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What is business?
Any business is determined by two basic factors - people and systems. For this reason, the key to success is identifying patterns of thinking and human behavior, as well as understanding the interaction of repeating processes that form the basis of any business.
I have an idea?
The basis of business is the creation of customer value, i.e. offering a person what he really needs. The basis of the idea can be values, for example, a product, service, resource, rental, resale, subscription, mediation, insurance, etc. Special attention you need to pay attention to the relevance of your offer and the market situation. You can use a number of criteria to help you, for example, market size, speed to market, consistency of consumption, etc.
Risks: How good is your business idea?
Strategic assumptions are facts that characterize the real world, and without which your enterprise will not be successful. Many new entrepreneurs often make mistakes in strategic assumptions. To prevent them and reduce risks to zero, it is necessary to carry out shadow testing - testing the proposal before the project is launched.
How to attract attention?
For a product to sell, it is important that potential customers pay attention to it. For this purpose, it is recommended to use special tools: free offers, slogans, stories about the company and others. You can also combine these tools and use them comprehensively.
Profitability of your business
If there is no profit, the business cannot exist. For the business to exist for some time. However, we should not forget that the comfortable amount of profit is determined by you personally. If you're getting enough to keep things running and compensate your employees for their time and effort, you've already achieved results—your business is functioning.
Third-party financing or self-promotion: what to choose?
Here it is necessary to apply the principle of sufficiency, the meaning of which boils down to the following: when creating a small company, it is better not to resort to third-party financing, which will allow you to retain control of your business for yourself. But you need to understand that the pace of development will be insignificant, and such a business cannot be compared with a business with third-party financing.
On the importance of setting goals
Allows you to visualize the final result. There is no need to be afraid to formulate your goals precisely, but rather to do so in a positive, immediate and specific manner. In the same case, if you understand that your goal is untenable, you should not panic - reassess the situation, determine new goal and start moving towards it.
Experience
In some situations, we compare new events with some patterns that live in ours, so the more experience we have, the greater the likelihood that we will make the right decision. Although decisions should not always be made based on personal experience– from time to time you should consult the “database”, which will point you in the right direction.
How to do everything without going crazy: everything has its time
To run your business effectively, you must always remain calm, especially in this era of information overload. You can concentrate on one task and eliminate all distractions. If there are a lot of tasks, then you just need to group them and allocate each group to complete. Remember that human energy rhythms change all the time, depending on the time of day, and people are active differently at different times.
What if it doesn't work out?
This is how the question is asked great amount people starting their own business. And if you tried to do something, but it didn’t work out, you can act in two ways: stop and accept that everything is as it is, or try again in the hope of success. And it is the second option that characterizes a person as successful. Perseverance ensures that you gain skills and knowledge and, as a result, achieve success.
On the importance of interacting with people
It doesn’t matter what the specifics of your business are, but interaction with people – colleagues, partners, clients, etc. – plays a huge role. And to achieve success in this process, several principles should be used, such as identifying people's comparative advantages, maintaining employee engagement, emphasizing value and others.
Once again about systems
For a system to be viable, it must meet environmental conditions. If we talk about business, then such conditions are: the presence of a sufficient amount of profit, income and manufactured product. However, the environment can be fluid, and to ensure your business can seamlessly adapt to changing circumstances, you must always be flexible. Business performance rests on system performance, but to improve a system, you need to understand as much as possible how it operates in the world. this moment.
Conclusion
As already mentioned, many people are confident that obtaining an MBA is a guarantee that a person will become a business professional. But any business school has its drawbacks: they are expensive, detached from real life, and do not provide any guarantee that you will get a well-paid position. Do you want to spend years of your life and a lot of money on getting a diploma? Perhaps you should learn everything yourself, thereby guaranteeing your success?
The book “Your own MBA. Self-education is 100% useful to everyone who decides to create own business or simply prove to yourself and the whole world that self-education “feeds” no worse than a diploma from a prestigious educational institution. It is this idea that is defended by the author of the publication, Josh Kaufman, who, using his own example, tells the reader about the benefits of self-development and self-education, provided that there is a desire to work and move forward, destroying the usual comfort zone.
In most cases, people unnecessarily spend huge amounts of money on education in universities, business schools, etc. educational institutions, promising a bright future. But expectations do not always come into contact with reality, and a person is forced to do routine work in an office, of which there are billions around the world, while dreaming of taking the highest step on the social ladder.
