The Personal MBA 10th Anniversary Edition Paperback – September 1, 2020

Full of hints of business practices and very easy to read.I think it's worth rereading and I'll keep on reading according the reading list the author provides as well.

This book is remembered as one of sophisticated and refined, it is so much satisfied with reading and always in my bag,I bring ;In the Metro, I constantly read it, thank you.

I'm a software developer looking to open a software development agency and this book is helping me a lot.

主題はビジネスの勉強をした事のある人は必ず学ぶ基本的な内容ですが、実例が身近でとても分かり易く、頭の中がスッキリ整理出来ました。英文もとても読み易く、ビジネス用語の理解も深まり、TOEICなどの勉強にも良いと思いました。世の中には小難しい内容や自慢話ばかりで、読む人のこと考えてないような本もありますが、この本は出版前に繰り返しテスト販売をして、読者層を広くしすべく、改版をくり返したのかなと思いました。(これはこの本にも書かれている、成功するための秘訣の１つです)

日本語版と英語版の両方を買いました。ビジネス英語の表現方法の参考にさせてもらいます。

読みやすくて、めっちゃ勉強になった！ビジネスの一人にも、ビジネスと関係ないひとでも、一般教養としてオススメします！

The Personal MBA is THE book to read if you've never read anything about business before.Kaufman boils down business into its essential parts and divides the book into several logical and easy to read (and refer back to) sections. He covers each topic in between 1 and 4 pages: perfect if you want to skip what you know and get the gist of a new topic quickly.The Personal MBA (the book and the website) is billed as an alternative to paying big money for business school. Opinions on this certainly vary, but depending on your situation, you might not be able to take 2 years off to pay 100,000 USD for a "premier" business education.If you're a full-time freelancer or small business owner like me, you cannot possibly go back to school in the traditional sense. This book is the prefect introduction to the nuts and bolts of business.My friend who teaches economics at a business school once told me, "If you want to learn about business, go buy some books."I recommend you buy this book first, then use Kaufman's recommended reading list to expand your studies. Mixed with advice from a handful of good mentors (like my econ prof buddy), you'll be in business in no time.

