Awakening the Entrepreneur Within by Michael Gerber

Gerber, Michael E. Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Create Extraordinary Companies. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

Sometimes Michael Gerber writes like a New Age guru. Sometimes he writes like a bad poet. Sometimes you may wonder if you’ve paid $25 to read a sales presentation on his latest ventures. Sometimes he writes paragraphs as bad as this one.



To be fair, Awakening the Entrepreneur Within is not strictly a business book. Gerber says of the book, “This is not a do-it-yourself manual. It is an entrepreneurial spiritual guidebook.”

The book is a series of stories. Mostly they are the stories of how he started his businesses. One is the story of how he imagines he’ll start a business.

The stories illustrate the stages of entrepreneurial development. An entrepreneur progresses through being a dreamer, a thinker, a storyteller and a leader. More properly, he accumulates these roles as he develops himself and his business, though at each stage one role predominates. An individual need not necessarily fulfill all these roles himself. In founding what is now E-Myth Worldwide, he teamed with a thinker. In his imagined story of a company to come, he hires someone to serve as the leader.

A dreamer contribute what you might expect, a dream. To be an entrepreneurial dream, it must be impersonal. It must be about others instead of the entrepreneur. The thinker develops the dream by picking it apart, asking questions, finding solutions and working out the details (Gerber calls this going from the dream to the vision). The storyteller takes the vision and creates an impassioned story, which he’ll tell repeatedly, refining it until it moves people (Gerber’s term here is purpose). Finally, the leader turns the dream, vision and purpose into reality through action (he takes on the mission).

Near the end of the book lays out, step-by-step, what he calls the golden pyramid. This process implicitly incorporates the stages of entrepreneurial development, but also incorporates the business development ideas from E-Myth. Though this is in some ways the most detailed how-to chapter, Gerber still falls into fanciful language.

If you’re looking for how-to, you may want to look elsewhere. If you’re looking for inspiration, this might be your book.