JOSH KAUFMAN
In the book “Your Own MBA. Self-education 100%” Josh Kaufman helps to look at the role of self-education in a person’s life, which is the best factor for achieving success. The author in no way expresses the idea that a diploma is useless; on the contrary, Kaufman helps to re-evaluate one’s own contribution to self-development and proves that this works no worse than educational programs of higher educational institutions and prestigious business schools.
The book will reveal the most effective and successful principles that work in the business world. Kaufman lays out in an accessible form the basics of the basic disciplines necessary for a successful start in the business arena. In “Your own MBA. Self-education 100%” Josh Kaufman does not offer a clear set of tips and rules, but in the process of reading they themselves appear in the reader’s head.
One of the main features of the book “Your own MBA. Self-education 100%" is its accessibility and brevity in presentation. This is not just 500 pages of abstruse and boring theory that is difficult to fit into your head. Kaufman systematized and adapted complex information for understanding an ordinary person. The author offers many options for solving business problems, talks about effective marketing models, and helps to understand personal psychology. By applying all these tips, you can build your own business much easier and more efficiently.
Download the book “Your own MBA. Self-education 100%"
Read online or download for free “Your own MBA. You can 100% self-education on our website. Start now to pave the way for a successful future with some parting words from Josh Kaufman. Also on our website you have the opportunity to listen to the audiobook “Your own MBA. Self-education 100%.”
Josh Kaufman
Your own MBA
Self-education 100%
Dedicated to millions of entrepreneurs around the world who, to the best of their ability and ability, make life better
From the publication's partner
My grandparents were real businessmen in those distant pre-war, war and post-war years. They were peasants and did not know the word “business”. Their education consisted of two stages: primary school (the ability to read and write) and then the school of life.
Business game
Conditions:
At the age of 20, my grandparents got married. It's 1924. "Citizen", devastation. There is no food in the villages. There are private farms where something grows, and even that can be taken away. There are almost no livestock (they were taken away or died). There are hand tools, of course: saws, shovels, axes, ropes. Living with parents is an immediate NO. Firstly, there is nowhere (seven people on the benches), and secondly, there is nothing to eat.
Task:
Survive. Build a farm. Give birth to children.
Now imagine yourself (you can use films) in this environment. Record that you are 20 years old. You don't have a roof over your head. You don't have a penny of money. You are newlyweds. Food is only under your feet. At the same time, there is no healthcare, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the Pyaterochka and Stroymaterialy stores, transport, or work in the city. There are civil clashes all around.
The only advantage is that to build a house you do not need to buy land or register with the chamber. He went to the edge of the village and lined up behind the last house.
Very briefly, schematically, I outline my grandmother’s detailed story of how everything turned out for them. The point of my presentation is to voice the old-fashioned solution to this business problem.
So, the sequence of actions:
1. Spend the night - where relatives sheltered.
2. Then a forest, a log house, a small house under the guidance of a village carpenter. ( Grandfather learned how to fold a frame, attach rafters, etc.)
3. Then the stove, under the guidance of a local stove maker. (Grandfather learned to make stoves.)
4. Next - winter in your home. Grandfather gets a job on the outskirts of the city as a mechanic at a railway depot. ( He begins to read books and study the locomotive on his own. Takes courses and becomes an assistant driver.) Little money appears.
5. Then there was a fire in the village. The house is burning down.
7. Grandfather is building a second house on his own (log house, stove, etc.). Relatives, who were built later, invite the grandfather as construction consultant.
8. Then, at the new house, a barn with three zones appears sequentially:
1st zone - workbench, tools, sharpener, lathe, drilling machine, etc., that is, according to Marx - first we create the production of means of production;
2nd zone - energy block: a place for the preparation and storage of firewood and coal;
Zone 3 - summer food storage. This cellar is a deep hole that is filled with ice in winter and serves as a refrigerator for food all summer.
9. And finally, having a strong base, he begins to develop the economy. It was an endless chain of consistent, leisurely actions that gradually increased the power and efficiency of the economy. Garden. ( Grandfather studied all the literature on gardening) Boat. ( Learned to build a boat) Networks. (Learned to knit.) Fishing. Subsidiary farm. Etc.
Grandfather constantly studied the intended direction. I started implementing it by continuing to study a new business, learning from experience and reading books. Soon he became a driver and then an instructor at the depot technical staff training school. In adulthood, grandfather and grandmother lived in abundance, were strong and independent.
The common thread in this story about the life of my ancestors is the fact of constant self-education and movement forward. In modern terms, grandpa and grandma were always involved in new projects and developments. This gave new knowledge, expanded horizons, introduced more and more people and created more and more “mental models” (a concept from this book), as close as possible to the “truth of life.”
