many more are successful in very specific circumstances. The writers of such books advocate very plausible theories gleaned from their experience. But because they are generally based on personal experience, there are as many different versions of business truth as there are dot.com millionaires, folk heroes in charge of the “big” companies or others with a particular axe to grind or religion to sell. Sometimes these theories are endorsed by the press, and other experts, and may even become massively popular. It is sobering then to check the corporate obituaries and count the guru CEOs.
In my experience, few books, lectures, even discussions with successful business people yield any reusable information, because they are based on interpretations of personal experience, received wisdom and war stories.
Examples may be interesting, often informative and may be used as evidence to support a theory. But a model inferred from specific instances cannot be generally applicable, or predictive under different circumstances. The fundamental truths I was searching for, only became obvious when I could consider them in context.
Now, while I recognise the contributions of the likes of Peter Drucker and Tom Peters, I believe we are in a similar state to the one that economists faced in the 20th century. With fundamental principles still to be established for entrepreneurship, we are awaiting the entrepreneurial equivalent of John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman. And while we continue to wait, we also continue to lack a framework or set of rules for communication and debate about entrepreneurship.
Nevertheless, there are ten books that I refer to time and time again and which have fundamentally shaped the way I perform as both an entrepreneur and leader. As part of the service Footdown offers to leaders, we have been tackling this lack of framework by writing what I call accelerators; so called because using them will enable entrepreneurs and other leaders to speed up the acquisition of the skills they need to be more effective. We have produced two so far, on Vision and Leadership and the ten books I offer you here were major references for these two accelerators, or for other accelerators we are currently working on.
View the Vision accelerator | View the Leadership accelerator
The above are Adobe PDF files:
Get Acrobat Reader
So, in conclusion, let’s agree that you can dip into most management theories and extract a coherent position of sorts that may help you as both an entrepreneur and leader. The problem is that, in most cases, you will have to sieve out the anecdotal waffle about specific instances in order to extract something that is comprehensible and reusable.
|
