Author – Michael E. Gerber

There is no real mission statement or business aim that’s propelling you to do the things you are supposed to do. It’s not the company and its goals that is motivating you, it’s some person.

It’s not Microsoft you’re here to serve, it’s Bill Gates.

It’s not Apple you’re here to serve, it’s Steve Jobs.

When a Manager understands that satisfying a person’s, his boss’s aim is what his job is truly all about, the whole job changes.

Am I here to serve this person, or am I here to serve me?

What do you want?

The only management tools that have ever worked were invented at the beginning of time. They are greed and fear.

Understand and accept that truth that greed and fear are running rampant in every organization you have ever been, until you change it.

How has fear and greed held me back in my life?

💡 The very fear we are talking about often serves as a fortress to protect what deep down inside we really want.

7 Rules of Management Independence:

1. Know what you want.
2. Know you have the power to get it.
3. There can be no causes other than your own.
4. If you cannot manage yourself you cannot manage anything.
5. There are no simple answers, only complex questions.
6. Before it gets better it is going to get worse.
7. These rules must become the defining principles of your life.

The responsibility of every Manager is to become the significant force behind his own life by choosing to be his own Emperor.

The Emperor’s Vision is always bigger than the benchmarks; that’s where the intensity comes from.

You must be able to envision your life as a whole. As one complete thing.

If the Emperor’s Vision does not serve you by adding energy and intensity to your own personal pursuits, then there should be no future for the Manager.

💡 Think in terms of standards.

Encompass who you wish to become.

It’s the scale of one’s Vision that shapes one’s life.

💡 There are no small people, only small visions.

💡 We are too willing to give ourselves up to the ordinary.

To manage anything, you must first learn to manage yourself.

Begin with a Vision, create the standards against which we monitor our own behavior, know that our behavior is that of the Emperor, the Manager, and the Technician, and then begin to act in all three roles as though we are the person we’re intending to be. And watch ourselves as we go through the process, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute.

Generally true in any transformative process worth its salt:

Questioning shatters our belief in our own certainty.

You are questioning not just who your boss is and what his agenda is, but also everything you believed to be true, everything you were taught to be true, by your parents, by your teachers, by your bosses, whoever they were, and wherever you were working for them. Parents, siblings, husband, wife, boss, Manager, subordinates, the job, all of it.

How do I spend my days, for what purpose, to what end; and where, in the middle of all that do I see myself as I truly am?

When can you do that, what can you expect but an enormous amount of pain?

You must subject yourself to such a process for the sake of your life, your sanity, and your livelihood.

The Emperor is the one who must finally make the decision to embrace that ultimately immutable self that in one moment in time will not only find itself but be itself, and with such stunning clarity that there will be no doubt about your purpose, about your aim, about your resolution, about your Vision. At that moment you will have become your Vision, you will have known the truth.

It is up to each and every one of us as Managers to create a personal bond with our own inviolable rules. Not values. Values are far too soft. Values are passive. Rules are active. Rules penetrate every thought we have. They are self-commandments. They are invasive. They call into question every act, or every lack of act, we are given to during the course of every day.

💡 Our own chosen path is the only way we can hold ourselves accountable for anything.

So how to begin all over again?

Reinventing the work you do: if you have accountability, but lack the clearly defined authority to implement it, you must get the authority you need or the game’s over before it begins.

Without authority, there can be no accountability.

The Emperor provides not only the direction for the Manager and the Technician, but the will and wakefulness necessary to remember it

The Manager has 3 accountabilities: to provide the capability, the capacity, and the resources for the enterprise to fulfill its Vision.

One of the Manager’s primary accountabilities is to invent such processes and systems. Once processes and systems are invented and implemented, the Manager’s primary accountability is to monitor their effectiveness.

The Technician has the authority to exercise her capability, capacity, and resources to implement the Manager’s processes and systems to fulfill the Emperor’s Vision.

💡 The Emperor invents a church to serve God. This is the enterprise. The Manager defines the best way to build the church, assembles the resources, the people, the expertise, the plans. This is the business. The Technician shapes the stones and moves them into place. This is the practice.

What do I want?

What is the enterprise I’m inventing here?

What is its purpose?

💡 Think about the ends rather than the means.

Go away from where the work is being done. Go away from the business. Go to a park. Go to a movie. Go home. Go anywhere but where you are. Every Manager needs to do this for himself every so often.

💡 In the most enlightened organizations, Managers do not manage people, people manage themselves.

Discrimination is the process of choice.