And I remembered all this in connection with reading Josh Kaufman’s wonderful book “Your Own MBA.” Suddenly, in my head, this “village” block of information, which was stored in my brain under the index “interesting historical information,” “resonated” with what I heard and felt in Kaufman’s book.
Published with permission from Portfolio, a division of Penguine Group Inc., and Andrew Nurnberg Literary Agency
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright holders.
© Worldly Wisdom Ventures LLC, 2010
© Translation into Russian, publication in Russian, design. Mann, Ivanov and Ferber LLC, 2017
* * *
Dedicated to millions of entrepreneurs around the world who, to the best of their ability and ability, make life better
Chapter 1. Why read this book
Another business textbook? As if not enough of them were written without you.
Customs officer at Kennedy International Airport after I answered a question about what I do
Life is hard. Especially if you're a fool.
John Wayne, star of classic American westerns
Since you are holding this book in your hands, I would venture to guess that you are either about to start your own business or want to get a promotion. And most likely, you still have not started to act because the following reasons are holding you back.
1. Business “angst”(German) Angst- fear). The belief that you don't understand anything about business and therefore won't be able to start your own company or take on a business O greater responsibility in the current position. It is better to leave everything as it is than to overcome the fear of the unknown.
2. Fear of being incompetent. The idea that business is a complex thing and should be handled by professionals. Unless you have an MBA or a degree from a prestigious business school, who are you to say, “I know what to do.”
3. “Impostor Syndrome.” Fear that you will not cope with new tasks and everyone will understand that you are just a deceiver. But no one likes them, right?
Dont be upset. Everyone experiences similar, unfounded fears, and you can quickly get rid of them. To do this you just need to learn a few simple rules that will change the way you think about how business works.
If you self employed, designer, student, programmer, or just a professional who wants to master the basics of entrepreneurship, this book is for you. No matter who you are or what you do, once you get acquainted with a new way of looking at business, you will no longer waste time fighting your own fears, but devote it to business.
You don't have to know everything
The methods are a car and a small cart, but there are very few principles. It is easy for someone who has mastered the principles to choose one method or another. But those who are looking for a method without paying attention to the principles will have a hard time.
Ralph Emerson, poet and essayist
In learning any new subject there is important rule: you don't need to know everything; you just need to understand a few fundamental principles of the field. Once you master them, the process of accumulating knowledge will be much easier, and learning will become more successful.
"Your own MBA"– this is a set of fundamental principles for the functioning of any business, with the help of which you can accomplish your tasks. Once you master them, you will be able to solve the most complex problems and achieve the most elusive goals with amazing ease.
Over the past five years, I have read a huge number of books about economics and business, interviewed hundreds of professionals, worked for a corporation from the list Fortune 50, repeatedly opened his own business and collected information about various enterprises - from tiny ones, where everything is done by one person, to multinational ones with a huge staff and billions of dollars in profit. All this time I processed the collected information and as a result formulated several main principles, which are set out in this book. Understanding these fundamentals will give you trouble-free decision-making tools. If you are willing to take the time and effort to learn these principles, you will learn:
How in fact business is running;
How to open your own business;
How to make an existing business work more efficiently;
How to use business skills to achieve your personal goals.
You can think of this book as a kind of filter. Instead of absorbing everything that is written and said about business, with its help you can extract from seas information only the most important and focus on what will personally influence what is happening.
No experience needed
People tend to overestimate the complexity of business. We are not building rockets - we have chosen one of the simplest professions in the world.
Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric Corporation
Even if you are a complete beginner, don't worry. Unlike most business guides, this book does not require any special knowledge or experience. I don't think I will be read exclusively general directors large companies, making decisions worth millions of dollars every day. (But even if they do, this book will still be very useful to them.)
If you have business experience, take the word of my MBA clients around the world: in this book you will find information that is much more valuable and useful than anything they teach in business schools.
We'll look at 256 simple concepts that will help you learn completely new business thinking. After reading the book, you will have a much more correct and clear idea of what business is and how to run it successfully.
Questions, not answers
Education is not the answer. Education teaches you to find answers to all questions yourself.
Bill Ellen, sociologist, educator
The authors of most business textbooks try to give answers: suggest a method or solution to a problem. This book is different. She won't give you answers - she will teach you how to place correctly questions. Knowing the most important principles any business is the first step to making the right business decisions. The more you learn about what questions need to be asked in a particular case, the faster you will find answers to them and understand what is needed to develop your business.
