers do on the outside to bring business into the organization.
o    CEO or LEADERSHIP – establishes the aim and holds people accountable to that aim.
•    Mastery is the business of every intelligent organization.
•    Hannah Aendt, “A Report on the Banality of Evil” – Eichmann in Jerusalem: The nature of every bureaucracy is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.
•    The role of the manager is to engage with present in a fully enlightened manner while inventing the future.
•    Innovation without quantification is deadly.
•    Quantification of your business is critical if innovation is to have any relevance to the day-to-day results you and your people are there to produce.
•    Orchestration is “the way we do it here.”
•    When you attempt to manage someone, you attempt to enforce intellectual reason upon an irrational organism, creating polarity…ultimately creating resistance, which leads to conflict, and ultimately and “us vs. them” mentality.
•    Instead of managing the people, manage the system.
•    TYPES OF PEOPLE IN AN ORGANIZATION:
o    The grunt
o    The mercenary
o    The patriot
o    The student – a manager’s greatest opportunity
o    The inventor
o    The nice guy
•    Becoming truly impartial is what enlivens people to reach beyond their means.
•    The work of the organization is to help the individual succeed in their personal lives.
•    Marketing is not just a business function.  IT is the ENTIRE business practice.
•    More customers mean more work.
•    True marketing calls for the ability to understand that your entire organization is the product.
•    Marketing is more than promotion.  It is a commitment to providing your people, customers with a business experience that is life sustaining.