Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
To become an E-Myth Enterprise, it is essential for a business to become a visual production. But for the production to have meaning, for the form to have substance, the second category of preference, the emotional ideal, is equally essential, lest the production degenerate into what might be called visual rhetoric, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Is business a form of war? Consider the long conflict in Iraq.
Fighting in the desert, surrounded by nothingness, a man or woman runs the risk of losing sight of why he or she is there, except to survive. A soldier’s motivation becomes doubly important. I believe that U.S. officers involved in any conflict should make the effort to take the time to sit with their troops, to explain goals, to know every soldier personally, to give them the feeling that they are the best and that their mission is vital.
Leadership is at a premium in any war, and without it, nothing will be achieved.
It might be argued that the comparison between war and business is an unreasonable one; that war brings with it a special edge, a unifying principle, that is impossible to sustain in an ordinary business engaged in mundane commercial transactions where life and death is not a day-to-day question, if a question at all.
I believe the opposite is true.
I believe a great business becomes so to the degree that, like war, it raises serious questions. It brings us face-to-face with our own mortality. If there are no extrahuman challenges, it creates them and engages with its own resistance to change the desert of its own doubt. It forms its people into squads, and companies, and regiments, and battalions, and divisions and determines where the enemy is (it is always within), and launches, time and time again, into battle after battle, if only to take one yard at a time, to experience not so much the land that is acquired (although, of course, there is that), but the extraordinary inner strength that is developed, the camaraderie, the passion that is shared, passed on, handed from person to person, from heart to heart; a sense of purpose, of value, of being as fully human as we can be, given our limited understanding, our limited skill, our limited interest.
In his book The Master Game, Robert S. de Ropp says:
What people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort or esteem, but games worth playing. He who cannot find a game worth playing is apt to fall prey to accidie, defined by the Fathers of the Church as one of the Deadly Sins, but now regarded as a symptom of sickness. Accidie is a paralysis of the will, a failure of the appetite, a condition of generalized boredom, total disenchantment—“God, oh God, how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!” Such a state of mind…is a prelude to what is loosely called “mental illness,” which…fills half the beds in hospitals and makes multitudes of people a burden to themselves, their families, and to society…. Seek, above all, for a game worth playing. Such is the advice of the oracle to modern man. Having found the game, play it with intensity—play as if your life and sanity depended on it. (They do depend on it.) Follow the example of the French existentialists and flourish a banner bearing the word “engagement.”
Though nothing means anything and all roads are marked “NO EXIT,” yet move as if your movements had some purpose. If life does not seem to offer a game worth playing, then invent one. For it must be clear, even to the most clouded intelligence, that any game is better than no game.*
“What is a game?” de Ropp asks. “It is essentially a trial of strength by rules. Rules are essential. If the rules were not observed, the game would cease to be a game at all. A meaningful game of chess would be impossible if one player insisted on treating all pawns as queens.”
De Ropp goes on to say that the only game worth playing is what he calls “the Master Game,” the aim of which is “true awakening, full development of the powers latent in man.”
Most of the people I know are not confused enough.
Oh, they would all admit to a certain degree of frustration, doubt, a lack of certainty as to how a particularly vexing problem could best be solved.
Like how to get Jack to show up for work on time.
Or how to get the landlord to fix the air conditioner, which, no matter what we say or do, blasts on at the coldest time of the day and shuts off at the warmest.*
But, aside from these petty frustrations that manage to bollix up our day from time to time, to my way of thinking none of that is what I would call a true confusion.
A true confusion means total disorientation.
Most people I know live moment to moment, state to state, voicing their opinions on just about everything, and, in the process, confirming their existence—the certainty of themselves. We all do it. It’s a matter of habit. How else would we get on with life?
But what I’m saying is that most of the people I know are not confused enough.
They rarely stop to see how little they actually do know—about anything.
They rarely, if ever, put themselves into question.
They rarely, if ever, get to the point where they suddenly feel totally stupid.
