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The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business Paperback – August 28, 2012
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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?
- Print length464 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPortfolio
- Publication dateAugust 28, 2012
- Dimensions5.48 x 1.19 x 8.38 inches
- ISBN-101591845572
- ISBN-13978-1591845577
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"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 of Wired and author of What Technology Wants
"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
"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
"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 Safavi, executive director of international sales and distribution, The Walt Disney Company
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Portfolio; Reprint edition (August 28, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1591845572
- ISBN-13 : 978-1591845577
- Item Weight : 13.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.48 x 1.19 x 8.38 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #232,144 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #201 in Leadership Training
- #1,607 in Entrepreneurship (Books)
- #2,157 in Personal Finance (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Josh Kaufman is the author of three bestselling books: "The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business", "The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything... Fast!", and "How to Fight a Hydra: Face Your Fears, Pursue Your Ambitions, and Become the Hero You Are Destined to Be."
Josh's research focuses on business, entrepreneurship, skill acquisition, productivity, creativity, applied psychology, and practical wisdom.
Josh has been featured as the #1 bestselling author in Business & Money, as ranked by Amazon.com.
"The Personal MBA" has been featured as the #1 bestseller in Business Training and Business Management on Amazon.com. The widely-acclaimed Personal MBA manifesto and business reading list has been downloaded over 3 million times by readers around the world.
"The First 20 Hours" has been featured as the #1 bestseller in Business Self-Improvement, Educational Psychology, and Personal Transformation on Amazon.com. His TEDx talk on "The First 20 Hours" has been viewed over 16 million times worldwide, putting it in the top 10 most-viewed TEDx videos and top 100 most-viewed TED talks published to date.
"How to Fight a Hydra" has been featured as the #1 bestseller in Modern Philosophy on Amazon.com.
Josh's research has been featured by The New York Times, The BBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Fortune, Forbes, Time, BusinessWeek, Wired, Fast Company, Financial Times, HarvardBusiness.org, The World Economic Forum, Inside Higher Ed, Lifehacker, MarketWatch, The Independent, Bloomberg TV, PBS Next Avenue, CCTV, and CNN's Sanjay Gupta MD.
Josh has been a featured speaker at The Aspen Ideas Festival, Stanford University, World Domination Summit, Pioneer Nation, Microconf, BaconBiz, Google, and IBM.
JoshKaufman.net was named one of the "Top 100 Websites for Entrepreneurs" by Forbes in 2013.
You can find his current research and writing at joshkaufman.net.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2022
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Top reviews from the United States
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In The Personal MBA Josh Kaufman makes a very compelling case (as does Will Hunting) that for people considering an MBA, the economics aren't that great. For many graduate students (not just Business majors), it feels like a Casino: everyone takes the tests, and gets primed, then takes out a huge loan from the bank (often a six-figure amount) hoping that when they come out the other side, there will be an awesome, high-paying job waiting for them. It's a financial transaction, not really an educational one. In fact, much of the education gleaned from an Master in Business Administration is theoretical and marginally updated from the projects and Case Studies done in Bachelor of Business and Economics programs; after all, how can you possibly sit in a classroom and `learn' how to be a Manager, or an Executive? Of course you can't. But the schools are more than willing to let you try, as long as the cheques clear.
Provided those cheques do clear (in many states in the US, the juice, as they say, is running the day you take your first class, not after you graduate), students can expect a marginally better income (in this economy? yuck) awaiting them on the other side; it turns out they're getting a crash course in finance after all! Ouch.
In the beginning of The Personal MBA, Kaufman reveals something striking: research shows there is little evidence that getting an MBA has any correlation with long term success in Business. Top tier Business programs make sure that they only accept brilliant students, which is why many go on to greatness. Business schools make it their business to take credit for other people's work-namely, your undergraduate degree, and your having studied for the GMAT. In a perfect world, you'd be better off, studying for the GMAT, applying to Harvard Business, getting accepted, and then refusing to attend (and pay the exorbitant tuition, and 2 years of your life), then bragging on your CV that you were accepted at Harvard, and applying for a plum job with a Fortune 500 company, ready to put you through the Management training program.
Why doesn't anybody do that? Because the MBA itself acts as a signal to help simplify the recruiter's job: he or she doesn't want to read 5,000 CVs. Reading 50 is a lot faster. It's that simple. Which 50 get the job doesn't really matter. When the eventual 20-something is hired, he or she will proceed to the actual training program, and begin to be molded into the perfect Hewlett Packard / Cisco/ Apple/ GE/ Nike/Starbucks Manager. That's right: real companies don't hire college grads and just plop them in a management or executive role. They have training programs. They have quarterly reviews. They promote you based on progress, not based on your GPA.
Where else did you think you would learn how to be a Manager?
Unfortunately there's no way around it. Since MBA students are required to pass the GMAT first, a fundamental understanding of business and finance is required before you set foot on a real campus. If the Personal MBA (book, and accompanying website) is going to attempt to replace an actual MBA, they must put the reader through the paces of very fundamental Business Concepts.
Business and Finance majors (like myself) will find much of this familiar, but that shouldn't take away from Kaufman's impressive achievement here. He's taken 2 years of Education and compressed it into a fantastic 400 page reference material. Kaufman will hold up the six-figure MBA and declare that by buying this book you're effectively saving $99,982, but of course, you're not getting a piece of paper either.
