Book Review: The Monk and The Riddle
The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living by Randy Komisar
Dec 9, 2008
The author describes the book’s purpose as “It is about the purpose of work and the integration of what one does with what one believes. The Monk is not about how but about why”. The vehicle to achieve that is through a fictional story about an entrepreneur with a business idea.
Business Sales Pitch
The story begins with the business sales pitch by Lenny to Randy Komisar for venture capital money to start his internet business associated with funerals. The pitch is a disaster and in the process we get a number of revealing portraits by Randy of various business figures that he has worked with and his insights into Lenny and his motivation. It turns out that Lenny is desperate for financial help but not making any progress. Fortunately, the meeting does not end with Lenny’s pitch as Randy decides that he will offer some help.
Deferred Life Plan
Randy identifies Lenny as a greedy opportunist and someone on a deferred life plan:
1. Do what you have to do – get a profession, build a career, establish yourself and be successful
2. Do what you want to do – do what you are passionate about, what you are pulled towards
But still offers various tips to both improve the Funerals.com business idea and the sales pitch. During the course of the ongoing dialogue he finds out about Lenny’s motivation and prods him to think about “it’s the romance, not the finance that makes business worth pursuing”.
Partner
Lenny makes progress with his revised business plan but then finds that his business partner, Allison, may pull out. Consequently he engineers a meeting between the three of them because he thinks she will be persuaded to get on board again. Allison, though is motivated by the desire to help people and build supportive communities. Lenny then finds out that he will not get the money.
What would make you willing to do Funerals.com for the rest of your life?
Allison then steps forward to work with Lenny on a new plan – Circle-of-Life.com - that builds on their original motivation for starting funerals.com, combining Lenny’s original sell caskets cheap and her sense of building communities, offering support services and referral. Both of them then move forward much more optimistically about the future.
About the Authors
Randy Komisar lives with his family in California and incubates start-ups as a Virtual CEO, helping to build businesses from vision and ideas. He has worked at Apple Computer, LucasArts Entertainment, Crystal Dynamics, Claris Corporation and GO Corporation. He has helped to build WebTV, TiVo, Mondo Media and many other emerging companies.
Kent Lineback lives in Massachusetts and is a writer, producer and consultant
The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating A Life While Making A Living by Randy Komisar and Kent Lineback. Harvard Business School Press 2001. ISBN: 1-57851-644-7
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