Indeed, they rarely, if ever, allow themselves to feel stupid, because it’s not only scary to feel that way, to see how absolutely stupid we are all concerning just about everything, but it’s drop-dead terrifying to come face-to-face with the dark, deep abyss of how little we actually know, and, even worse, with the alarming, unsettling, absolutely devastating fact that most of the time we’re not even here.
If we were to be honest with each other, we would have to agree that most people are like that. In fact, if we really want to be honest with each other, if the truth were really to be revealed—you and I are like that.
Oh, yes we are. We’re all certifiable dummies.
What’s worse, we’re all mainly gone, absent, asleep, out to lunch most of the time, habit-ridden, doing an automatic dance of someone else’s choosing, pushed along from behind.
It’s my contention that if we were working in a great business, someone would be telling us that all the time.
Someone would be reminding us that we’re not confused enough, that we have too many stupid answers and not enough questions occupying our minds.
A great business makes sure to keep everyone awake—its customers, its employees, its suppliers, and its lenders.
True, it’s a difficult, often treacherous, path to take.
Most people don’t like to be confused. They don’t like to be jostled; they don’t like to feel jarred; they don’t like to have someone say, “Think!” as Tom Watson at IBM was given to do; and they like to have opinions about everything that goes on. Don’t we? Don’t we all like that, honest to God, deep down inside, don’t we all like to be authorities?
On the other hand, isn’t there a part of us, however small and timid, that loves to be shaken?
For it’s that shock to awaken, it’s that cosmic rap on the noggin, it’s that existential kick in the ass, it’s that primordial shout from our struggling old conscience that says, “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” that lifts us out of the ether, that snaps us out of our lockstep, that pins us to the wall of our sleep and makes us look at it, makes us open our eyes, makes us breathe, think, move, come alive!
I had a saxophone teacher once. As I mentioned earlier, his name was Merle.
Merle was a tyrant, a tormentor. Other than the fact that he was a genius at the saxophone, he had nothing else going for him.
Merle must have weighed at least 300 pounds. He had a drinking problem, too. Not that I ever saw him drunk, though I don’t think I would have known it if he had been. I was only nine years old when I started studying with him. But at each one of my hour-long Saturday morning lessons (there were at least 400 of them in all: I studied with him for almost eight years), he drank down a whole quart of beer. Now, I know he had other students besides me, about seven every day. That means that Merle drank at least seven quarts of beer a day for the entire time I knew him, and not once did I see him out of control.
(The only symptom Merle ever displayed to me of his possible alcohol problem was a broken leg he suffered shortly after I began studying with him. He wore a cast, which stayed with him, off and on, for the rest of his life. He told me that he’d been jumped by two drunks in a bar one night; one of them held him, while the second propped up his leg between two chairs, and then beat it with a bat. Needless to say the leg never healed, and it finally killed him—the leg, not the alcohol—but I don’t really think it matters which to Merle.)
Merle and I had an understanding.
This was the deal: Merle could beat the living hell out of me (not literally, but figuratively), and I was free to quit if I didn’t like it.
And he exercised his part of the bargain almost every week.
He was the most difficult man I have ever known in my life.
He wouldn’t allow me to get away with anything.
If I let up a little on my practicing, he knew it.
If I played something sloppily, or carelessly, or thoughtlessly, he called me on it, every single time, and made me play it over and over and over again, until I got it just right.
Understand, to Merle, “just right” meant perfect, absolutely right.
And it didn’t matter to Merle if the entire hour was taken up with one simple phrase. That’s what we’d do, that one phrase, over and over and over again, until it fairly flew from my fingers on its own.
To get to Merle’s, I’d take a bus from Anaheim to downtown Los Angeles, then transfer to a second bus that would take me to North Hollywood, where Merle’s studio was. It was a long trip, up and back: at least three hours of bus riding for every hour of saxophone lesson.
But it didn’t matter to Merle how many buses I took, or how far I had to come to study with him, or how young I was, or, for that matter, how big a pain in the ass he could be as a teacher.
Nothing mattered to Merle but the bargain we had struck: that it was his lot in life to teach people to become great saxophone players, and that people studied with him for exactly that reason.
