PROLOGUE

Life is but a vanishing mist (Jas 4:14)

This book is about entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship is about imagination and vision. Exploring such mystical phenomena is a perilous and difficult journey for the novice as well as the expert, because it involves, to a large extent, dealing with the metaphysical vastness of the creative mind. Not everyone is up to the task. Many of the entrepreneurial people with whom I’ve worked over the last thirty years want success on the cheap, or have capricious visions. These quasi-entrepreneurs don’t genuinely commit to the grand task of unraveling the fresh truth in reality before they attempt to achieve economic and organizational greatness. Thus, they are seldom successful. My experience has taught me that most managers and people in general, lack the resolve to truly understand the reality they endeavor to manage, control, and exploit innovatively. I have also witnessed those few entrepreneurs who really succeed, because they have a deeper sense of truth, which gave them a special advantage, determination and confidence. I have learned much about how they imagine the future and then work hard at creating an innovative reality. I’ll share my take on developing that successful kind of systematic imagery, if you care to come along. This book is designed to help the reader develop a systems perspective from which an entrepreneurial management orientation and style can be implemented, a challenging and very personal undertaking. Therefore, before one begins any difficult journey, I think it appropriate to get to know one’s guide. If you don’t desire to delve into why I think I’m a systems thinker, why you need to become one, some of my personal motives and my accumulated biases and assumptions about life on this planet, move on to Chapter 1; otherwise, let me be presumptuous.