To choose, one must have standards.

To have standards, one must have a Vision.

To have a Vision, one must rise above the whole organization to see its place in the world.

To see its place in the world, once must have the ability to rise above oneself, to see one’s place in the world, in relationship to the organization, as well as outside of it.

To rise above oneself, one must possess the ability to focus one’s attention in an uncommon way.

To develop such an attention on must practice, practice, practice.

Think about the Manager’s relationship to work.

💡 Questioning is a way of life.

The game of every organization always starts at the top, not somewhere in the middle.

A commitment to decide what is that you believe, completely apart from what the Emperor believes.

What the Emperor does want is for you to decide in your own mind and in your own heart how you feel about the subject the E-Myth addresses, whether or not you agree with my perspective on the plight of most businesses, and that you wrestle with the same subjects that I did.

Only after that inquiry, and only after you’ve decided for yourself whether or not you are determined, for your very own reasons, to bring this message to the world, only then can we work together as equals, each dedicated to pursuing this Vision as differentiated individuals, each on his own path in life. If not, we should part company before we each begin to blame the other for feeling let down.

And should we decide to work together toward this end, then, and only then, must you begin the process by constructing a view of your own organization, independent of me, to show me how you can add value here.

Until you define your own point of view, your own Vision, until you can create your own rules and answer your own questions as I feel I have answered mine, only then can we come to agreement or not.

The E-Myth Manager is one who understands the temporary nature of management work. To the E-Myth Manager, management is a benchmark in a life-transforming process. It is the benchmark between the work of the Technician and the work of the Emperor/Entrepreneur.

Whether or not the Manager is ever willing to create an actual enterprise of his own isn’t so much the point; the goal is to reinvent the Manager’s role and mindset in an entrepreneurial way to bring greater authority, conviction, accountability, productivity, and happiness to his life.

Until one has developed the awareness, the sensitivity, the sensibilities, the skills, and the know-how necessary to the process of inventing and growing one’s own enterprise, she is in fact only a shadow of the Manager who could truly contribute to her organization’s vitality, growth, and success.

An organization in which the critical focus is developing Managers with passion and objectivity, is not only fully alive itself, but is a force field for the birth of countless extraordinary ventures that themselves will multiply and flourish.

💡 To become an E-Myth Manager is to become an Entrepreneur.
→ A willingness to embrace what becoming an Entrepreneur really means. An Entrepreneur is single-handedly accountable for creating a Vision for her company. Traditionally, this was always done by the Emperor of the company at large, and implemented by the rest of the staff, Managers included.

The first step in becoming an E-Myth Manager is to think about this organization as if it truly were your own.

A Manager must create a system through which this Vision will be optimally realized.

💡 Most companies don’t even have a system.

Without a system, people have no objective understanding of the nature of their work and what is expected of them, save the highly personalized goals that are set for them by their immediate superiors, who we all know have their own agendas.

→ Without a system, you’re playing Russian roulette with your results.

Delivering results is the last great objective of the Entrepreneur.

💡 To produce more and better, and improve profits, you need to know why you’re doing what your doing and you need a system through which to implement it.

To build the entrepreneurial organization, each and every entrepreneurial Manager must assume the task of creating the Vision, the system, and the results for his team.

He will create positive energy within his organization, rather than consume negativity.

He will increase possibilities for his people, rather than reduce them to a state of confusion.

He will help people relearn to think for themselves, to rediscover a kind of joy and pride in what they’re doing, or not.

Knowing what to do is significantly more important to the entrepreneurial organization than knowing how to do it.

→ Once you know what to do, the how will quickly follow.

What do I want? → is a life-defining question.

Your Primary Aim is the Vision you have of the kind of life you would like to live.

“The organization will serve me, as a vehicle through which I live the life I want to live. The enterprise is an extension of who I am, and my role as an E-Myth Manager is to transform this enterprise into a living reality that embodies what I want to accomplish and represent.”

Your Primary Aim is a statement of what you wish your life to look like when it’s finally done.

The clear purpose for creating one’s Primary Aim is to actively live life, rather than let life live you.

→ What does it mean to be alive?

It is to become self-aware. To know ourselves. To discover the truth about ourselves. To see ourselves as we really are.

Try to see yourself as others see you.

Commitment to the awareness of other people, to find out what is truly going on in them.

A commitment to ask others what is true about them.

Develop an understanding of the people and processes around you.

Compose an impartial description of the life you intend to lead.

