Jobs and Enterprises

My tweet for today was a quote from Michael Gerber: "The entrepreneur builds an enterprise; the technician builds a job." What does he mean by this?

I think it means you can choose to work in your business or not, but you must work on your business or risk failure.

The starving artist is a figure we're all familiar with. He lives for art, plying his craft every waking moment. He spends no time at all on marketing and never bothers trying to work out favorable deals with his suppliers. His art may be the greatest stuff ever created by man. But, he starves to death because he spends all his time and energy working in his business rather than working on his business.

To make a successful enterprise--a going jessie, if you will--you've got to look at the whole picture. You have to tweak marketing, boost sales, and put efficient processes in place even if you're the marketing director, the salesperson, and the operations manager all rolled into one. Without this kind of of big-picture vision, you're just working in a job. And, it may be a short-lived job.