StartupGarden: April 2002 Archives

A Ghost's Memoir

Here's one of the coolest business books I've read in the past year: A Ghost's Memoir by John McDonald (MIT Press, $24.95.) You can chalk up my excitement to occasional work as a ghostwriter; this remains a cool and engaging read about the history of business, and business of history. In 1954 McDonald, a writer at Fortune Magazine, teamed up with Alfred P. Sloan, the man who created the modern corporation by assembling General Motors out of a disparate collection of carmakers in the 1920s. The two men spent five years producing the business masterpiece, My Years With General Motors. Because the book was detailed and good and honest, GM (then the subject of an antitrust investigation) naturally fought to keep it from being published. McDonald fought back; and won. This book details that struggle.

As a companion read, I highly recommend Sloan's book. It's rare to find a business book delve so deeply and honestly into the nitty-gritty details of taking a grand plan (integrating the disparate divisions to create a new organization capable of competing in a range of markets) and making it real and operational. His book makes the recent memoir Jack: Straight From The Gut by General Electric former CEO Jack Welch feel like an obligation fulfilled, a politic hagiography. While Welch shares nice stories about growing the behemoth, he fails to shed broad insight into the structural or cultural changes that catapulted GE from a major player to the world's leading company.

One final pick in this genre: Father, Son, and Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond by Thomas J. Watson, Jr., with Peter Petre. This book (also ghosted by a Fortune writer) shares, in personal details, just how the charismatic founder Tom Watson grew IBM into a sales machine that came to dominate the world of high-tech. His son describes how he took over the family business and actually built on Dad's legacy.

Posted by tom at 04:51 PM | Comments (0)

Utopian Entrepreneur: genius or oxymoron?

Brenda Laurel’s oxymoronically-titled Utopian Entrepreneur (MIT Press, $14.95) reveals too much about why this charismatic entrepreneur’s software company burned bright and then flopped. Purple Moon was a noble venture that produced eight computer games for girls. They featured Rockett, a spunky character whose challenges were found more in fitting in at a new school than in toppling a time-traveling gun-toting monster. On paper, and actually on disk, the games made perfect sense. (Just ask my daughter, for one.) And the book nicely describes how such high ideals can be channeled into a company. "The story I learned about work when I was growing up was that the idea was to create value. The goal was to make things that would make people’s lives better," writes Laurel. Unfortunately, being good doesn’t necessarily translate into profits in the long term. Purple Moon produced computer games for girls with more intellectual fiber and content than most, yet one wishes Laurel could have applied the same passion and wisdom towards creating an enduringly great company. Her memoir seems to reflect some of the company’s strengths and weaknesses. Laurel digresses smartly into the relation of narrative and story-telling to gender and the creation of identity, yet she barely conceals a slight disdain for the nitty-gritty of business details. We like talking about values and gender construction too—but hey, what about distribution and licensing? The lesson here: first, build a great product. But learn to love creating a great company as well.

Posted by tom at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

When the Story is the Product

It’s a good thing that the Son-of-Sam law doesn’t apply to businesses. This law basically holds that criminals can’t profit from books or movies about their crimes. And if a ridiculous, gimmick-y piece of schlock could be considered a product crime, then this law would certainly apply to John Lusk and Kyle Harrison. But the good news is that these two young entrepreneurs have written an engaging book about a very stupid product. The Mousedriver Chronicles (Perseus, $24.00) shares the long trek these two MBAs took in commercializing a PC mouse that looks like a the head of a driver golf club. Their travails reveal that even the goofiest of gadgets requires serious work and planning to become profitable. The two reveal, in colorful first-person prose, that going to market required tracking down countless leads, contracting marketing in the far East, working the trade shows, dealing with unexpected crises, and always maintaining a positive attitude in the face of the weird setbacks that bedevil any startup. They demonstrate that entrepreneurship is really a process—a long, drawn-out exercise in persistence, in which you learn to succeed by continually pressing on from where you are. These two displayed resourcefulness, fun, and enterprise in their company and book. Learn from it. By the way: word has it that they’ve been approached by television and movie producers for rights to the book. For more, visit their website.

Posted by tom at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)

The Business Owner’s Guide to Personal Finance: When Your Business is Your Paycheck

Jill Andresky Fraser’s new book, "The Business Owner’s Guide to Personal Finance: When Your Business is Your Paycheck," (Bloomberg Press, $25.95,) is based on a simple though profoundly important insight. For the vast bulk of entrepreneurs, your personal finances and the financial life of your business are inexorably intertwined; and to ignore this link invites disaster. Accordingly, Fraser provides wise advice to entrepreneurs on tending to critical such matters as paying yourself a salary, creating a good credit history, and thinking through the tradeoffs of working at home or how to communicate with investors who are often friends and family. Naturally I am drawn to this book for recognizing the dynamic link between the individual who runs the business and the way in which this person’s behavior animates the enterprise; in financial matters the cause and effect takes on critical importance which Fraser carefully limns. Her book goes beyond keeping the books to guide one in all aspects of starting and growing a business. I rank this with "Small Time Operator" by Bernard Kamoroff, "Self-Defense Finance for Small Business" by Wilbur Yegge, and "Managing by the Numbers" by Chuck Kremer and Ron Rizzuto with John Case, as the top finance books for entrepreneurs.

Posted by tom at 10:17 PM | Comments (3)