Imagine yourself as a person who is determinedly self-aware, genuinely interested in what is going on inside other people, intelligently open to the way other people see and experience you, and passionately intent upon understanding the relationships that exist in the world around you.

It provides you with the experience of seeing in the moment yourself as you can truly be: intensely focused, intelligently interested, and deeply dedicated to your dream, your enterprise, and everyone you work and live with. Your Primary Aim is your dedication to truly living.

The only way to truly evaluate where you are in your career as a Manager is to look at the organization: the work, the time, the money, the people, the product, the ethics, the morality, the culture and measure it against your own clear definition of who you wish to be.

To fashion your Strategic Objective your must think about your ideal organization. If you could invent it, what would it be? What qualities would it have? Think about what kind of an organization would facilitate the development of the kind of person you wish to become.

Ideally, such an organization would be an intelligent, integrated system rather than a collection of individual ‘stores’ or people each doing their own thing. This system would be devoted to implementing the enterprise’s overarching Vision or purpose, and as a result, the group would be in agreement as to what this purpose was and the type of results it was hoping to achieve. Decisions would be made with this focus in mind. A rational environment would exist in such an organization, as would a balance very much like the balance achieved in a healthy body. Such an organization would make its choices based upon the growing intelligence at the heart of each and every system within the enterprise, along with the information streaming into it from the outside world and from the people within the organization. And just as a body experiences the exuberance that comes from health, so too would this organization experience the exuberance that comes from such intelligence. The clarity of the truth would be the sole driving force in such an organization, because living this truth would bee the sole driving force in you as an emerging individual.

💡 A conscious organization seeks intelligence. An unconscious organization seeks solutions.

Your Strategic Objective defines clearly what your organization’s reality will be when it is finished. Not until the Strategic Objective is formulated will the E-Myth Manager truly own his organization.

How to go about ‘owning’ my organization?

Just as if it were your own enterprise, your own business, you must approach this organization with a mind to how it will differentiate itself successfully from all other such organizations.

organization’s four primary influencers: customers, employees, suppliers, lenders.

influencers’ making decision preference: their visual, emotional, functional, financial.

How will my organization look?

How will my organization feel?

How will my organization work?

How will my organization justify its existence financially to its influencers?

It is not only your organization, but all organizations within the totality of the enterprise’s organization, that must come to agreement about the matrix it utilizes to invent and reinvent itself. The best way to do that is within your own organization. It’s like tossing a stone into a pond: once the stone penetrates the surface, it inspires ripples of movement within the water surrounding it.

“Thank you for coming here today. I am Jack, the director of field operations for The E-Myth Academy. I’m delighted that I have this opportunity to tell you the story of my organization. If we had met a year ago, I’m afraid the story would have been much different. The truth is, I came to a conclusion exactly one year ago that something was missing in my work. And candidly, that something was me. Oh, certainly I worked hard, and my organization seemed productive. But all the same, something critical was missing. I came to the realization that I hadn’t made a decision about what I wanted my work, and the place in which I did it, to mean to my life. Once that realization struck me, I decided to do something about it.

The first thing I did was to create a picture of the life I wanted to lead. The second thing I did was to create a picture of what my organization needed to look, act, and feel like in order to make my life’s picture a reality. Over the past year, my people and I have gone through an incredibly exciting and often difficult process to produce the organization I’m about to describe to you. Is it perfect today? Of course not. But it’s on its way.

When we’re done here, each of you will get a chance to speak to one of our people about your interests in relationship to our needs. Depending upon how that goes, we’ll then take the next step, which will be a personal interview during which you will get to ask all the questions you need to ask, and we will do the same. Eventually, if we both feel that a relationship between us is warranted, we’ll make that decision. If not, we’ll make that decision too. Whatever the outcome, I hope that you do for yourself what so many of us fail to do. That you will make an honest decision about what you want for your life, what kind of an organization you would like to spend your working hours in, and what the end product of all that time and work and energy should be if you are to realize the life you want. If that happens for each and every one of you, I will have considered this process well worth our time. I trust you will too. So let me tell you about our organization

First and foremost, of course, we are an information organization. But we’re not just any information organization. Our commitment goes far beyond that. I would prefer to think of us as a place that facilitates honest and intelligent decisions. Our clients come to us because they have a need. Our job is not to convince them that we can fill that need, but to discover together whether or not one or more of our services can fill that need, and if it can, how, and at what cost. If we come to the conclusion that we can honestly do what’s needed, then we design a process through which to justify a buying decision so that no customer has to go through the painful process of discovering, on their own, long after they have spent the money, that our services weren’t the right ones in the first place. When we’re done with our process, every client will know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the decision they are being asked to make is the right one. And if it isn’t the right one, we’ll tell them that before they ever have to tell us.