The book is eminently readable and mostly well-written.The problem is that its content belies its title: despite advertising its value as substitute for an MBA degree — a Master of Business Administration — this book isn’t about business.It spends one page — page 208 — providing actually useful business information that someone might seek when attending business school, namely how to fund a venture/project/business/company, and methods for generating money, such as unsecured & secured loans, bonds, receivables financing, angel capital, venture capital, and public stock offerings. This is valuable! Students often enter business school with little knowledge about the wide variety of financing options available for funding, and would presumably learn this in class, from case studies, or textbooks. Josh Kaufman did well in covering this.But it lasted little more than one page.The rest of the book starts off arguing why a graduate-level MBA education isn’t worth the money ("Just buy this book instead!"), then devolves into life hacks, self-help, amateur psychology, mental models, dictionary definitions, and regurgitations/quotations from other self-help books and websites. If I wanted a reading list, I would just go download the syllabi of Stanford business school, or read a more sophisticated in-depth analysis like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow or Robert Cialdini’s Influence.The problems are many:1.) Too much life advice. I didn’t buy a business book to learn about the benefits of meditation or the proper way to order someone to dial 911.2.) Vapid fortune-cookie quotes and fluff buffering between sections. Every individual section tries to draw you into the discussion by telling a small story, and ends by making some overarching re-statement of the lesson. While I understand the benefits of dividing the book into several 1-3 page briefs on specific topics, the rapid context-switching drains the discussion of any sort of depth and fills it instead with vapid hooks and summary statements, each one more dumbed down than the last."The world is a fundamentally Uncertain place. Unexpected things happen—some good, some bad. You never know when Mother Nature, Lady Luck, or a hungry predator will decide that today is not your day" (422).Really? I don’t need to buy a business book to know world events aren’t certain.3.) Too many distracting metaphors: Josh Kaufman gets too cute trying to draw analogies between business and other subjects."Think less like a tiger and more like a turtle and your business will be able to withstand pretty much anything" (423).No, a business doesn’t become invincible because of how one person thinks."Leverage works just like rocket fuel—depending on how it’s used, it can propel your business to dizzying heights or make the entire operation explode" (422)."Doing something is not always the best course of action. Consider doing nothing instead" (421).No, businesses don’t exist by doing nothing. Problems don’t solve themselves."If you don’t want to go the way of the dinosaur, you must always consider how conditions in the Environment affect your system" (367).Businesses aren’t dinosaurs.4.) Stating the obvious:"By recruiting a good team and eliminating as much Friction as possible, you’ll achieve the results your’e seeking" (355)."The more flexible you are, the more Resilient you’ll be when things change" (372)."To improve your results, improve the quality of what you start with" (287)."If people who suffer heart attacks take 365 showers a year and blink their eyes 5.6 million times a year, does taking showers and blinking your eyes cause heart attacks?" (357).C’mon, the reader isn’t an idiot.5.) Oversimplifying how a business functions:"Create Standard Operating Procedures for important recurring tasks, and you’ll see your productivity skyrocket" (417).Creating extra layers of overhead doesn’t increase your productivity; the opposite happens.6.) Too superficial. Basic surface-level definitions of elementary-school math like mea, median, and mode. Percentage = 100 times the ratio. Do I really need a business book to know what percentage is? Or telling me how I can calculate a ratio by dividing one thing by another. Insulting waste of reader time.7.) Too many links. When I am reading a physical book, I am not simultaneously looking at my smartphone screen and continuing on the personal MBA website, so it breaks my attention and wastes valuable space & time by including a link to a discussion every other page. Just put the text in the book! I bought the book to read its pages, not follow links to read the same material on blogs.8.) Poor quality of paper. Smells like recycled paper, and the paperback version doesn’t stay open on its own because the binding is weak and flimsy. It feels like reading a cheap mass-market paperback rather than a high-quality tome or textbook.9.) Not enough visuals. Unlike textbooks you might read in school or during your MBA, this book contains no charts, graphs, visual aids, or even LaTeX formulae. Everything is delivered via walls of text, including long-hand statements of computations like ROI, ratios, and other verbose calculations that would have been much more digestible if blocked out as a LaTeX equation.10.) Bolding and random capitalizations are annoying, distracting, and completely inappropriate for a business audience.For example, "The challenge is that including significant Slack time is almost never seen as acceptable or appropriate" (333).→ Slack is a well-known software application. Capitalizing it because the chapter defines it as some special business term for excess time margin makes the prose incredibly misleading for people who regularly use the software Slack."In essence, Management is the act of coordinating a group of people to achieve a specific Goal while accounting for ever-present Change and Uncertainty" (352).Management, Goal, Change, Uncertainty — these are basic English nouns, with straightforward meanings. The author goes too far in treating them as some special business term. Leave the capitalization and bolding for terms that actually carry business meaning!Define a term once, then just use it naturally in sentence form!11.) Lack of business discussion. Outside of page 208-209, there are no in-depth discussions or case studies of business: how businesses can make, generate, or borrow money. Even brief mentions of methods like debt financing and futures fall short of showing how they can be used in the real world.Like he should better define and capitalize futures: "By purchasing financial instruments called 'futures,' the businesses can make money if the price of oil goes up, which helps to offset the losses they would incur in their primary line of business if oil prices increase" (427).Instead of clarifying this non-layperson term and "financial instruments," the author wastes time rehashing and defining basic English terms that any high schooler would know, like uncertainty, management, mean/median/mode, and ratio. He should be delving deeper into the terms that normal people don’t know.Even self-help techniques are hopelessly impractically vague: "Using the data I collected from Stress Testing, I made several major improvements to my website’s infrastructure and systems" (426).What were those "major improvements"? Kaufman never says; like the rest of book, he leaves it as a problem for the reader, superficially glossing over the most valuable information in the discussion.All in all, the book is impractical and useless, a poor and misrepresented proxy for a business education. The introductory pages position the book as a substitute for attending business school, highlighting how much tuition costs, and how seldom classes reflect reality. But this book doesn’t discuss business at a deep or comprehensive enough level to compete.Where’s the financial analysis? How might an analyst or entrepreneur identify markets, analyze supply and demand curves, seek out manufacturing, read a profit-and-loss statement, scale a service, defend one’s value with IP protection like trademarks and patents, valuate a company’s assets in share price, fundraise in Silicon Valley, create/generate funds for a startup, decide between common financial structures like a SAFE note or JKISS contract, negotiate a merger or acquisition, allocate common & restricted stock to founders and investors, hire and sound a board of directors, time and sequence funding rounds like seed/series-A/series-B/series-C, slice data about key metrics like DAU (daily active users), or simulate a market with Monte Carlo methods or other modeling algorithms?The book mentions none of this, not even name-dropping their existence and linking out to relevant papers or books. Kaufman instead chooses to focus on trivia, dictionary definitions of basic terms like mean/median/mode, and self-help life hacks like meditating, eating a healthy diet, and exercise.Business education, indeed!Go elsewhere for your MBA.