Many of you may wonder why I chose to write Jump Start: A Technopreneurship Fable (Singapore: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009) as a business fable, instead of doing it in a non-fiction manner. Well here is the inside scoop.
One time, in the midst of plugging my book Rice & Chips: Technopreneurship and Innovation in Asia (Singapore: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), a technopreneur approached me and said that he really liked my book. However, he added that it wasn't really that useful for practicing technopreneurs like him because it didn't tell him how to sell more products, or approach potential investors, or other useful tips like that. I agreed with him, and said that I wrote Rice & Chips primarily for policy makers, for people in the academe, and for government administrators who wanted to encourage more tech startups in their communities. In short, if you just want to be on the periphery of technopreneurship, Rice & Chips was a great book. But if you wanted to be in the action, it wasn't such a great book after all.
So I realized what he was saying. I then decided that I would do a book that would be useful to engineers and scientists who really want to become technopreneurs. I wanted something that would give practical sage advice, the type you would get from people who have actually been there and done that, so I based the book on my various talks and interviews with many Asian technopreneurs and venture capitalists, and not from some theoretical drivel being spilled out by some business professor who hadn't gotten his feet wet on starting a tech venture.
I also wanted something that people would enjoy reading, so instead of writing it in the typical non-fiction fashion, I decided to employ the fictional business fable genre popularized by New York Times bestsellers such as The One Minute Manager, Who Moved My Cheese?, Our Iceberg is Melting, etc.
More importantly, there are situations in business that involve family and personal decisions. I struggled how to put that on paper; I didn't want to lose friendships by divulging not so great personal situations. So at that point, it looked like a fictional setting based on actual experiences, might work.
Now here is the thing. People often have two schools of thought about business fables. Some hate them with a passion, arguing that books that read like kids fairy tales cannot convey serious messages. On the other hand, I belong to the camp that believes that business fables are effective teaching tools, because humans are hardwired to listen to stories. After all, haven't you experienced listening or reading fairy tales or stories during your youth? Even Jesus resorted to using parables to explain his teachings.
Now for those who would like to follow this debate on fables vs. non-fictional business books, there is an interesting USA Today article (http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2002-12-26-cheese-usat_x.htm) you might want to check out.
Anyhow, the result of all this is my new book, Jump Start. If you want, you can download a sampler of Jump Start in this blog. I sincerely hope you like Jump Start and spread the word about the book.
DENNIS