At The E-Myth Academy, we call that process ‘Our Guarantee’. We call it that because that’s exactly what it is, a guarantee that a client will always get exactly what they need, in exactly the way they need it, or we won’t do business.

The process I’ve just described is not left up to our sales people, it is completely orchestrated from the very beginning to the very end. At The E-Myth Academy, we believe strongly that the system is the solution. We believe strongly that everyone in the organization should be able to produce consistent, highly predictable results. That no one should be left on their own to figure out the solutions to their problems, that the organization holds the first accountability for understanding the best way to achieve any result. And that the organization needs to make the commitment as an organization to discovering the very best methods, processes, and systems for producing results that will make everyone in the organization, and everyone who is depending upon it, extremely successful. So it is important for you all to know that we work very hard here to get things done right. And that we are looking for people for whom cooperation rather than competition is a key indicator of an organization’s integrity. Because that’s what our people do. They cooperate. With one another. With our clients. With our suppliers. And with the enterprise at large. “We are thought of as the guys who cooperate better than anyone else. Which means we’re always here to help. Which also means that when anyone walks into our organization from any part of the company, we’re up to bat before we’re asked. And we do that because, to me, it tells other people that we are absolutely committed to what we do. And we’re absolutely committed to what we do, because each and every one of us in the Field Sales Group knows why he or she is here. We know what we are going to get out of it. We know what role our work plays in our lives. We know exactly what we must do, because we have participated in shaping the Group, not just to serve other people on the outside, but to serve all of us on the inside.

As a result, the Group looks better than any organization you’ve ever been in. This suit I’m wearing right now is no accident. It’s part of our code. We dress a certain way because we think a certain way. And the way we think also shapes the way we’re all compensated. Everyone in the Group is paid the same base salary. Each and every one in the Group, from administration to sales, works within a formula we’ve developed over the past year, which provides every person with an individual Profit Center Analysis of his or her performance. This Analysis is automated, and is pulled up daily by each person for his or her own activity and results. “That way, every single individual within the Group can determine what they have earned, if anything, above and beyond their base salary. The formula for that calculation is known to everyone, so there’s no mystery to it. As a result, every individual within the Group has the ability to affect their own income positively, by looking at what they’ve done in any one day and by analyzing how they could have improved their performance. Each person then has the opportunity to describe what they learned in a fifteen-minute Snapshot Meeting we hold at the beginning of every day. The Snapshot Meeting is just that. It’s a snapshot of what happened the day before, and an opportunity for our people to engage with each other in the process of improving individual and group performance. Everyone shows up at this meeting without fail. It’s the juice that starts our day. Of course, there’s a system for Snapshot interaction as well. People have to learn how to share what they’ve learned the day before quickly, so they have to get to the point. Having to get to the point sharpens everyone’s communication skills, not only for the Snapshot Meeting, but for all interactions between the people themselves, as well as between their Managers, their customers, and other people from other organizations within the company. In other words, we learn how to make our point without belaboring it.

So let me make my point, without belaboring it. The E-Myth Academy is a place that honors people and process. We believe the world can be an intelligent place, but not if results are left up to chance. We also believe that people cannot create a world any better than themselves. So we provide everyone in our Group with the opportunity to set their own benchmarks, personal and organizational, and then help them in every way we can to realize those benchmarks. Understand, we don’t set the benchmarks for our people, they do. Which means that the one underlying belief we have, which shapes everything we do, is that each and every one of us must make a personal decision, and then take the responsibility for sharing that decision with everyone else, and taking responsibility for it. That’s our motto here at the Group. ‘Help to grow. Grow to help’ Thanks for coming and listening.”

What is true is that once the ‘flavor’ of the organization you’re creating is communicated clearly, once the standards and character of the organization are shaped with as much clarity as you can muster, the tactical components begin to reveal themselves.

💡 Building an organization is just like programming; if this, then that.

If this kind of an organization, than that is what we must do to manifest it.

You need to surround yourself with real people who believe in earning and spending real money. Money they’ve earned, and money they feel a responsibility for.

💡 You must deal with the way people think about money long before you approach how people are going to earn money.

First make certain within your organization that everyone understands how money works, and how it doesn’t.

