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The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business Paperback – August 28, 2012

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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 Even the elite schools like Harvard and Wharton offer outdated, assembly-line programs that teach you more about PowerPoint presentations and unnecessary financial models than what it takes to run a real business.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 business 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.

Print length

464 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Portfolio
Publication date

August 28, 2012
Dimensions

5.48 x 1.19 x 8.38 inches
ISBN-10

1591845572
ISBN-13

978-1591845577
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Popular Highlights in this book

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The best way to observe what your potential competitors are doing is to become a customer.
Highlighted by 2,635 Kindle readers
Learn everything you can from your competition, and then create something even more valuable.
Highlighted by 2,400 Kindle readers
Every business fundamentally relies on two additional factors: people and systems.
Highlighted by 2,023 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A masterpiece. This is the 'START HERE' book I recommend to everyone interested in business. An amazing overview of everything you need to know. Covers all of the basics, minus buzz-words and fluff. One of the most inspiring things I've read in years." - Derek Sivers, founder of CDbaby.com and sivers.org

"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

Josh Kaufman is the author of The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, an international bestseller with translations in 12 languages. 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. PersonalMBA.com hosts over 50,000 readers every month, and has been visited over 2 million times by readers all over the world 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.

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: #336,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #359 in Leadership Training
- #2,159 in Entrepreneurship (Books)
- #3,355 in Personal Finance (Books)

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4.6 4,537 ratings

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Josh Kaufman

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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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J English

Should be read by anyone in business

Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2024

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I didn’t spend some ridiculous money to go to business school because of the magic of scholarships. This book is a well organized summary of most topics covered in B schools without the networking, projects, presentations, exams, tuition or any of the other experiences of school . It is a good fast read and is very well organized so that the topics are both understandable and applicable - I.e. no fluff! The book is also a source for more in depth reading on the topics presented. Excellent book for entrepreneurs in most fields and well worth the $15. I strongly urge anyone who is either looking to go into business or who is running a business to read this book. It’s not an MBA but it is better written than most business books I’ve read in or out of school.

6 people found this helpful

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Dino

GREAT BOOK!!

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2024

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Awesone book. All you need to start your first business!

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Michael A. Robson

Brilliant, but reads like a Textbook. What did you expect?

Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2011

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"You dropped 150 grand on an education you could have gotten for $1.50 in late charges at the public library." Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting

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.)

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63 people found this helpful

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Business most

Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2024

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This book is a very basic easy to read for every businessman out there so if you like business this is a must read.

2 people found this helpful

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Saabaxa

great book

Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2024

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I have to say this book really help you understand business. It is a lot. But you have to comeback to it and explore in deep.

One person found this helpful

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Daniel Joshua Rubin

Brilliant, Essential, Rebellious

Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2011

Verified Purchase

When you consider what else you can do with the $15 or so it costs to buy this book, the value proposition feels downright ridiculous. For $15 you can buy 3/5ths of a baseball cap, order a round of watered-down drinks or pick up a 1/3rd of a video game. Or, for the same price you can get over 350 pages of clearly explained, entertainingly presented, essential business concepts that will directly and meaningfully enhance your knowledge of business. If you're new to business, it will take the stark raving terror out of the process. If you're a veteran it will help you focus and enhance any venture you're working on and likely inspire more profitable ideas.

One of the many stories Josh tells in the book is of a hospital that incorporates simple checklists to prevent infections from developing in patients. These checklists include basic things like reminding doctors to wash their hands. Though almost laughably simple and obvious, the mere act of incorporating the checklists lead to the complete elimination of infections at this particular hospital. The Personal MBA book is the ultimate checklist for all business decisions - as an entrepreneur, investor or even as someone running your own career and household financial system. Anyone who reads this book will have a practical guide to avoiding financial catastrophe and identifying the most promising opportunities. If I had this book a decade ago I would have saved myself from a very unfortunate business experience that cost me over $50,000 in losses and limitless wasted energy.

