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Hunting in a Farmer's World
Category:
Business/Investing
Publisher: Gardendale Press
ISBN-10: 0979053110
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 195
Copyright: September 23, 2013
ISBN-13: 9780979053115
Price: $9.99 (eBook)
Entrepreneurs are the hunter of the 21st century. They create, but management books tell them how to be farmers. This is an ownership book.
All men (and women) are created equal, but that doesn't mean that they are all the same. Entrepreneurs are different. Small business owners make up 3% of America s population, but they create two-thirds of the new jobs in our economy. They are hunters, and hunters have provided for others for thousands of years.
Management books tell entrepreneurs how to become farmers. They try to teach hunters to run their businesses using a farming cycle. Ancient farming wisdom has been translated into the modern day management tasks of planning, budgeting, standardizing, and measuring. Entrepreneurs hunt. They don't manage. They explore rather than analyze. They build companies with vision, creativity and tenacity; not with policies and procedures.
From the ambition that captures an entrepreneur and drives him to take the plunge of starting up, to the unexpected pitfalls of runaway success, Hunting in a Farmer's World examines why business owners are different from the people who work for them.
John F. Dini draws on thousands of hours of face to face coaching with entrepreneurs, using the personal true stories of successful owners to drive home the challenges, rewards, exhilaration and terror of being a business owner.
Hunting in a Farmer's World celebrates the differences that drive entrepreneurs. It is filled with the stories of real business owners who overcame real challenges -- including those that accompany success.
Excerpt
Before any business owner can join one of our peer advisory boards, I conduct a ninety-minute interview. Among the key questions that I ask are “What is your greatest strength? What makes you good at running your business?”
I have heard one answer so many times that I can recognize the body language even before the words are spoken. The interviewee seems to shrink a little bit in the chair. His eyes may look away. His posture and voice change into what I think of as “confession” mode.
“First, you have to understand ... I think I’m a little bit ADD.”
Look at the traits of a typical ADD “sufferer.”
Overly distracted, frequently late, forgetful, overwhelmed by responsibilities, a dreamer, a tendency to overlook details, poor listening skills, hyperactive focus for long periods on a single task, a tendency to procrastinate, underestimating the time needed to complete tasks, relationship problems stemming from a tendency to tune out things that interfere with what they are doing. (Helpguide.org: Adult ADD/ADHD, signs symptoms, effects and treatment)
Dang, that is a description of 90% of the business owners I know.
We should replace that with the hunter’s diagnosis:
Works tirelessly in pursuit of a vision not seen by others, juggles more responsibilities than normal people can handle, able to get the big picture, sees the potential outcome of actions through multiple iterations and decision trees, carries the burden of providing not only for his own family, but for the families of those who work for him, accepts the liability of bad results as a consequence of making decisions, accomplishes massive amounts of work while understanding that he will never, ever be “caught up,” functions in chaos when everyone else is panicking, has no time to waste listening to idiots, can accomplish huge projects in short time frames, (able to leap mid-sized buildings with a running start).
There you have it. The hunter’s diagnosis doesn’t contradict the ADD diagnosis. In fact, many of the behaviors described are identical. It is just a different perspective. What the farmers think of as a problem, hunters should recognize as ability.
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