Team member should understand the financial impact of what he does every day in relationship to the profit and loss of the organization. When he does, he will understand what it means to be in the business he is in. And what he and it are actually worth.

To ben an E-Myth Manager, you’ve got to think like an owner, not like a Technician, and teach your people to do the same.

The only way to get the team member to think like an owner is to get him to understand the financial reality of the business he’s in.

The team member has got to be become a personal profit center: he’s got to analyze the costs of doing business every day and he’s got to think about it and discuss it with other

E-Myth Manager’s Financial Strategy:

💡 To encourage every person in your organization to operate as a personal profit center. To involve every single individual in the organization with the subject of money: how it works, where it goes, how much is left, how it’s spent, and how much everyone gets at the end of the day.

💡 Income is the money that everyone is paid. Profit is what’s earned after everyone is paid. And equity is what the business is worth.

E-Myth Manager’s Financial Strategy:

To teach everyone in the organization about money. About what income is and what it isn’t. About how to think about income as if you were the owner as opposed to the driver. Not only how to think about it, but how to do something about it.

Everyone you bring into your organization, must be taught how to think about money, how to understand and appreciate their personal relationship to money, and how to see that it is not simply the organization’s responsibility to be financially solvent. It is the responsibility of each and every individual within that organization to be financially solvent, and to see the impact that that solvency, that productivity, has on the health of the organization at large.

💡 An E-Myth Manager knows that you do not organize people, you organize work.

You do not create a position for any person, ever. Not for any reason whatsoever.

Identifying positions to which you will assign people requires that the purpose of the position be understood clearly within the context of the highly complex system known as your organization.

You organize work throughout the organization in one fell swoop as a comprehensive system of work, a system that enables the organization to function in the most effective, efficient, and predictable way possible.

You don’t create the position first, you create the organization’s system first, and then the positions will identify themselves.

An organization must be thought of as one system, not many systems or positions. And the one system must be designed to do the one thing, the most important thing, every organization must do: to make one promise, and keep it!

What are we here to accomplish? → The answer is the promise.

What is the best way to fulfill it? → That’s your process.

Seven Essential Functions every E-Myth Enterprise is composed of:

1. Marketing
2. Management
3. Money
4. Lead Generation
5. Lead Conversion
6. Client Fulfillment
7. Leadership

Strategic functions: marketing, management, money.

They are the work you do inside of the organization to determine what the organization does outside in the world. They are the focus of Managers at the most strategic level of the organization.

Tactical functions: lead generation, lead conversion, client fulfillment.

They represent the work Managers do on the outside of the organization to bring business into the organization.

• What is the one result we are here to produce?(marketing: the promise)
• How do we do it? (management: the process)
• How much must we charge for doing it? (marketing and money: the pricing strategy)
• How much money will it take to do it? (marketing, money, and management: the capital requirement)
• How much money will we make when we do it? (marketing, money, and management: the profit and the return on investment)

The seventh essential function of an E-Myth enterprise is that of the CEO. The CEO has the pivotal role in every organization. The CEO is the one who establishes the aim of the organization, makes certain that each and every person within the organization is committed to that aim, and monitors the processes through which his or her Managers do the work of the business they’ve been entrusted with.

💡 Every Manager must enter the ritual of management development with one, and only one, role in mind. That role is the function of CEO in an organization of his own. If the beginning Manager’s role is that of an apprentice, the CEO’s role is that of a master. The trail up that management mountain is the age-old ritual described as apprenticeship, craftsmanship, and mastery. If one is to become an E-Myth Manager, he must be committed to that ritual, or not begin it at all.

The apprentice Manager is trained to perform and become a master of all the tactical functions of lead generation, lead conversion, and client fulfillment.

It is critical that the apprentice learn his management skills in the fulfillment of these essential functions, before moving on up to become a craftsman. It is only after having been certified as a successful craftsman, which means that he has mastered all three of the strategic functions of the E-Myth enterprise, that a Manager would be given the opportunity to become the CEO of his own organization.

You go to work on your business, rather than in it. You build it as though it were the only business you were going to be in; you turnkey every single aspect of it, from the most important things it does to the most trivial, with exactitude, with passion, with a true interest in getting this wonderful new idea off the drawing board into predictable action. As you do it, you begin to experience the truths and the nontruths of it. You watch it intelligently. You originate it as an enterprise, and you do it with true intention and attention, on purpose.

“The role of the Manager is to engage with the present in a fully enlightened manner while inventing the future.”

