Ang Peregrino Recommends 64: The Personal MBA

The Per­sonal MBA
URL: http://​per​sonalmba​.com/

The Per­sonal MBA web­site works on the assump­tion that busi­ness schools don’t have a monop­oly on worldly wis­dom, that you do not really need to be in busi­ness school to be good at busi­ness, and that you can learn if you’re seri­ous about learn­ing advanced busi­ness principles.

The Per­sonal MBA (PMBA) is by Josh Kauf­man and is a project designed to help you edu­cate your­self about advanced busi­ness concepts.

The PMBA is more flex­i­ble than a tra­di­tional MBA pro­gram, doesn’t involve going into mas­sive debt, and won’t inter­rupt your income stream for two years. Just pick up one of these busi­ness books, learn as much as you can, dis­cuss what you learn with oth­ers, then go out into the real world and make great things happen.

The core of the Per­sonal MBA is a list of the very best busi­ness books avail­able. Some books will give you tools: processes or actions you can apply imme­di­ately to improve your life and work. Oth­ers will give you ideas: help in envi­sion­ing what you and your busi­ness are capa­ble of becom­ing. All of them will give you men­tal mod­els: use­ful ways of think­ing about the world that you can use to your advan­tage in a wide vari­ety of situations.

Check out the The PMBA Busi­ness Book Rec­om­mender and the PMBA Rec­om­mended Read­ing List, which are the “result of thou­sands of hours of read­ing, research, dis­cus­sion, and eval­u­a­tion. By read­ing these books and apply­ing what you learn to your daily life, you will pro­gres­sively develop a greater under­stand­ing of busi­ness and increase your effec­tive­ness in the work­ing world. Each book in the list has been selected for a sin­gle pur­pose: to max­i­mize your edu­ca­tional return on invested time.”

The Per­sonal MBA is Not:

A cre­den­tial. If you read these books, you won’t have cor­po­rate recruiters beat­ing down your door, and you won’t have a pretty cer­tifi­cate to hang on your wall when you’re done. You will, how­ever, have an under­stand­ing of busi­ness that’s com­pa­ra­ble to com­plet­ing a tra­di­tional busi­ness school cur­ricu­lum, along with the plea­sures of not hav­ing to mort­gage your life for that under­stand­ing. You do not need a cer­tifi­cate to be able to under­stand, use, and hold an intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tion about advanced busi­ness top­ics. (Employ­ers do, how­ever, respond well to port­fo­lios. If you build a port­fo­lio of notes to cap­ture what you learn through the Per­sonal MBA, you’ll have a tan­gi­ble asset to prove your hard work and ded­i­ca­tion dur­ing the inter­view process.)

A stand-alone ven­ture. You can’t learn about busi­ness solely from books (or sit­ting in a class­room); you have to be will­ing to go out and learn by doing. Whether you’re work­ing full-time for a com­pany or build­ing your own busi­ness, a great deal of your knowl­edge will develop as a direct result of your day-to-day work expe­ri­ences, which pro­vide the nec­es­sary con­text for under­stand­ing what you read. Read­ing books is not enough; appli­ca­tion of what you read is essential.

A mind­less replica of a tra­di­tional MBA pro­gram. The PMBA was cre­ated to expose you to a core set of advanced busi­ness con­cepts quickly and effec­tively. By design, it does not include every­thing you might come across in busi­ness school. If you’re look­ing for a detailed analy­sis of the Black-Scholes option pric­ing model and its rela­tion­ship to the volatil­ity sur­faces of cer­tain finan­cial deriv­a­tives, you’re going to be very dis­ap­pointed. The PMBA focuses on knowl­edge that you’ll find use­ful in the real world, not what an aca­d­e­mic pro­fes­sor per­son­ally finds interesting.

An imper­sonal cur­ricu­lum. You’ll find more mate­r­ial about learn­ing who you are, what you’re good at, and how to work more effec­tively with other peo­ple in the PMBA than you will in a stan­dard busi­ness school cur­ricu­lum. There’s a rea­son why these top­ics are included here: these “soft skills” are often more prac­ti­cal and impor­tant than the­o­ret­i­cal knowl­edge, and will help you tremen­dously in your every­day life and work.

An infal­li­ble edu­ca­tional rev­e­la­tion. It’s per­fectly okay if you dis­agree with one of the selec­tions or think that a crit­i­cal book has been over­looked. Feel free to make sub­sti­tu­tions as you deem nec­es­sary. If you’re skep­ti­cal about the value of a title you haven’t read yet, I encour­age you to bor­row the book from your local library and give it a try. If you’re of the same opin­ion after read­ing a few chap­ters, put it down and read some­thing else.

Easy. Work­ing your way through this list will take time, energy, and per­sis­tence. There is no sub­sti­tute for hard work and ded­i­ca­tion. I’ve struc­tured this pro­gram to be as easy as pos­si­ble to use, but it’s up to you to put in the time and energy nec­es­sary to learn.

For the great list of books, the great arti­cles, and show­ing us that in the end, self-education is the only kind of edu­ca­tion there is, AngPere­grino Rec­om­mends The Per­sonal MBA this week.