And to Merle, anything I did, or failed to do, that violated that bargain was grounds for immediate, and drastic, action.
On one occasion, only two minutes into the lesson, Merle coolly told me to pack up my saxophone and go back home. The lesson was over. When I asked him why, he looked at me in disgust, and said, “Go.”
I never did find out why he asked me to go home that particular day, but deep down in my heart I knew the reason.
It was because Merle knew I wasn’t working as hard as I could.
Merle knew that I had a lazy streak in me a mile wide.
And I knew it, too!
He wasn’t only telling me to go home early, he was telling me to look at myself, to put myself into question, to ask myself whether or not I was really serious about becoming a great saxophone player. Was I taking myself as seriously as Merle was?
Was I keeping my part of the bargain?
I honestly can’t tell you what kept me going back to get beat up by Merle week after week, month after month, year after year. But I think it was the sound of my saxophone, as it changed, and grew, and matured—as it became music. Its depth, its range, its richness, its dexterity, its power all mesmerized me.
I remember how I would stand, sometimes for hours, in the bathroom at home with the door locked behind me and play the saxophone against the tiles in the shower.
How taken by surprise I would sometimes be by the rich, fat sound as it ricocheted off the tiles and the walls and out of the window, filling me with the most extraordinary feeling of wonder, of connection with myself and the world. How old that sound seemed to be—how alive!
Without Merle, it wouldn’t have happened.
People who work in great companies—E-Myth Enterprises—think about them in exactly the same way as I think about Merle. It’s a love–hate relationship.
An acquaintance of mine who graduated from West Point, earned an MBA from Wharton, and then, as though that weren’t enough, completed his sales apprenticeship at IBM, told me that nothing he had ever done in his life measured up to his IBM experience.
“It was the toughest thing I had ever done,” he told me proudly. “Without a doubt, no one, nothing has ever tested me as completely as IBM. I loved that place.”
A friend of mine who worked intimately with Walt Disney said of him, respectfully, “He was a monster. No one was tougher than Walt. No one expected more of you than Walt. No one rode you as hard, squeezed out the very last juice, kept digging until he found that very last nugget. Once he got it in his mind what he wanted to do, Walt wouldn’t let anyone rest until they had done it.”
They say the same about Ray Kroc, and Ross Perot, and Fred Smith, and Steve Jobs, and the companies they created. They loved the man and they hated him; they loved the company and they hated it.
So it seems that E-Myth Enterprises—indeed, all companies—take on the personalities of the people who create them.
And that is why so few companies have been successful in their attempt to develop managers into entrepreneurs.
It’s because personalities like Tom Watson’s, Walt Disney’s, Ray Kroc’s, Ross Perot’s, and Steve Jobs’s are so uncontrollable. That had to be the reason why Jobs was brought back as Apple’s CEO.
They are a force all their own, driven from within, unmanageable, chaotic, solitary, insatiable—possessed, you might say—exactly the opposite of what it takes to be a good manager.
You don’t find people like that working in other people’s companies for long.
That is why the companies they create demand more of their people than other companies do, because personalities like theirs demand more of themselves than other people do.
If my saxophone teacher, Merle, had, by an accident of fate, taken up business instead of the saxophone as his calling, I’m certain his company would have mirrored the ones I’ve just mentioned. And that is because Merle expected more of himself and more of his students than anyone has a right to expect in the ordinary world.
In the ordinary world, few people have the right to expect to become great saxophone players.
In Merle’s world, nothing less would do.
In the ordinary world, few people have the right to expect to create a chain of nearly 32,000 restaurants, all operating in an identical fashion, with the same rigorous standards.
In Ray Kroc’s world, nothing less would do.
Companies like these often appear rigid from the outside. That’s because they live by rules.
Walt’s rules, or Ray’s rules, or Tom’s rules, or Steve’s rules.
Tough rules, rules for a tough world, where ordinary people are unaccustomed to playing.
Despite outward appearances—despite the seeming rigidity of their rules—the truly difficult characteristic of E-Myth Enterprises for ordinary people to take, isn’t that they play by the tough rules, but that they are avid breakers of the very rules they make.