So for anyone who didn't graduate in Economics of Business,this book is a great summary of the definitions and concepts that took us about 4 years to get through. And it's pretty much the same material (minus countless case studies and Powerpoint presentations) you'd get from top-tier business programs.
So what do I suggest for young career-minded readers?
The point of an MBA, traditionally, was not for a 19 or 20 year old to `train' to be a manager (whatever that means) but for a middle-manager to train to be a leader in his current company. An ideal situation would be to get a job (any job) with a great company and work your way up, and eventually have your boss pay for your education. The company will consider the investment in human capital worth it if they see potential in you, and will also have you promise to stay with the company for at least a few years upon graduation, so they can benefit from their investment.
Education is great. If I didn't believe that, I sure wouldn't have started a blog about it. But so is avoiding foolish six-figure debt. Consult your boss, and consult this book before proceeding.
(PS. Yes, I've graduated from a post-secondary International Business program. That one came with a five-figure student loan, not six.)
More reviews like this on 21tiger
Admittedly, this text is very well written. The writing style and organization of Kaufman contributes greatly to readability, and I enjoyed this aspect of this book. Many business works have a lot of fluff, and in general most of this text provides substance that will be appreciated by many readers. In addition, the history behind this book is interesting in that it came about as a natural step after the author created a heavily visited blog listing books and resources he had found valuable in his studies, so readers can be assured that this text was not written from an ivory tower perspective but resulted directly from reader interest.
The author writes at length in his first chapter as to why this book should be read. It is not easy summarizing this chapter in a few short sentences, but Kaufman mentions that what he provides here 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. Once you master the fundamentals, you can accomplish even the most challenging business goals with surprising ease." Later, the author calls this text "a self-directed crash course in business", and provides an extensive discourse as to why the traditional MBA does not provide significant value.
Neither the author nor myself has an MBA, although we have both gone to business school (and I also have a graduate degree). While I cannot speak for the author, in my opinion there is substantial material in this text to provide to the business neophyte. However, I was unfortunately not overly impressed with the material Kaufman provides after chapter 6, which is midway through the book. The author makes up on this aspect to some extent by providing an appendix entitled "How to Continue Your Business Studies" that lists dozens of texts in a variety of business topics, although this list serves as a reminder that, as communicated in the introduction, what the author provides here is an introductory text.
If you do not have time to read this whole text, I recommend reading chapter 2, entitled "Value Creation" on creating value for customers. The summary that the author provides on the "Twelve Standard Forms of Value" (product, service, shared resource, subscription, resale, lease, agency, audience aggregation, loan, option, insurance, capital), for example, is very well done. The "Ten Ways to Evaluate a Market" is also especially well done. The author obviously summarizes and synthesizes material from disparate sources very well, but the reader needs to be aware that much of the content provided is just that, a CliffsNotes-styled survey of what the author has determined is fundamental to studying business.
From the perspective of a consultant, be aware however that this material is sometimes overly summarized and synthesized. For example, in his 3-chapter presentation on understanding systems, analyzing systems, and improving systems, many important topics are glossed over, and unless the reader understands the substance that is waiting for them within the reading lists the author provides, they may minimize the importance or complexity of the topics. For example, the definition that the author provides for "Return on Investment (ROI)" is limited to "simply dividing the amount of money you collect by the amount of money you spent, then subtracting by 1.00."
However, there would be no need for texts such as "The Consultant's Scorecard: Tracking Results and Bottom-Line Impact of Consulting Projects", by Jack Phillips (see my review), where several ROI calculations are detailed at length, if this calculation were so simple. Fortunately, Kaufman points the reader in the right direction, and presents in an entertaining manner, and so this book is recommended to anyone new to business topics, especially aspiring entrepreneurs. One of the best features of this text are the many quotes from other sources that introduce each of the subtopics in the 12 chapters provided here, and for this reason alone this book is worth a read.
Top reviews from other countries

After that though it does have some great content. In some cases it's simply explaining what you may already know but in a way you've never thought about before. For example, different types of things you can sell may seem very obvious but it will covers these in much more granularity... It's something about reading someone else describe these things which makes it a lot more clearer and lets you see it from every angle.
I generally quite happy with the book, just think he should've skipped on congratulating himself at the beginning. It would probably put off a lot of people.

This book is an excellent choice for anyone looking for business education. The book is divided into small sections and each section takes less than 5 minutes to complete. Due to nature of its format, I found reading it easy and fun. It is easy to understand and digest as well.
Though this book is fun to read, a wide array of information is condensed into it which may be difficult to implement and will definitely require to read author recommended list of books as well as to experiment with learning.
I recommend this book to all professionals working in corporates as well as to anyone planning to launch a business. Thanks for reading my review.


two sentence reviews of lots of mediocre popular self-help books
glad i wasted 99 pence so i didnt have to listen and could delete saving 12 hours of his crap. avoid like the plague.