Josh, who is stunningly still under 30 years-old, has a wisdom far beyond his years. He is fiercely intelligent and despite a very pleasant demeanor as a writer, he is a rebel in the best sense of the word. His tone is always moderate, respectful and his arguments are always meticulously researched, expertly and passionately presented. He talks softly but he carries a big intellectual stick. Make no mistake about it. The title of this book is not a gimmick. He thinks business school is a terrible investment and clearly has walked the talk, building a successful career without it. He has a gift for simply articulating complex concepts and has a deep-seated passion for analyzing systems, particularly the workings of the human brain. His tone is never cloying, condescending, egotistical or obnoxious - as so many heinous business and management book titles are. He presents his views with an inspiring confidence that will fuel your business or business-to-be. While reading it I constantly had to put the book down to jot down new ideas.

Think of it this way. After absorbing what Josh calls the "mental models" in this book you will find the world of business presenting you with opportunities everywhere you go. It is a lot like buying a car and then seeing that model everywhere. As you adopt the mental models into your own thinking you will feel a shot of inspiration and be empowered to act thoughtfully, and confidently. I recently interviewed for a job and couldn't help but notice interactions that were playing out exactly as described in the book. You know that scene in The Terminator, where Arnold Schwarzenegger sees a menu of options scroll down before his eyes? And he chooses his response from that list? This book is like having a long list of useful ideas to pull from as you make decisions.

The concepts articulated in The Personal MBA helped me make progress as an entrepreneur (launched a Website that made a modest profit last year), landed a job in a completely different field that I enjoy and moved to a city better suited to what I really want. I highly recommend making the Personal MBA (both the site and the book) a major part of your studies. The risk is you spend $15 and sell it for say, $8, and lose seven bucks. The potential reward is you create a business you love, earn massive profits, increase your opportunities, avoid disaster and contribute something meaningful to the world through your business. If there's a better risk/reward profile for a $15 investment, I'd love to see it. The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

28 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

The content is 5 starts!

Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2024

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The contents is great and insightful but I got defective one with red ink so I replaced it.

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Alejandro

Me encantó!

Reviewed in Mexico on February 22, 2024

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En simples palabras este libro sería como una recopilación de los fundamentos que todo emprendedor y dueño/a de negocio debería de saber. Yo lo he leído dos veces seguidas y me encanta! Sin duda alguna, una guía para iniciar en este mundo del emprendimiento!

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Ole

Outstanding

Reviewed in Germany on March 8, 2024

Verified Purchase

"The Personal MBA" ist echt genial! Hab selbst einen Master in Economics und muss sagen, dass ich in diesem Buch mehr Praxisnahes Know How mitnehmen konnte als im ganzen Studium. Das Buch gibt einen super Überblick über Business, ohne dass man einen teuren und vorallem Zeitaufwendigen MBA oder anderen wirtschaftsmaster machen muss. Josh Kaufman erklärt alles verständlich und bringt die meines Erachtens nach wichtigsten Konzepte auf den Punkt. Mit praktischen Beispielen und einfacher Sprache macht er selbst komplizierte Sachenverhalte klar. Wenn du deine Business-Skills verbessern willst, ist das Buch ne echte Waffe!

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Andrei Lemisz Silverio dos Santos

A compiled of the essential principles of any business

Reviewed in Brazil on January 4, 2021

Verified Purchase

The author's view is that an expensive and lengthy MBA does not guarantee that anyone will become better at business. However, all businesses follow the same essential principles: they create value for a target audience, who pays money to fulfill expectations, which allows the company to survive financially. So, if you understand those principles and how they work in real life, you have all the knowledge necessary to play the capitalist game.

The books goes in depth on a lot of subjects: how the human mind works, how to fulfill expectations, the basics of finances, how to work with yourself and others...

I think the books cover all the essentials and can be very usefull to everyone. However, since the book is in written form, there is no teacher, no deadline to read, if you are not used to reading complex books like this, most of the information will be lost.

5 people found this helpful

Dom

Amazing book

Reviewed in Australia on October 12, 2023

Verified Purchase

This book is easy to understand. It offers a decent amount of basic knowledge when it comes to starting a business. I love how it not only covers the author’s experience and his advice but also other aspects (team working, mental health) that contributes to creating a great business. Would recommend to anyone who are interested in starting their own business but don’t know where to start. This book is good for people that are not interesting in starting business at the same time imo as it covers ideas that are beneficial to personal development

G.M.SELVA

Marketing

Reviewed in Singapore on September 26, 2020

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Very nice

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