The rules are constantly changing.
E-Myth Enterprises are continually rewriting their own traditions.
They are continually creating a new game to play.
And that is because the creators of these companies are continually asking questions about how to get better; they are continually rising to their own expectations; they march to the beat of a different drummer. Marching to their own inner tune and living to a measure that comes from just around the corner, out of reach, out of sight, they are continually in a state of breaking up and reforming, and they do this as a matter of being, as a way of life; they couldn’t do it any other way.
But their energy, their creativity, their spirit, their drive, their stamina—as essential as these traits are—aren’t enough. If they were, there would be many more E-Myth Enterprises than there are.
No, it seems also that E-Myth Entrepreneurs possess, to a degree that puts the rest of us to shame, the five essential skills I spoke about earlier.
They concentrate, discriminate, organize, innovate, and communicate in a way that puts focus, tension, order—a presence—at the heart of the enterprise that causes it to almost shimmer with ecstasy as it goes its unusual way.
It is that shimmer, that brightness, that radiance—are these words too strong?—that almost instantly distinguishes an E-Myth Enterprise from all the others, from the inside and from the outside—in the hearts of those people with whom it comes into contact.
It is the fact that game is more important to such companies than the reward that excites people so much.
But that still is not enough.
There is something else about E-Myth Enterprises that endow them with such a tangible difference. And it is that these businesses, these E-Myth Enterprises, are created, not by businesspeople, not by so-called entrepreneurs, but—and there is no other way to say it—by children.
These E-Myth Enterprises are created by the youngest part of us, not the most adult.
They are created by that part of us that believes it has the right to expect the world to change, to give us everything we want, exactly as we imagine it.
Not the methodical part, the dependable part, the reliable part, the responsible part, the grown-up in us all, the part one expects the manager to play.
Not the adult who has learned to limit his or her expectations, but the child who wants it all.
I think of John Anderson, and I immediately know that it was the child in him who created that 1947 Ford coupe.
I think of Merle, and I immediately know that it was the child in him who expected so much to come from my horn. At times, I remember, he would stand beside me with obvious impatience as I was playing my horn and actually stamp his feet, that’s right, jump up and down, as if by stamping his feet he could force the sound out of my horn that I was incapable of forcing out myself. He so much wanted to hear that sound!
Who does that but a child?
No wonder there are so few E-Myth Enterprises around.
It’s because business, as it is ordinarily played, is so unattractive to most children. It is such a dead and empty game.
Let me tell you the story of another great business—another E-Myth Enterprise.
Let me give you a profound example of how the emotional preferences of people have been so well served, and how this quality alone has enabled one small business to thrive under conditions that would put most businesses under.
Let me tell you the story about a woman named Mary and a vocational school in the field of massage therapy called The Holistic Health Institute.
To Mary Conner Brown, settling down was a color of a different kind. Putting it mildly, she had led a traveler’s life. From the moment Mary graduated from the University of North Carolina with a bachelor’s in psychology, she hit the road, and for the next five years she rarely stopped in any one place for more than a minute and a half.
As Mary puts it, she wasn’t really looking for anything in particular, she was just restless.
She had this burning desire to do something, to make some kind of a mark on the world, to create an impact that would cause people to say, “Mary was here.” It took on a physical form, starting, you might say, with her feet—they just wouldn’t stop.
Shortly after graduating, Mary heard about, sought out, and immediately joined a commune in Virginia called Twin Trees, which was built on the principles of B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two. There, Mary alternately worked on the construction team as a plumber, the kitchen team as a cook, and the child care team as a surrogate mother.
Mary remembers the commune as “a powerfully transformational experience.”
“It was a true matriarchy, created by women, for women, a place where, for the first time in my life, it became abundantly clear to me that I could damn well do anything I wanted to do.
“Here I was working as a plumber, for God’s sake, when just a few months before I couldn’t have told you the difference between a pipe wrench and a hammer!
“At Twin Trees, my restlessness—what I thought of at the time as my Search—became focused less on the question of what to do with my life, than on what do I want to do with my life?
