Subscribe to the Three Star Leadership Blog

The Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training.

Follow me on Twitter

For weekly tips and resources pointers, check Wally's Three Star Leadership Letter

Find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention.

Find out more about Wally's coaching services.

American Entrepreneur: the fascinating stories of the people who defined business in the United States is not a motivational book. It is not a book of business advice. It is a book of business history.

So if you're interested in learning about entrepreneurship or if you're seeking ideas for how to improve your business, this is not the book for you. But if you enjoy American history or business history, you may want this book on your shelf.

But there's a problem. Either this is a work of business history that's too long. Or it's a collection of the "fascinating stories of the people who defined business in the United States" that's too short.

As a work of business history, tracing entrepreneurship from Colonial times to the present, the book is too long. It's filled with short bits about individuals that are fascinating in themselves, but that don't move the story of business forward.

On the other hand, if this is meant to be a collection of stories of individual entrepreneurs in roughly chronological order, the book needs to be much longer. Hardly any of the entrepreneurs get much coverage. And they're profiles, not stories.

Malcolm McLean, for example, deserves more than he gets. McLean invented the shipping container. The story is fascinating. It's been the subject of two books and a Harvard case study.

In this book, McLean and the entire "story" of the container system that changed the world gets one, historically-inaccurate paragraph. It's less than the coverage in Wikipedia.

Henry Heinz gets a bit more coverage, but the authors concentrate on his use of free samples in marketing. They don't note that one of Heinz' challenges was to get people who made their own pickles to trust a faceless manufacturer. They don't mention his innovations in distribution. But it's hard to get than all into three paragraphs.

Some people you expect to be in the book are among the missing altogether. Estee Lauder is one example. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are two others.

It's hard to credit a history of entrepreneurs that ignores Brin and Page and their company, Google. Instead, the authors concentrate on Yahoo.

Yahoo is not an entrepreneurial story at all. It's the story of two grad students, who came up with something everyone wanted to use almost by accident. They didn’t' start out to create a business. And when people under the sway of the Dot-Com Craze gave them money, they managed to have a strategy-less company for almost a decade.

Google, by contrast, was started with the idea of being a business. At least at the time of writing the book, it has been one of the most successful start-ups in history. But the Google story isn't anywhere in this book.

The fact is that very few actual stories get told. Some stories like those of Apple and Wal-Mart get spread over a number of scattered pages. Some, like the story of Amazon are reduced to a paragraph or two. And others like those of Enterprise Rent-a-Car and Home Depot don't get told at all.

Boss's Bottom Line

The only reason to buy American Entrepreneur is that it covers a lot of material. If that's OK with you, great, otherwise, give it a pass.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.