The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business [Hardcover]

Josh Kaufman (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 30, 2010

Getting an MBA is an expensive choice-one almost impossible to justify regardless of the state of the economy. Even the elite schools like Harvard and Wharton offer outdated, assembly-line programs that teach you more about PowerPoint presentations and unnecessary financial models than what it takes to run a real business. You can get better results (and save hundreds of thousands of dollars) by skipping B-school altogether.

Josh Kaufman founded PersonalMBA.com as an alternative to the business school boondoggle. His blog has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to the best business books and most powerful business concepts of all time. Now, he shares the essentials of entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, negotiation, operations, productivity, systems design, and much more, in one comprehensive volume. The Personal MBA distills the most valuable business lessons into simple, memorable mental models that can be applied to real-world challenges.

The Personal MBA explains concepts such as:
* The Iron Law of the Market: Why every business is limited by the size and quality of the market it attempts to serve-and how to find large, hungry markets.
* The 12 Forms of Value: Products and services are only two of the twelve ways you can create value for your customers.
* The Pricing Uncertainty Principle: All prices are malleable. Raising your prices is the best way to dramatically increase profitability-if you know how to support the price you're asking.
* 4 Methods to Increase Revenue: There are only four ways a business can bring in more money. Do you know what they are?

True leaders aren't made by business schools-they make themselves, seeking out the knowledge, skills, and experience they need to succeed. Read this book and you will learn the principles it takes most business professionals a lifetime of trial and error to master.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kaufman, a former middle manager at Proctor & Gamble and founder of personalmba.com, argues that those interested in business would be better served by skipping the M.B.A. and focusing on the critically important concepts that really make or break a business. According to the author, much of what is taught in business schools is outdated; you're better off saving the expense and finding other ways to learn about these core principles--which Kaufman synthesizes--in such areas as value creation, marketing, sales, and finance. He also explores the psychological side of business and examines how consumers take in information, make decisions, and decide what to do or not to do. Acknowledging the panoramic overview his approach necessitates, he includes a fairly lengthy list of sources to seek out if more information is needed. While Kaufman's rallying call will not eradicate the need or desire for M.B.A. degrees, he does provide a surprisingly solid alternative full of information that even those already in the workplace will respond to. (Dec.) (c)
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Review

"I've run across few people who conceptually 'grok' how to get things done better than Josh Kaufman."
-David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

"File this book under NO EXCUSES. After you've read it, you won't be open to people telling you that you're not smart enough, not insightful enough, or not learned enough to do work that matters. Josh takes you on a worthwhile tour of the key ideas in business."
-Seth Godin, author of Linchpin

"No matter what they tell you, an MBA is not essential. If you combine reading this book with actually trying stuff, you'll be far ahead in the business game."
-Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor, Wired, and author of What Technology Wants

"A creative, breakthrough approach to business education. I have an MBA from a top business school, and this book helped me understand business in a whole new way."
-Ali Safa vi, executive director of international sales and distribution, The Walt Disney Company

"An absolutely amazing book! I'm highly recommending this to all creative types, for the best overview of the modern business mind-set they need."
-Derek Sivers, founder, CD Baby, sivers.org

"Josh has synthesized the most important topics in business into a book that truly lives up to its title. It's rare to find complicated concepts explained with such clarity. Highly recommended."
-Ben Casnocha, author of My Start-Up Life

"An enterprising and thrifty way to hack business school. This is a fantastic resource for motivated autodidacts looking to get into business."
-Gina Trapani, founding editor, Lifehacker.com, and author of Upgrade Your Life

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover (December 30, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591843529
• ISBN-13: 978-1591843528
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (212 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #46,782 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #40 in Books > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Training

More About the Author

Josh Kaufman is the author of the #1 international bestseller "The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business," as well as the upcoming book "The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything... Fast!" Josh specializes in teaching professionals in all industries and disciplines how to master practical business knowledge and skills.

Josh's unique, multidisciplinary approach to business mastery has helped millions of readers around the world learn essential business concepts on their own terms. Josh's work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Time, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and HarvardBusiness.org. The widely-acclaimed Personal MBA manifesto and recommended reading list has been downloaded over 1.28 million times from ChangeThis.com.

PersonalMBA.com hosts over 50,000 readers every month, and has been visited by over 2 million readers since its founding in 2005. Josh's work has directly saved prospective business students millions of dollars in unnecessary tuition, fees, and interest by providing an effective, affordable, and debt-free method of learning fundamental business principles.

Josh's current projects involve ongoing research in the fields of business, education, and skill acquisition.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#63 in Books > Business & Investing

#73 in Kindle eBooks > Business & Investing

#63 in Books > Business & Investing

#73 in Kindle eBooks > Business & Investing

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

155 of 169 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Why read this book? January 26, 2011

By Aram

Format:Hardcover

The following is just my synthesized version of the first chapter.

Why?
So you know just what you need to know, gain confidence that business fundamentals are master-able and can be self-taught.
Improve and acquire new mental models to help you understand how businesses work (see Charles T. Munger)
Because the author spent a lot of time synthesizing material from a wide range of sources (there's a lot of junk out there)
Because Seth Godin and Lifehacker.com approve (and you read about it on reddit and digg)
Because a real business degree is usually a bad investment (there's a study that says so)
Because the material taught in most MBA schools is outdated and impractical (think "How to be an Industrial Age Captain of Industry")
Sometimes they even teach you the wrong stuff - see "direct incentives" and the book Drive by Dan Pink
Also, you don't have to build a behemoth to build a viable business
And number-crunching skills are not business-running skills. Create value, flam fraud.
And because small businesses are the new big business, holmes. Small, agile and lean companies are going to make your lunch and eat it.
But don't expect business schools to change until they feel the burn of mass rejection.
The one thing business schools can do is get you an interview
Cue Admiral Ackbar "It's a trap!" anti-college debt rant
Strum that familiar refrain: If you're smart enough to get into business school, you're smart enough not to need it.