“The realization that there was a huge difference between those two questions opened up a whole new world to me.”
It wasn’t long, however, before Mary discovered that, despite its lofty ambitions, Twin Trees had become its own sort of prison, a place so charismatic, so seductive, yet so oppressive, that she knew she had better get out.
As Mary tells it, “It was incredible for me to discover how powerful a hold the commune had on me. The very thing that empowered me there, began to control me. It was like a narcotic. Something in me told me that if I stayed much longer, I would find it difficult, if not impossible, to leave.
“The very next day I literally escaped in a visitor’s car by hiding on the floor behind the driver’s seat! The guy was shocked to find me there, but agreed to drop me off sixty miles away in Virginia Beach. Why I chose Virginia Beach is still a mystery to me; I think it was the only place that came to mind. It amazes me to this day. In only a couple of hours my entire life had completely changed! Here I was, at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, in a strange town, with no identity, no job, no place to live, only $18 to my name, and absolutely no idea of what I was going to do next. I loved it, and I was scared shitless! It was like waking up on a strange planet.”
That very afternoon Mary rented a $15 a week room in a boarding hotel and, with only $3 left to her name, began hustling “survival money,” doing odd jobs on the streets of Virginia Beach, wondering what the next step in her odyssey would be.
The street became another first for Mary.
Her resilience and resourcefulness were tested over and over again.
Unlike home, college, and the commune, there were no rules on the street, no ritual to which Mary had to conform. No one told her what she had to do, or that she had to do anything.
She made it up as she went along, creating her own rules, her own aims.
Every day became a new opportunity, a new problem. If she was good—or lucky—she got work; if she wasn’t, she didn’t.
A fast student, she quickly learned the difference between the two. It quickly became a practice. It gave her something of value to teach. She was developing her style.
A company is only as alive as its people.
The vitality of the product of a company, what it sells—its “commodity”—always reflects the emotional vitality of its people.
Put more directly, dumb commodities are created by dumb people.
I think it is also true that commodities mature—become dumber—not only as they outwear their usefulness—for example, their perceived value to their customer—but as the vitality of the people who create them wanes, disintegrates, becomes less intense, less joyful.
On the other hand, the emotional vitality of a company’s people is always a function of the emotional vitality of the founder, or CEO, of that company.
An old Sicilian expression, “The fish stinks from the head down,” tells us where one should look for the failure of a company to thrive.
It’s a reliable axiom that dead CEOs create dead companies.
CEOs who are satisfied with themselves create self-satisfied companies.
Dull CEOs create dull companies.
Belligerent CEOs create belligerent companies.
Adventurous CEOs create adventurous companies.
Fearful CEOs create fearful companies.
What goes around comes around.
Most companies fail because there is something missing—some key and critical component left out.
The CEO is adventurous but lazy, so the details don’t get worked out.
The CEO is passionate but stupid, so there is force, but in the wrong direction.
The CEO is dissatisfied with himself or herself but places blame on his or her people instead, so “the search” turns into a witch hunt.
Or the CEO is a genius but crazy, so the energy of his or her genius is transformed into a stew pot of confusion.
Consider this: if you want to understand Steve Jobs, look no further than Apple. If you want to understand Howard Schultz, take a good, long look at Starbucks. Conversely, look at Apple to understand Jobs; look at Starbucks to understand Schultz.
What’s great about these CEOs is what’s great about their companies and vice versa.
This game we call business is a delicate, delicate, yet highly connected thing.
For the next four years, Mary Brown stumbled from one adventure to another, moved more by instinct than anything else.
A stranger on the street got her a job in a beer bar “slinging suds.”
A chance encounter in the bar turned into a roommate and a relationship aboard a thirty-five-foot sailboat aptly named Chance Encounter, in which she and her new friend sailed to the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, the Florida Keys, and the Tortugas, working as they went, diving for conch, chartering out, or whatever showed up.
