The E-Myth

I read a book over December break that rocked my world and changed the way we run our entire organization.

The E-Myth starts off with a vignette of a woman who absolutely loves baking pies, and her pies are everyone's favorite.  Her friends and family gush about how delicious they are, always urging her to start her own pie shop.  Eventually, she heeds their advice and decides to take the leap into the entrepreneur world!

After 2 years running her pie shop, her friends never see her any more, and the book's author describes how weary and worn down she is.  She says she'd be happy if she never baked another pie again in her life.  Her pie shop is in such financial trouble that she is the only employee-- she sweeps the floors, bakes the pies, works the register, and manages inventory.  Alone.

So what happened?  She fell victim to the E-myth, a.k.a. the myth of entrepreneurship.  Like so many before her, she thought that being good at a certain skill would allow her to have a successful business providing that skill.

It turns out it takes much more to run a pie shop than incredible baking abilities.  In fact, it requires a trifecta of personas all in perfect balance: the entrepreneur, the manager, and the technician.

Then and only then will a business be successful.

But how does this apply to school leadership?

As a school-starter, I realize my team and I had fallen victim to the E-myth ourselves.  When we started Cloverleaf, our founding team included 6 visionary parents with lofty ideas about the future potential of an outstanding, unique special education school ("entrepreneurs"), and 3 exceptionally talented, highly skilled teachers ("technicians").  However, unbeknownst to us at the time, we had a giant, gaping hole in our founding team where the manager persona should have been.  We were destined for failure if we didn't fill that gap, and we hadn't even realized it yet.

We threw grand opening parties, we gave tours, we attended school resource fairs, we wore our new t-shirts around town.  We grew enrollment by 3-fold each year.  We provided innovative, multisensory, experiential learning opportunities that our students couldn't get anywhere else.  Yet eventually after 2 years, the gap in our organization grew painfully obvious-- things slowly began eroding internally as role tensions mounted, finances were neglected, and under-developed internal structures neared collapse.

We knew we had to do something, but the question was what.