What it argues
The Personal MBA makes a deliberately provocative claim: that the core concepts underlying business can be learned through self-directed reading for a fraction of the cost of an MBA program, and that most of what business schools teach is either available in books or not taught at all. Josh Kaufman spent years building a personal reading curriculum to fill in the business knowledge he lacked, and this book is his attempt to distill that curriculum into a single reference covering value creation, marketing, sales, operations, finance, and the psychology of working with people.
The book is organized as a series of mental models — short, named concepts that Kaufman argues are the building blocks of business thinking. Examples range from familiar ideas like supply and demand and sunk costs to less commonly named concepts like the Iteration Cycle, the Critical Assumptions test, and the Pricing Uncertainty Principle. Each concept gets a few pages. The format is deliberately encyclopedic; the book is more useful as a reference than as a narrative.
What it gets right
- 1.
Every business performs five core processes: value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and finance. Understanding what each requires is the foundation of business literacy.
- 2.
There are five types of value a business can offer: products, services, shared resources, subscriptions, and resales. Each has different economics and different competitive dynamics.
- 3.
Testing Critical Assumptions — the beliefs your business depends on that might not be true — is more important than perfecting a plan. Find out cheaply what will or won't work.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Josh Kaufman is an American author and business educator who built his reputation on the PersonalMBA.com reading list, which he started compiling in 2005 as an alternative to formal business education. His first book, The Personal MBA, became a New York Times bestseller after publication in 2010 and was expanded in a revised edition in 2012. He also wrote The First 20 Hours, which applies rapid-skill-acquisition principles to learning. Kaufman's work sits at the intersection of business fundamentals and self-directed learning, drawing on a wide range of academic and practitioner sources.
