According to Michael Gerber, author of E-Myth Mastery, there are seven
disciplines that a successful entrepreneur must develop to build a World
Class Company. Each discipline is like a puzzle piece that makes up the
enterprise. Each discipline is like a puzzle piece that makes up the
enterprise. It’s not a building block working in a linear fashion, but
rather part of a system of components that work together to complete
the whole that make up the company. The entrepreneur must have all
disciplines regardless of the size of the company in order to achieve
his or her desired objective, the vision of what he or she is trying to
create.
The seven disciplines are:
- The Enterprise Leader
- The Marketing Leader
- The Financial Leader
- The Management Leader
- The Client Fulfillment Leader
- The Lead Conversion Leader
- The Lead Generation Leader
There are five essential skills the Enterprise Leader must have
Concentration, Discrimination, Organization, Innovation and Communication. The skill of Concentration
is learning to feel comfortable with being a lone. We’ve heard the
phrase, “It’s lonely at the top.” It’s true. The entrepreneur is the
final decision-maker. Good or bad, your decisions are the ones that
will create the company of your dreams. As the enterprise leader, your
work is to lead, not do. According to Gerber in his book E-Myth
Mastery, you need to remind yourself every day, “I am a leader. My job
is to do the work of leadership.” This skill deals with how to focus your attention.
The second skill, Discrimination, deals with where
to focus your attention. You need to learn how to choose between
alternatives. The most important things for an enterprise leader to
consider are the vision, mission and values (the culture or
consciousness) of your enterprise. Focus on the end game of what you’re
trying to create. Every option or path you choose to pursue should be
held up against those elements. Ask the question, “will this path get
me to the vision I’m trying to create? Does it tie into the mission of
what we’re doing?”
The third skill, Organization, deals with the functional components of your enterprise. This is how
you organize your business, turn chaos into order, how you structure
your business so everything has a place and function and it works in an
orderly fashion.
Innovation,
the fourth skill, depends on Discrimination. Everything you do must be
held up against the standards of you vision, mission and values.
Performance is judged by the standards of how well it contributes to
achieving the future objective of the enterprise. Innovation comes from
following a series of steps that include determining what you want to
improve, deciding how to improve it, quantifying the improvement or its
effect on the enterprise, testing it, and re-quantifying, and testing
it again and again, until you get positive results.
The fifth skill is Communication. This involves how you communicate to
your
people what you expect of them, how you listen to their understanding
of your expectations, and how you improve your communication to close
the gap between your expectations and their understanding of them.
Organize your communication so it’s clear, compelling and inspiring.
Present it in a variety of ways, in person, via e-mail, in newsletters,
on the website, in brochures and other marketing materials.