Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, book cover fragment
What sets entrepreneurs apart from managers?
It's not knowledge. Whose CV is full of MBAs, CFAs, CIPMs, PhDs?
It's not experience either. Among successful founders, you find both seasoned veterans and young upstarts.
Personality type? No, there are nerds and bonaparts aplenty in both camps.
After two decades observing them closely, I've cracked the code.
They pray to different gods.
For a founder, it is Function. For a manager, it is Form.
Allow me to illustrate with an excerpt from Robert Pirsig's book:
When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the collars were pinched shut.
"You’re going to have to shim those out," I said.
"What’s shim?"
"It’s a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines."
"Oh," he said. He was getting interested. "Good. Where do you buy them?"
"I’ve got some right here," I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my hand.
He didn’t understand for a moment. Then he said, "What, the can?"
"Sure," I said, "best shim stock in the world."
I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.
But to my surprise he didn’t see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.
...I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn’t oxidize in wet weather...or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that prevents any further oxidation. Also perfect.
For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would have gone gaga over it.
...I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was. That’s how I arrived at that distinction.".
Sincerely yours,
-Alexander
About me:
As a business therapist, I help tech founders quickly solve dilemmas at the intersection of business and personality, and boost company value as a result.
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