As Mary describes it, “Whatever happened, happened. Something in me craved experience—new impressions. Somehow I knew that the only way I would grow was if I let go of my past and walked willingly into an unknown, an unforeseeable, an uncontrollable future. What’s most true of that time in my life is that I simply allowed events to shape me. I was smart enough to know that I didn’t know enough to shape events. It’s not that I was fearless, as a lot of people think when I tell them about those times, but that I simply made room for my fear and I established a working relationship with it.”
It was during that freewheeling time that Mary’s school was born.
Who can say why things happen?
Who can say where anything begins?
But it’s instructive to try.
It’s of value to look for origins, beginnings, where things begin to go off or on track. For it is undeniable that every single thing, every event, every condition, has its beginning—was started, or was born, or was ignited—at some single point in time. Whether or not we know when, where, or why, it did happen, it did start, and it did come together.
But the most instructive origins are not in the past; they are happening right now.
New things, new ventures, new companies—new lives—are continually beginning. At this very instant—in this microsecond, in this flash of contracted time—something new is setting its foot down on a totally new path, is suddenly decided, is charting its course, is creating a future of what will also become past and present events, each existing on the very edge of future instants, future beginnings, and future endings.
It is in the miracle of occurrence—this living moment—that everything begins, that everything ends, even businesses, as they have begun, and ended, for all time.
So I think that Tom Peters was wrong.
It’s not the pursuit of excellence that matters, it’s that we are pursued by excellence.
It’s that the question of excellence resides as a possibility in everything we do.
It’s not that the gas station is clean that’s important, it’s that somebody was possessed by the need to clean it.
It’s the fire at the heart of life itself, this excellence, that either possesses us or not.
And it is this instant that it happens, not in the past, not in the future, but at the very instant of choice, now, as our businesses, as our very lives, are being shaped.
What concerns me, what should concern us all, I think, is how few of us seem to be available—or willing—to be possessed.
It is astonishing to think that Mary’s business was started with a book about massage and a handful of clients, both of which (the book and the clients) were given to Mary by a massage therapy friend who decided to leave town.
Mary read the book and massaged the clients, and thus her school was born.
How Mary Brown came upon the idea for her school isn’t important. You couldn’t replicate it even if you wanted to. The simple matter is that she was passionately seeking something, and she found it.
Don’t misunderstand me, it wasn’t the school she was seeking—the business never is, not for Disney, not for Kroc, not for Smith, not for Perot, not for Jobs, not for Mary. No, the business is simply the medium through which such people hope to find what they’re looking for.
For Mary Brown, the school was, and still is, a mirror—a reflection of her true self.
She sees herself in it every single day.
It is a product of who she is.
It is a continuing commentary on what she has learned, and on what she hasn’t.
It is—like the streets of Virginia Beach—a difficult place to go to sleep.
Several years ago, Mary, like all the other owners of vocational schools with student aid programs in her state, was peremptorily notified by the state that the rules for such schools were about to be changed.
Changed, however, is too mild a word for what the state had in mind.
What the state had in mind was a revolution.
This revolution was going to take place immediately, and anyone who didn’t comply immediately with the state’s new rules would be found in violation and could be put out of business.
The state had decided to create a new game, a game called “Try this one on for size.”
Just a few examples:
What the state said was that such schools could no longer pay their sales staff commissions for enrollments until the students they enrolled graduated from school, forcing schools to create a totally new compensation system for their salespeople (at great additional expense to the school) and take the risk of losing all their sales staff at the same time.
The state didn’t care.
What the state said was that any student on financial aid had the right to drop out of school at any time and receive a full pro rata refund of his or her unearned tuition, forcing schools to rethink their entire financial strategy, their capital requirements, their financial aid programs—without any data to support their conclusions.
The state didn’t care.
What the state said was that the school had to guarantee that at least 70 percent of its graduating students would be fully employed in the field for which they were trained within six months of graduating, or the school would be in default.
Can you imagine what would happen to state universities and colleges if the same rules applied to them? That all psychology students who had received financial aid had to be employed as psychologists within six months of graduation; that all music students who had received financial aid had to be employed as musicians within six months of graduation; that all teaching students who had received financial aid had to be employed as teachers within six months of graduation, and that all engineering students who had received financial aid had to be employed as engineers within six months of graduation?
