Page 9 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com

INTRODUCTION

Turning the pages of Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth is a bit like
going into the attic of your parents’ house and sifting through all the old
family belongings. There are so many aphorisms and bite-sized bits of
homely wisdom that you begin to wonder if this was what your granny read
before going to bed every night of her life. ‘Early to bed and early to
rise…’,‘no gains without pains’, ‘little strokes fell great oaks’,‘God helps
those that helps themselves’—it’s as if every drop of sound and solemn
common sense you ever heard had been distilled into the pages of one slim
volume. As a true classic it’s also clear, on reflection, that this advice is as
valid now as it was back in 1758 when the book was published. Creditors
still make killings off unwary borrowers and working smarter, not harder, is
still the way to business success. So why would you read a modern
interpretation of an already stick-thin tract? Two reasons, really. The first is
that, like everything else in the attic, The Way to Wealth has picked up a
little bit of dust on the way. Groats and grindstones generally play little part
in our daily lives these days. Similarly work tends to revolve around
management, delivering services, knowledge work rather than ‘spinning and
knitting…hewing and splitting’. Apologies if any senior hewing and splitting
executives out there feel slighted by this. More importantly, Franklin was
writing in an era when manual labour and the delivery of products rather
than services were the primary activities. As such he doesn’t dwell much on
knowledge management, outsourcing or even delegation. What is surprising,
then, is how much of his homespun wisdom still applies to those fields
(with a little extrapolation).

But most of all the problem posed by The Way to Wealth is that it is, as
Franklin himself puts it, a ‘harangue’. It’s told as a tale within a tale, with
the advice within being delivered as a sermon by a fiercely anti-materialistic
disciplinarian called Father Abraham. In the book the narrator is a writer
called Richard Saunders who recognises that Abraham’s words are in fact
his own advice (or as he acknowledges, the collected advice of generations)
being read back to him.