What'll you'll learn (p. 32)
- how businesses work (ch 2-6)
- how people work (ch 7-9)
- how systems work (ch 10-12
You won't learn much about managing people (see chapter 9)
You won't learn much about managing money (read Accounting Made Simple and Essentials of Accounting, the McGraw-Hill 36 Hour Course in Finance for Nonfinancial Managers and How to Read a Financial Report)
You won't learn much about crunching numbers (read Principles of Statistics and Turning Numbers into Knowledge)

That's it. You're welcome.

149 of 163 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Skip the business education and buy this book! December 30, 2010

By Drasko Raicevic

Format:Hardcover

Having graduated from a top business school in Canada, I can safety say that I could have thrown out all my textbooks and used the money I spent on tuition to actually START a business, and used this book as a replacement to my business education.

What makes this book warrant such a strong statement is the fact that it's a comprehensive synthesis of all of the concepts you need to know to understand business inside and out. There are no complex models to learn or outdated theories to memorize just to get marks or pass tests. What you get is a comprehensive set of "mental models" or heuristics on all of the sub parts of creating, operating and working within a business. Why is this important? Because a mental model is like a rule of thumb for any possible scenario you might encounter in running a business - from value creation to delivery to marketing to finance. It helps you look at the world through the lens of what's most important (and thus no fluff to distract you) which ultimately helps you to ask the right questions and ultimately helps guide you to make the right decisions about maneuvering in business. These principles are universal and applicable for small business start ups to Fortune 50 CEOs because they're based on business fundamentals (the mental models) and not just tactics found in most other books.

In addition to a sound business knowledge what this book has is a very extensive section on working with yourself and with others. Achieving great strides in business is sometimes less about knowing the business aspect but more about conquering yourself - either with productivity, with working with people or with overcoming doubts and fears - all things I'm finding out as I work on my own venture. After having read dozens of psychology and self help books I can also say without a doubt that the section on working with yourself trumps them all. Josh delivers a well researched practical guide to understanding how you brain works and how to work with it rather than against it, so you can actually go ahead and apply the concepts in the rest of the book.

Highly recommended if you wish to know more about business, are thinking of starting your own business, or are thinking about joining an MBA program to climb the corporate ladder. Buying this book could end up saving a mortgage worth of student debt, so what have you really got to lose?

51 of 55 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Greatly disappointed for myself - can see usefulness for others July 26, 2012

By John Markle

Format:Kindle Edition

As someone who is opposed to higher education for the same reasons the author is against it, I was very excited to pick up The Personal MBA to feed my own opinion as well as learn from someone much more informed than me. After coming across the author's blog I wanted to shout "hallelujah amen!" and shake his hand as he went on about the questionable economic sense of an MBA. When I was finally able to pick this book up and dedicate some time to it, I was very excited as I read through chapter one "Why read this book?". However, I was greatly disappointed when I got about a quarter of the way into it and fully realized how shallow/limited of a view we were taking of each topic.

In chapter one the author writes "The Personal MBA is a set of foundational business concepts that you can use to get things done. Reading this book will give you a firm foundation of business knowledge you can use to make things happen." Unfortunately, I would take issue with the author's claim that after reading this you will have a firm foundation in the topics covered. I felt that the book read more like a Spark Notes encyclopedia or dictionary and did not make me equipped to adequately think or apply any of the topics to my own professional life. It was as if there was a machine gun firing off all of these quick topics that followed the outline of casual story or comment and then one paragraph of depth. When I purchased this book, I was looking forward to more detail than the author presented and I think the first chapter does not adequately set the stage for what the author's goal is.

More examples could be given buy my intent here is not to berate the author. I simply would like to point out that if you have a fair amount of academic or practical business knowledge already, this book may not be as enlightening as you would like it to be. I will not discount my own fault here because I should have read more about the book rather than judged it by the title... shouldn't I have learned that by now?

On a side note, I would like to take some time to mention how impressed I am that the author has responded to many reviews here on Amazon, especially the negative reviews. In one of his responses he writes something that summarizes my feelings regarding this book excellently. I quote him in response to someone on a negative soapbox thinking MBA programs are the greatest thing since sliced bread:

:Quote: "If a reader who isn't familiar with business can learn the essentials in a few hours for a few dollars, the book is a worthwhile investment. For experienced readers, the value is conditional: it depends on your willingness to step back, reexamine your assumptions about how businesses work, and reconsider how you're operating. The biggest barrier to learning something new is usually realizing you still have something to learn." :Unquote:

I cannot help but admire his response and I think it is a very valuable three sentences to read before purchasing this book. If you know nothing/little of business, this is going to be a great read for you. If you studied it in college and like to read business books on occasion, then I would say that spending visiting his blog with an open mind would be just as beneficial in the long run.

At the end of the day, with well over 100 reviews and nearly 5 stars, many acolades from very successful business people, and a successful following on his blog, this book is not going to waste your time. I believe the author is challenging the status quo in a vocal, logical, and well thought out way and for that I wish him the best on his journey to convince people to self educate themselves. It is a powerful lesson that everyone can challenge themselves more on.