Remnant Review
[One week ago, I sent a link to this article to Robert Kiyosaki’s organization. I asked that it be forwarded to him personally. I wanted him to see it in advance. I told him that I was not going to publish it if he would contact me personally within a week to say that he had read the article. I posted it in inactive mode, so that nobody who did not have the link could read this. I wanted to see if bad news would go up his company’s chain of command. It is supposed to in any sensible organization. It surely is supposed to in the Marine Corps, his institutional model. I wanted to see if the structure of his organization matches what he writes about the core values of the Marines, especially including feedback. I am publishing it here because I don't think the bad news ever got to him. Maybe it will now. The munchkins have taken over his company. They need supervision. Unmonitored rule by munchkins produces needless foul-ups.]
I am an expert in book production. I have written over 70 books. I began publishing my books in 1976. I even typeset my two publishing companies’ books from 1990 to 1997. I have written about this experience here. So, what I am about to say is based on expertise.
Robert Kiyosaki wrote the best-seller, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It sold so well that he created an entire company around the book.
The original book is about the man he calls his rich dad, who never went to high school. His rich dad, who was not his father, was the father of a friend. He told Kiyosaki about the techniques of amassing wealth. In contrast, the author’s real father, who had advanced degrees from major universities, and who was always a government employee, never saved much money. He was in no way entrepreneurial.
He has written a series of books that present the same theme: amassing independent wealth. His basic theme is this: become an entrepreneur. In your own governorship, create positive cash flow. In the long run, this is the most successful way to build wealth, or so he says. He makes a plausible case in each of his books for this position.
I have just read his 2015 book, 8 Lessons in Military Leadership for Entrepreneurs. The content is exceptional. He is deliberately targeting veterans. He thinks veterans have a competitive edge in the field of entrepreneurship because of the training that they received in the military.
I have not been in the military, so I cannot comment with any degree of accuracy. My suspicion is that the military is no different from all other occupations and organizations. Pareto's 20/80 law dominates. Approximately 20% of the members produce 80% of the output: "killing people and breaking things.” In the bottom 20% are the slackers, the goldbricks, the goof offs, and the low productivity people. But I get his general point. Somebody who rose in the ranks on the basis of competence, especially under fire, does have a competitive edge in the private sector. The closer that such a person came to repeated encounters with death or conditions that had a high probability of death, the more likely it is that this person survived because he paid attention to details, accepted responsibility, and participated as a team player. These are crucial attributes of an entrepreneur. Kiyosaki is correct in talking about these attributes as necessary for successful entrepreneurship.
He thinks these attributes are usually learned. He offers his own career as evidence. He was a goof-off in high school. His high school career counselor told him that a very good school to graduate from is the Merchant Marine Academy. A generation ago, as today, graduates of the Academy are among the highest paid recent graduates in the workforce. Somehow – he does not say how – he got in. He says that constant discipline from above eventually produced self-discipline in his own life. It was this self-discipline that enabled them to survive in the Vietnam War. He was a Marine helicopter pilot. He quit a career as an officer on an oil tanker, a draft-deferred, high-paid life, to join the Marines in 1969.
He has enormous respect for the Marines. I have never met a Marine who did not have this respect. He does not mention the almost universal phrase that every Marine I have ever known insists on: "Once a Marine, always a Marine." There are retired Marines, but no ex-Marines.
The book is sufficiently good on entrepreneurship that I considered substituting it for a book I had assigned to my students in my Business I course for the Ron Paul Curriculum. That would have required me to go back and record 15 replacement audio lessons. I would have had to scrap the existing ones. But I have decided not to do this. Here is my reason.
A POOR TESTIMONY
The book is one of the most poorly proofread books I have ever read. It is a shamble. The errors are continual. There are lots of grammatical mistakes, but these are peripheral to the ghastly spelling errors.
On a separate page, I have listed the spelling errors and grammatical errors. There are so many of them that they would interfere with my narrative here.
As I said at the beginning, I am an author and book publisher. I am a former typesetter. In all three capacities, I have always been a fanatic about the avoidance of typographical errors, grammatical errors, and general foul-ups. Readers deserve near-perfect books. They spend their money, and that's what they deserve.
Kiyosaki argues throughout the book that it is mandatory that an entrepreneur be familiar with all aspects of his business. He has to hire good people. They have to be team players. He must not micromanage the business. But he must know every aspect of it. He gives case after case in the book regarding the requirements of members of the Merchant Marine to know every aspect of the ship. Survival depends on this. Team cooperation depends on it. Everybody in the team should have respect for the other performers. They should know enough about each of the assignments on the ship to be able to evaluate the success of their teammates. He says that exactly the same attitude prevails in the Marine Corps. I agree entirely with this philosophy.
Yet it is clear from the book that Kiyosaki has zero respect for his own book. Zero. I doubt that he ever read it. If the kinds of errors that got through his manuscript, through the proofreader, through the typesetter, through another proofreading, and into print did not scream “sinking ship,” from start to finish, then he does know how to write. He surely doesn't know how to proofread his own writing. I cannot imagine an author who cares so little about his book that anything this shoddy could come off the press.
It is really worse than this. He has little respect for the readers. He has targeted men and women who have come out of the military and who have respect for competence. Yet I cannot imagine anybody coming through the ranks who would not have spotted at least some of these bloopers. It didn't matter to the author. Frankly, it looks as though all he cares about is making a buck. He is unwilling to pay for the support that is needed by any author and any publisher.
I really don’t think he cares only about making a buck at the expense of retired military personnel, but that’s what the book looks like.
The sloppy nature of the book’s typesetting testifies against what he says is one of the core values of his life and his company.
