Keeping it simple

Dean Shepherd is one of the world’s most prolific researchers on entrepreneurship. The Ray and Milann Siegfried Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business has written over 20 books and contributed to more than 180 journal articles on the subject.

For his old friend Justin Parer, a successful businessman in Australia, though, Shepherd’s scholarly work was a bit too academic. Parer wanted resources he could pass on to friends and colleagues who asked him for business advice.

“Sometimes I would send him articles and they would frustrate him because of all the jargon and the language that academics use,” Shepherd recalled. “He said, ‘Just give me five simple rules for entrepreneurs.’”

Shepherd went above and beyond. His new book, “66 Simple Rules for Entrepreneurs: A Roadmap for Improved Performance,” co-authored with Holger Patzelt and Nicola Breugst, offers, yes, 66 simple rules that entrepreneurs should follow.

That’s it. There are no case studies, no stories of business people triumphing over adversity, no elaborate charts or equations, no metaphors about moving cheese. Each rule is explained in a single page or less.

“I think with normal business books, every chapter has a major point,” Shepherd said. “And it seems to me you’ve got to read that whole chapter to come away with one little point. It’s a long walk for a small drink of water.” He didn’t enjoy writing in that style: “I’m not good at elaborating and elaborating and elaborating.”

Instead, Shepherd decided to distill everything he’d learned in his 30-year career into a single simple book. He’s studied and thought deeply about entrepreneurship for most of his life, even in his youth as he watched his father struggle when his business failed.

To write “66 Simple Rules,” he went back to the lecture notes and slides from classes he’d taught over the years and thought about how he would turn the research he’d covered with his students into rules. The process wasn’t difficult but he realized there was a significant difference between his typical academic way of thinking and writing and what he was aiming to do with this book.

“A simple rule will probably explain 95% of the situation,” he said. “But academics are always interested in understanding the other 5%, not the 95%.”

Most of Shepherd’s rules are common sense: “Anticipate and Avoid (or Prepare for) Potential Threats.” “Build a Circle of Trusted Advisors and Listen to Them.” Others are more counterintuitive but also still common sense: “If You Think You Do Not Have Implicit Biases, You Are Probably Wrong (We All Do).”

Shepherd focused on offering principles that would lead to practical action. He described the narrative style as a “proactive voice,” following each simple rule with a series of directives to explain how to implement it; in other words, “Do this, don’t do that.” He incorporated research not by citing the studies directly, as he would have in an academic paper, but by describing the results as business principles.

Once Shepherd had the process down, the rules came easily. He had compiled about 40 or 50 when he realized he needed to follow Simple Rule No. 8: “Ask For Help.” For co-authors, he turned to his colleagues Holger Patzelt and Nicola Breugst, both of whom teach at the Technical University of Munich. Patzelt, who has doctorates in biochemistry and management, has a better understanding of the technical aspects of business, while Breugst has researched emotions and team conflict. Both understood Shepherd’s intention for the book and accordingly wrote in the same simple and direct style.

He also appreciated their perspective as Germans. “In Germany,” he explained, “it’s a lot about entrepreneurship in large organizations, where in the U.S., there’s a more substantial focus on creating new ventures. They have more of this kind of experimental mindset in the U.S. than they do in other parts of the world.”

America, Shepherd observed, also has a more forgiving attitude toward failure than Germany or his own home country of Australia. “If you fail in the U.S., so long as you learn and you keep going, you’re not stigmatized at all. And in some ways, you may even be celebrated because of your failures.”

Shepherd and his colleagues worked with publisher Palgrave Macmillan to make the book open access, offering it for free as a download.

For Shepherd, this was an easy decision. Most academic books don’t sell very well anyway — the average press run is 500 copies — and the authors’ goal was to help entrepreneurs. So far, the strategy seems to be paying off: Within the first 10 days after publication, the book was downloaded 10,000 times.

One of those early readers was his old friend Justin Parer, whose request for a few simple business rules had inspired the book. Parer has been sharing the book with his other friends and colleagues.

“It’s always easy to look at past performance and see and analyze patterns,” Parer says. “The trick is to be able to look into the future and plan for what’s coming. The rules in this book make that possible.”

He doesn’t mind that there are far more than the five rules he had originally asked for. “Be careful what you say casually in front of a smart person,” he jokes. “It could end up being a book!”