The Most Successful Small Business in The World: The Ten Principles [Hardcover]

Practitioners of small businesses - this book is poison for you. You know that starting, financing, and operating a small business successfully is a contact sport, not a dreamy attempt to change the world.

My partner and I run a restaurant, which is a labor-intensive business with high costs for fresh organic ingredients, and it takes meticulous planning to make a profit. Before this, we had an export-import business for seven years. It failed because we had big ideas and high hopes, but lacked the short-term financial discipline and long-term planning. It's fine to dream big and fantasize; but for that you don't need a book. And don't do it during business hours.

I heard about this book in a workshop given by a SCORE counselor. A woman, who also attended the workshop, raved about it and tried to summarize the main ideas in the book. She was not able to tell us why reading this book would help, other than that it inspired her to come to the workshop and start her own business and make it big and become rich. The SCORE instructor did not know this book and suggested that we read the E-Myth Revisited book instead. Although it's old and a little conceited by claiming to solve all small business problems, it's still worth reading (I agree).

Last Sunday I went to a bookstore and spent time with this book. A lot of the content is trivial, there's some spiritual nonsense and pipe dreams, and overall, for me as a practical woman, the book irresponsibly raises exorbitant hopes for exorbitant successes, which will make the fall down to earth ever more painful.

Another thing put me off (I was originally a Lit major): The book is written in an abominable style. It's not an effort to explain difficult concepts in a simple way; it's a clumsy way to make something difficult (e.g., running a restaurant) sound trivial. Mr. Gerber repeats his assault on English on his ridiculously arrogant about-us web page, where he says that "He love beauty impeccability!"

Bad things, it seems, also come in threes. After the goofy "Awakening the Entrepreneur Within" and the bizarre "E-Myth Enterprise" comes this newest calamity, modestly entitled "The Most Successful Business in the World: The Ten Principles." If you detect an allusion to Moses bringing down the Ten Commandments to his dumb people, who were dancing around a golden calf - well, then you guessed right: Gerber has made the chrysalis from business coach to white-clad guru and now to a false Messiah, who thinks that rational people with reasonable doubts towards know-it-alls are stupid.

His messianic conceit becomes clearest in the mini-chapter "An Invitation from the Author," pp. 153-154, where he claims "The miracles are happening every day. I see them. I participate in them. I stand witness to them." And then, in an embarrassing mumbo jumbo that Gerber calls a "poem I wrote some years ago: When you woke up this morning, all was before you. The sun, the moon, the stars (...) so that you could emerge from your sleep to engage, to play your part, to begin to dance, the holy promise, the whirling, the song, the breath." For Pete's sake, does he think he's God? Yes, he is: a God of Mammon and Genius of Sales. For here he is "inviting" you to become a member of his club and register for a Dreaming Room experience that'll costs the paltry sum of $5,000 (five thousand!) for 2 ½ days. Just before that, on page 148 in an "Epilogue Concerning Success," he is buttering you up by calling you "an amazing individual" and "excited beyond belief," yet also "fearful" and "confused." But do not despair: "Here we are (...) The Ten Principles will guide you. (...) When you are in doubt, the Ten Principles will remind you that there is no need to doubt." Then one of his trademark mixed metaphors: "Put your mind and heart to the wheel of your imagination." And in case you hadn't noticed, with many repetitions, because you may still not get it (are you stupid?): "This is not a theoretical conversation. No, it's not theoretical at all. This is not a classroom. This is not a school. This is not for your entertainment" (where did that come from?) "This is for you and your world. Our world." Coy reference to Genesis?

The next section has the ominous title "When We Begin Something, We Begin It." Oh my: Now there's talk about "the sweet song", "the soul that breathes fire in you," "to feel the kiss of imagination within you," at the end puckering up a saccharine "With love." And suddenly, substituting edge for end: "Have we gone off the deep edge?" Answering himself, with customary repetitions, in case you didn't get it the first time: "Oh, yes. Oh, without a doubt. Without a doubt, we have taken a leap into a world, where business does not speak. In which business doesn't have a word."

And yet, he spews them out, words. Lucky for us, this book is mercifully short. You pay about a dime per page, or about a dollar fifty per principle. With these principles (examples follow below), Gerber has left his contrarian stance from his one-book wonder "The E-Myth Revisited" far behind (namely that most businesses fail because their owners are mere technicians, not true entrepreneurs, thus falling prey to a temporary illness call "entrepreneurial seizure"). Now, as we have seen above, he preaches about heart and soul and meaning and the kiss of imagination. You wouldn't expect that when you see his first principle: A business is worthwhile only if you have plans to grow it 10,000 times (yes, ten thousand) its current size. This seems to be the extension of his former obsession with franchises and his admiration for the multiplication of cheap hamburgers, his paradigm for telephone coaching. Since you, dear reader, are not used to abstract thoughts ("This is not a theoretical conversation."), Gerber, who has used poor baker "Sarah" and hapless "Manny Espinosa" and "John Anderson" and "Merle" as proxies for his "thoughts", now shoves in front of us a dull mechanic named "Joseph" to make his point. Try to understand from the chapter why such "10,000 times" megalomania is absolutely necessary for a business to have meaning - well, it's not easy, and it's pure nonsense. Alas, he complaints, "Most businesses, no matter their age, stay adamantly small." (Adamantly!)

The Second Principle stresses that "A Small Business Is No More Effective Than the Idea upon Which It Is Built." The Third Principle stresses Systems, which is old hat (and not wrong), and so it goes on, in an English that is either childish of the Dick-and-Jane style or bloated, with quotes from Paul Coelho, Charles Bukowski, Einstein (of course!), Nietzsche, the New Oxford American Dictionary, and on and on. Principle 10 is especially succinct and beautifully put: "A Small Business Creates a Standard Against Which All Small Businesses Are Measured as Either Successful, or Not, to Upgrade the Possibility for All Small Businesses to Thrive Beyond the Standards That Formerly Existed, Whether Stated or Not." Where was the editor when s/he was needed most?

When I first received the book, I thought of leaving it alone, because it is again just like a shameless marketing pamphlet applauded by the usual sycophantic suspects who also make their thirty or more pieces of silver by pandering to a gullible audience. But then you read about the promises and announcements of great resources and business tools allegedly available on his website, a variety of "Michael Gerber Companies" and "Ventures" complementing this book, and you find - NOTHING but registration forms for the Dreaming seminar, where, as participants have described it, Gerber either pontificates or humiliates people and ridicules their efforts. Now you feel like warning the reader. His newest ploy: He, as a one-man business department, will confer the fictitious degree of "Master of Business Design" on you, but not for the love of you, but for the modest fee of - $245,000! As Gerber himself says: "Have we gone off the deep edge? Oh, yes. Oh, without a doubt." Adamantly.

I don't normally comment in these venues, but was taken aback by the nasty attacks on Michael Gerber. It wasn't even about the book, but about the person. (Makes the attacker look very small, but that's his problem.) I read the book and found it inspiring. Plain and simple. If you are offended by the mention of God, don't read this book then, because Gerber is inspired. Yes, by God. Imagine that! You won't find it over-done in the least, but there are some who actually bristle at the very mention of the Divine, and get very distracted from the main message. And the main message is actually in the title of the book. I always say that if you take away one thing, from a book or seminar, that will improve your life, it was well worth it. Twas a bargain to gain new insights from Michael Gerber for under 20 bucks. One example of what I walked away with was reading very specific guidelines for finding a market and creating a successful business that can sustain the nightmarish economic responses to the acts of our wayward politicians. (My political view, not his.) Go for it!!!