An entrepreneurial Manager doesn’t just solve problems; an E-Myth Manager identifies and seizes opportunities.

Problems are endless, as are opportunities.

But seizing opportunities always produces exponentially more than solving problems ever will.

It’s also critical to know that attempting to be innovative without a picture in mind of the result you’re there to produce is a waste of energy and time. In the case of an entrepreneurial organization, the result is the company’s promise, what it intends to become, its Strategic Objective. This Vision guides the innovation.

Where are you aimed?

What is it that you intent to do?

Is your organization, the way you’ve set it up, the way you’re managing the process, poised to take you there?

Conventional wisdom dictates that:

• People are our most important asset.
• Time is our most important advantage.

The E-Myth Manager, on the other hand, believes that process, not people, is what distinguishes great companies.

Orchestration : the way we do it here.

“The solution is to avoid managing people at all. And the best way to do this is to manage the system instead.”

To really revolutionize the people processes at your company, your primary matter of concern should be for every person in your organization to agree to become a master at:

• understanding the system
• sustaining the system
• practicing the system
• improving the system
• transforming the system

The Grunt: a cynic who does a day’s work for a day’s pay. He’s not interested in anything else beyond that. Not ideas, not Visions, not teamwork, not results. There’s no way to win him over.

The Mercenary: excellent at what he does, and sells himself to the highest bidder. Loyal to no one other than himself and his expertise. Cash on the table.

The Patriot: true believer in causes, companies, people, ideas, and gives herself totally to those things. She does so willingly because she has forsaken her belief in herself.

The Student: is the Manager’s greatest opportunity and greatest obligation. The Student loves to learn, wishes to be taught, wants to know, and craves a teacher.

The Inventor: is a continual surprise to everyone around him. has the ability and desire to see opportunities where none seem to exist. He should be nurtured carefully to help him fulfill his potential, accept his gift, and find balance within an organization.

The Nice Guy: eager to please everyone, and to serve no one. Always nice until he is asked to do something he doesn’t want to do. Suddenly turns passive aggressive, sullen, and uncooperative.

💡 Think of your organization as a school, where each student is assigned a particular task.

Everyone who joins the organization is able to fully apply himself willingly, conscientiously, and freely to the aim of the organization, knowing that in the process each one of them is completely responsible for his own life. Knowing that his relationship with the organization has been made consciously, rather than unconsciously, not only at the very beginning when he first joined it, but continually, every day, as he pursues the Work of the Organization and the Work of the Individual in a focused, intentional, intelligent way.

Provide people with an objective understanding of the organization’s goals and your systematic means for achieving it.

The work of the enterprise is to create the Vision for the entire organization, and to continually and consistently stay ahead of it. The work of the business the Manager’s work is to create, monitor, and improve the systems through which the Vision is realized. The work of the practice The Technician’s work is to implement the Manager’s systems and to provide feedback as to how well they are working in the organization. ⇒ Work of the Organization

Work of the Individual which is to serve its people’s most essential needs, the pursuit of each individual’s Primary Aim.

Imagine a conversation between you and prospective entry-level employees.

“I want to thank you all for responding to my ad, and for taking the time to meet with me. Unlike the traditional interview, however, I’d like to take some time to provide you with some real insight into who we are, what we do, how we do it, and what that would mean to you if you choose to be here, and if you are chosen. I’m not going to ask you any questions, nor are you going to have to participate in any way at all. This is my opportunity to give you a true impression of what it means when I say it is the heart of an organization that defines it as either an extraordinary place or an ordinary place to work. Not the products, not the pay scheme, not the benefits, although I believe that if the heart of an organization is rich, everything else within it will be touched by it, including of course, its people.

Whether or not our organization feels extraordinary to you is a very individual thing, and a question only you can answer. But it’s important for you to hear me when I say that it would be easy for us to provide you with many compelling reasons to believe in us, if only because you are all looking for a job. Most people who are looking for a job have a habit of jumping to positive conclusions about places where they interview, only to discover that the job they’ve gotten is either a dead-end street, or worse. That won’t happen to you here. In fact, the process we’re going to go through together was designed to make certain that you discover what it is you are truly looking for so that you can measure us against your most honest, personal expectations. If we measure up, that’s a first step. If we don’t, we will have saved you an enormous amount of time and energy. Let me describe the heart of our organization as I see it, and when I’m through, you can ask me any questions you wish and I’ll do my utmost to answer them for you. Okay?