Do you suppose state schools could survive under those rules?
Could your business?
What if the state required you to guarantee your product or service?
What if the state demanded that you provide your people with a guarantee of success when you hire them?
What if the state told you how much capital your business needed to have in relationship to your revenue in order for you to be permitted to stay in business?
What if the state told you what your net profit needed to be in order for you to be permitted to stay in business?
What if the state told you what you could say, and what you couldn’t say, to your customers in your marketing process in order for you to be permitted to stay in business?
Well, the state said these things, and much more, to the vocational schools doing business there. But what the state didn’t say was how it came to these brilliant conclusions.
Instead, what the state did was to shove dozens of small vocational schools to the very brink of financial disaster and put many others out of business.
As you might imagine, most of the schools, small and large, were simply unprepared and therefore unable to comply.
But on the very day when all schools were expected to be in compliance, with only two weeks’ notice, Mary’s school had fulfilled every single requirement imposed on it.
She had done the impossible in record time.
Mary was able to accomplish the impossible in record time because her school possessed something few businesses possess: the people who worked for her, bought from her, sold to her, and loaned her money loved her and the school she had created.
They thought she was incredible, and, the simple truth of it is, they were right.
Mary had created a wonder out of nothing.
Her school was started in a small, shabby house with six students, no capital, and absolutely no business experience of any kind. But she knew about people and what it took to survive on the streets.
More importantly, she knew that she wanted to teach her students more than a skill. She wanted to teach them what she had learned, and she wanted to teach them what she hadn’t.
She wanted to teach people that it was possible to have work they love and to have it on their own terms.
But she also wanted to teach people what it takes to make it on their own—to become independent of the system, to grow, and expand, and thrive, as she had, to take risks, as she had, to test themselves, as she had—without any certainty, or any guarantee whatsoever that the end would justify the means.
Mary was afire with her convictions and absolutely inspired by what she had to do.
And what she was about to do was learn.
There are seven rules Mary learned about building an emotionally vital business.
The first rule Mary learned is that people need order. They need to know that there is a structure, a logic, a foundation, a clear set of standards, of principles, a fairness about the business and the job they are there to do.
The second rule Mary learned is that people need to feel heard. They need to know that their contribution is important, that no matter where they stand in relationship to the business—as employee, as customer, as supplier, as lender—what they want matters, and that there is a channel through which they can express what matters to them, and that the channel is always open.
The third rule Mary learned is that people need to feel connected to something bigger than themselves. If the business has small aims, is simply interested in surviving, in staying in business, it will not sustain them, it will not touch them, it will not engage them. No, the business has to take on something—no matter what kind of a business it is—in an important way. It has to be willing to tilt at windmills—the bigger, the better.
People are dying for want of something larger than life to believe in, to rally around, to support. Could that be why young men and women volunteer to serve in the armed forces, even in times of war or unrest?
The fourth rule Mary learned is that people need to have a purpose. They need to have a plan. They need to be going someplace—someplace specific, in a specific amount of time. Without a purpose, people begin to wallow. They become suspended in time. They become a drag on each other, begin to feel victimized, lose track of the time, go to movies and forget what they’ve seen.
The fifth rule Mary learned is that people need to feel that what they are doing has moral weight. The business has to be concerned about what is right: what is right for themselves, what is right for others, and what is right for the world. The business has to operate with conscience. Without conscience, a business is a drag on what little self-esteem people already possess.
The sixth rule Mary learned is that people need to feel that what they personally do is important. They need to feel that the enterprise, without them, somehow wouldn’t matter as much; that when they walk in the door, something vital is added to the business, something only they can bring to the table. They need to feel that if they were no longer there, the business wouldn’t be the same.
The seventh rule Mary learned about the emotional health of a business is that people need to feel that the people they associate with love them. That, no matter what, people care.
The words a student of Mary Brown’s wrote express it all:
Mary C. Brown, what a lady!
She beats my brain out daily.
She’s rough, she’s tough,
But she knows her stuff.
(And she can charm the socks off a baby!)
I love you, Mary C. Brown!