The Personal MBA
Josh Kaufman
A business education without the fees. It chooses breadth over depth, on purpose.
Josh Kaufman skipped business school and decided to teach himself instead, from books. This is what came out of that: a few hundred short ideas covering most of what an MBA teaches, each one a page or two long, with a reading list for going deeper.
His starting point is that every business, however complicated it looks, does five things. It creates something of value, gets people's attention, turns that attention into sales, delivers what it promised, and brings in more money than it spends. Mess up any one of those and the business fails, no matter how good the rest is. The book then walks through each part, and follows it with sections on how people think, how to work with others, and how systems behave.
The format is the point. You aren't meant to master anything here. You're meant to know that each idea exists, so when you hit the problem in real life, you recognise it and know where to look.
It's on the shelf because it's the widest book I own about business. It's a good reminder, when you're deep in one corner like offers or code, that the other four parts exist.