I have to say in advance that my organization is not an easy place to work. It’s not easy because we place unusual demands on our people. Note, I said unusual demands, not unreasonable demands. There’s a difference. Unreasonable demands are those that make your life stressful, difficult, inharmonious, and confusing. Unreasonable demands can be found everywhere you look in the workplace. My wife and I recently had to complete the signing for a construction loan on our home. The meeting was scheduled at the title company for 5:00 P.M. The office was packed when we arrived. Obviously, everyone was busy completing one assignment, one closing, or another. No one looked very happy. In fact, they all looked tired, bedraggled, done in. I asked the loan officer, Tina, who was helping us with our transaction, ‘Do you guys ever close?’ Her answer was, ‘Well, we all have a life of sorts, but when you’re in this kind of business it doesn’t seem to matter. Twelve-hour days are a matter of course.’ I wouldn’t want to work in a place like that. I don’t think you would either. In a place like that, the focus is on results and only results. In an organization with heart, the focus is also on results, but more specifically the focus is also on people.

I’m sure every one of you could give me an example of an unreasonable demand. But how about an unusual demand? An unusual demand is something quite different. One of our unusual demands is that we expect every employee to speak the truth. It doesn’t matter about what, just that it is the truth as you see it. Now, that might sound funny to say, but let me tell you it is always surprising to me how difficult it is for people to do. Mostly what we learn at work, at home, at school, in our relationships with other people is to do exactly the opposite. That’s why I say this could be a difficult place for you to work. Another unusual demand we make is that we expect every employee to take full responsibility for himself and his commitments. Some of those commitments are tangible, such as when you say you’re going to meet at a particular hour, you’re expected to show up on time. Other commitments are invisible. For example, when you come to a meeting we expect you to be in that meeting fully. Not dreaming, not wandering, not playing with a pencil, not wishing you were elsewhere.

We’re also unusual in that we see ourselves as having two distinctly different functions within our organization. The first function is what we call the Work of the Organization. The second is what we call the Work of the Individual. The Work of the Organization is everything done in the organization to fulfill its commitments: production, sales, lead generation, marketing, finance, and so forth. The business stuff that every organization does. It’s how we do all these things that makes the difference between our organization and many others. You might say that when it comes to the Work of the Organization, everyone within our organization—and I mean everyone—is dedicated to discovering what’s true about what we do, what works and what doesn’t, and why. If it doesn’t work, we seek to develop increasingly better ways of doing things, and where we see the opportunity, we work to completely change not only how we do things, but what things we do, so as to more effectively respond to the world we live in. To do that well requires a highly honed focus on the systemic point of view. Which means to say that we see our entire organization as one unified highly interdependent system that we are designing every day to become significantly more effective at our jobs. Everyone who works here is taught how to participate fully in this design and implementation process.

So, to work you must possess an innate interest in not only going to work in your position, but as we say here, going to work on your position. Because very few people who come to us have ever worked in such a way before, we don’t expect you to have the skill to know how to do this, but we do expect you to have the desire to learn. If you do, then we have a process for teaching you over time how to develop and increasingly enhance that skill. That’s One part of what we do here. We engage every employee at every level completely in the evolution of our organization. The Work of the Organization provides each and every one of us with an organized process for continually reinventing it. It works, so we don’t have to. And by that I mean, the greater part the systems play in enabling us to produce stunning results, the less the tyranny of routine consumes us, the more we are freed to pursue the more meaningful questions of what it means to be a human being. And that is where the Work of the Individual comes in.

The Work of the Individual was inaugurated here some eighteen years ago, first as an idea, and slowly, and ever more carefully, to the point where we find it has grounded our organization. Nothing we do here is more important to us than the Work of the Individual. Nothing speaks more truly to the question of heart in our organization than this work. No one will start here who doesn’t see the crying need to do it, and no one will start here who doesn’t isn’t personally committed to sustaining his passion for it. The Work of the Individual is a fivefold process. First, to become more self-aware; that is, to know the truth about yourself. Second, to become more aware of others; that is, to be interested in what is truly going on in other people. Third, to become aware of the impact you have on others; that is, to see yourself as others see you. Fourth, to become more aware of how the world really works; that is, to truly become interested in the truth of things rather than in your opinions of things. “And fifth, to create a very clear Vision of who you would be if you were the person I’ve just described, and what that would mean not only to your life, but to the lives of the people around you.