Let me give what I think is the most blatant example of being asleep at the wheel. This is so bad that it really boggles the imagination. Chapter 3 begins Part Two of the book. Part Two is the core of the book. Part Two is called "Lessons in Leadership." Here is the title of chapter 3: "Leadership Lesson #1: Leaders Are Role Models."
Paragraph four reads as follows:
The pressure and discipline was intense. And as much as I hated the pressure, I have come to appreciate my four years at the academy. For four years, we were trained to be officers with responsible for multi-million-dollar ships, filled with millions of dollars of cargo, and in charge of a large crew doing different jobs on board the ship. That training prepared me for leadership in the world of entrepreneurship.
I hope you see what appalls me. First, he used a singular verb with plural subjects. He should have written this: "The pressure and discipline were intense." But even more appalling is this: ". . . we were trained to be officers with responsible for. . . ." No, they were trained to be officers with responsibility for.
That is only the beginning. On the next page -- page 62 -- comes the central concept of the entire chapter. It begins with a boldfaced headline: The B-1 Triangle: 8 Essential Elements. Everything in the chapter depends on this diagram. But there is no diagram. The diagram is first introduced on page 97: chapter 6. Yet it is even more crucial to chapter 3. The entire chapter is incoherent because of the absence of the diagram. It does not hold together.
Any proofreader who did not spot this was overpaid, even if he was being paid minimum wage. But how did it get by the author?
Another example: on page 142, at the top of the page, we read this headline: The Cone of Learning. Beneath it is a half-page image of a diagram that explains how people learn most efficiently.
Immediately beneath the diagram we read this: “You may notice, in studying the cone of learning pictured on the previous page, . . . .” It is not on the previous page. It takes up half of the existing page. How did this get by the typesetter? How did it get by the proofreader?
In this case, the typesetter did not bother to correlate the manuscript’s text, the image, and what he was typing. Talk about asleep at the wheel!
It is four years since this book was published. If I had been the author, let alone the publisher, after reading page 142, I would have told the publisher to burn every copy of the book. Every copy. Nobody should see a book with a mistake this bad. A mistake this bad sends a message to the reader that the author doesn't know what he is doing. He doesn't know what his subordinates are doing. He probably never has read his own book. This is just inconceivable. Yet his publishing company is still selling this first edition on Amazon.
I am not about to assign this book to my students. The book is one long testimony against the author's commitment to excellence. The content of the book is excellent. The typesetting of the book is schlock.
I don't think he ever read his book. I really don't believe that he ever sat down at his desk, stopped all the phone calls, locked his door, and read the page proofs. Once the book was published, he never read the book, or so I deeply believe.
I was in the book publishing business for 20 years. Let me tell you, when I found a mistake in one of the books I published, and it went into a second edition, I made sure that the error was not in the second edition. For seven years, I typeset my two companies' books. If there was an error, I personally went back and fixed it.
Did no one ever warn this man in the last four years that his book's typesetting is schlock? Apparently not. Or if somebody did, the errors never went through the chain of command in his company to tell him just how bad the book looks. In either case, it looks bad for his company, and it looks bad for him. Apparently, his company is set up with built-in safeguards that keep the boss from finding out just how sloppy the execution of his book publishing mission was.
He says repeatedly in the book that feedback is crucial for developing competence and character. You have to be ready to take criticism, no matter in what form it comes. You have to get better at what you do. You have to stop making mistakes. Yet it is obvious from the book that he has not instituted a system of feedback within the company where some low-level employee has the courage to warn him about the disaster that his book visibly is.
I don't think either his rich dad or his poor dad would tolerate this kind of performance. His rich dad warned him to take care of the details of business. His poor dad had several advanced degrees from major universities, and major universities don't let students through who don't understand grammar, cannot spell, and failed to include a crucial graph in a term paper that is completely dependent on the graph.
CONCLUSION
I have used grammar to critique the book. I have used logic. It's time for rhetoric.
Imagine the following scene. Kiyosaki is sponsoring a Marine Corps special event. The Commandant of the Corps is present. His commanding officer when he was a helicopter pilot is present. They are here to celebrate Kiyosaki’s book-long defense of the integrity and precision of the Corps.
He shows up in his dress uniform. It is modified a bit so that it fits. But it has holes in it. There is a splotch of ketchup on his tie. His shoes are not shined. And sitting on top of his white Marine Corps officer's cap is a three-day-old dropping from a seagull.
A Marine's dress uniform is supposed to testify to the precision of the Corps and a Marine’s pride in the Corps.
So should the typesetting and proofreading of a retired Marine Corps officer's book.
Kiyosaki delegated the responsibility for producing a clean, accurate typesetting job to subordinates. He neglected to review their work. He assumed that they had taken great care with his work. He assumed incorrectly.
Every hierarchy needs to have rules. It also has to have positive and negative sanctions. With respect to his typesetting of this book, Kiyosaki neither threatened nor imposed negative sanctions. The Marine Corps could not exist with such a structure.
He neglected to follow Ronald Reagan's advice regarding mutual nuclear arms reduction in the USA and the USSR: "Trust, but verify."
Here is the letter that I sent on Monday, November 11 at 1:27 PM to customerservice@richdad.com.
Dear Mr. Kiyosaki:
I have asked customer service to forward this article to you. I wrote it. It is critical of your publishing system, though not your book, which is good. Your book deserves a lot better than what your typesetter provided and what your proofreader neglected.
https://www.garynorth.com/public/20160.cfm
I am testing your company's communications system. If you reply, then I will know that it works. I will know that you accept feedback, which your book recommends. I will not post the article.
Nevertheless, you should burn every copy of the book. You should start over with the typesetting.
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