Now, I know that every time I repeat what I’ve just said to any group of people, a great many of them are thinking, ‘What does this have to do with a job? What business do they have messing around with my personal life? What in the world do they care if I’m self aware, or interested in the truth, so long as I can produce results for the organization?’ My answer to those questions is this: people who are unconscious and not aware of it are of no interest to us here. And by unconscious, I mean consumed by their habits. If I am an unconscious person, my personality shapes me, I do not shape my personality. My ego drives my wants, my wants do not drive my ego. This is the condition of most people in most organizations around the world. We choose to do it differently here, to the degree that we’re able, because it makes us happier and healthier. And because it works. Having said all that, let me describe for you the process through which the Work of the Individual is pursued by each and every one of us here.

There are five essential skills through which the fivefold process of the Work of the Individual is enabled in our organization. The five skills are: concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation, and communication. Concentration is the skill through which we develop a heightened ability to focus our attention. Discrimination is the ability we need to focus our intention. Organization is the skill through which we convert chaos into order in everything we do. Innovation is the skill that turns order into what is called right action. Innovation is the ‘best way’ skill. It helps us to see opportunities, as opposed to problems, and to best take advantage of them. Communication is the skill that enables us to engage with other people in a way that works.

The Work of the Individual is assisted by the organization through the systematic training of all of our people in the development of these five skills. When it comes to these skills, everyone who starts here is presumed to be an apprentice. In short, everyone receives the same training. What you do with it is, of course, up to you. Having gone through the process of apprenticeship, one then moves to craftsman. The craftsman moves on to master. The master becomes a trainer of apprentices. And so forth and so on. Everyone who works here goes through that process continuously. We become masters to the degree that we’re able to master the five essential skills. And the way do that is continually being improved, so that no one ever finishes their training. They’re just in continuous evolution along with the rest of us at whatever level we each find ourselves at any particular moment.

Your Manager here has little or nothing to do with this process. Your Manager, in fact, doesn’t manage you at all. Your Manager manages the systems you’re using, the processes through which you produce or fail to produce results. Your Manager is focused on the improvement, along with each and every one who works with him, of the way we do business here. And because her focus is always on the process of innovation, quantification, and orchestration, that leaves you to manage yourself. Of course, in order to do that, you need to learn how to manage yourself. We presume also that everyone who starts in our company is an apprentice when it comes to self-management, no matter how much experience you bring with you. So we teach you our self-management system. You’re expected to master and use it. It is the same system for everyone, so that at any time you’re having difficulty with it, the person next to you can be of help. It is what we call in our organization a universal system—one that brings productivity, creativity, joy, and opportunity to everyone equally.”

→ True marketing has also to do with the way your organization delivers its promise.

What is the offer our organization needs to make to our clients that they absolutely, positively cannot afford to refuse, and how do we deliver it?

Marketing is so much more significant than promotion. Marketing done well is a commitment to providing your client, your people, yourself, with a business experience that is life-sustaining. With an experience of a relationship that is reviewing. With an experience of the process of performing ay service, or delivering any product, in a manner that says to the client, ‘You matter.’ Marketing engages every part of your organization in a dialogue that involves the promise you make and your execution of it. It calls into question the ways in which your system works to deliver on this promise, in a consistently high-quality way that everyone has come to depend upon.

Understanding and developing a marketing mind-set is a must for every Manager no matter what she does. Because if the E-Myth Manager’s accountability to the organization at large is to invent a way to fulfill its Strategic Objective, then it is insufficient for her to simply become more efficient at what she does. She must also become stunningly more effective in a way that differentiates her organization from the competition.

What would world-class performance in an organization such as mine look like, feel like, act like, perform like?

→ And the only way that question can be answered effectively is to know how the organization is attempting to serve and what they want. Or what they don’t want. Find out what’s keeping them awake at night and how your organization can promise to solve that problem.

Where is my bottleneck?

What’s driving my clients crazy?

How many ways are you and your people making it difficult for the people you affect on a day to day basis to get the results they’re being held accountable for, and how could you make their lives so much easier?

And once you’ve discovered the answers to those questions, how quickly can you do it? Today, tomorrow, the next day?

What’s my version of ‘On time, every time, exactly as promised’?

What would happen to my business if I could actually make that promise and then keep it?

Most Managers want to jump to the how of it. That’s because most Managers aren’t Managers at all, but Technicians suffering from a management seizure, so accustomed are they to doing it, doing it, doing it.

The ability that we have to be open and conscious in our lives and in our work, is such a stunning experience. to be vulnerable, to be interested, to be awake, to be challenged, and to feel that the challenge is not in opposition to you, but a part of your being.