Mental Models, Not Methods
The boundaries of my language are the boundaries of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher
In order to acquire new skills in the field of business, it is not at all necessary to strive to learn everything - it is enough to master the basics. I name the key concepts of business science mental models. Together they form a solid system that you can rely on when making decisions.
Mental models are concepts that reflect your understanding of “how things work.” Imagine you are driving a car. Here you press the pedal to the right. If your car slows down after that, you'll be surprised, right? Because, as everyone knows, the gas pedal is on the right. This “known” is a mental model—an idea of how things work in the real world.
Your brain automatically forms mental models by noticing certain principles in what you do every day. However, often the models formed in this way turn out to be not entirely accurate, because the experience of one person is, of course, limited. Education is a way to refine your mental models by absorbing the knowledge and experiences that other people accumulate throughout your life.
For example, many believe that “starting your own business is a very risky step,” “to open your own business, you need to draw up a detailed business plan and borrow a lot of money,” and “business is about connections, not knowledge.” Each of these phrases is a mental model, but none of them is absolutely true. Adjusting your mental models will help you be more clear about what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong, and as a result, the decisions you make will be more accurate.
After studying the mental models proposed in this book, many of my clients have realized that their ideas about what is business and how does it work, are not entirely true - if they had known this earlier, they would not have had to make such efforts at the beginning of the journey and waste precious time on unnecessary fears and worries.
Your own MBA
I am convinced that self-education is true education.
Isaac Asimov, science fiction writer, biochemist
I am often asked if I have an MBA degree. “No,” I answer, “although I went to business school.”
As a student at the University of Cincinnati, I took part in the Karl Lindner Honors-PLUS program, which was essentially an undergraduate MBA course. The program was funded by a substantial grant, so I had a great opportunity to experience much of what business schools teach without going into debt.
A year later, through the university’s work-study program, I received a position as a manager at Procter & Gamble, one of the 50 most successful companies, according to the magazine. Fortune. In 2005, when I graduated from university, I was offered the position of deputy head of the brand management department in the division dealing with household chemicals, – holders of MBA diplomas from leading educational institutions were usually invited to this post.
By the beginning of the last semester, I was much more concerned about the future than actually studying. Certainly, new job required deep knowledge of business, and all my colleagues probably sported diplomas from the best business schools. For a while, I also thought about getting a special education, but then I decided that there was no point in spending a lot of money on a “core” that, in fact, was needed only in order to get a position that was offered to me anyway; besides, I would have had enough work even without a bunch of assignments that I would have to do during part-time study.
As I wondered what to do, I remembered the advice of Andy Walter, the first Procter & Gamble executive to whom I had to report: “If you put in as much time and effort as it would take to get an MBA, Good work and consolidation of skills, the result will be the same.” (Andy didn’t have an MBA, just an electrical engineering degree. Walter is now a world-class IT executive overseeing several of Procter & Gamble’s largest international projects.)
Eventually, I abandoned the idea of business school—but not the business education—and hit the books to complete my “personal” MBA course.
A short, self-paced business crash course
Many self-taught people can easily outshine doctors of science, masters and bachelors from the best universities.
Ludwig von Mises, Austrian economist, author of Human Action
I have always loved books, but before I decided to study business science on my own, I read mostly fiction. My childhood and early youth were spent in New London, a small town in Ohio, whose residents are mainly engaged in agriculture and produce some things for their own needs. My mother works in a children's library, my father taught physics to high school students, and then became a director. primary school. So reading played a big role in my life, but business didn’t play any role.
At the time I got my first real job, I knew almost nothing about what a business was and how it operated - except, perhaps, that it was the same kind of work that people go to to get paid. I had only a vague idea that companies like Procter & Gamble existed until I applied for employment and stepped into the corporate world.
Working at P&G is a good education in itself. For the first three years, I had to make decisions that involved creating new products, managing the manufacturing process, allocating millions of dollars in marketing expenses, and overseeing distribution of products through major retail chains like Walmart, Target, Kroger and Costco.
As Deputy Head of Brand Management, I managed teams of 30-40 employees, as well as contractors and intermediary organizations, all of whom had competing projects, agendas and varying degrees of urgency. The stakes were high, and, accordingly, considerable pressure was put on me. Even now I am amazed at how many thousands of man-hours, millions of dollars and extraordinarily complex technological processes necessary to create a regular bottle of dishwashing detergent, which you can buy in any supermarket. Everything from the shape of the bottle to the fragrances is optimized, including the text of the inscriptions on cardboard boxes for delivery of goods to stores.
However, at the time I was thinking about more than just my job at P&G. The decision to educate myself instead of studying for an MBA program from a side project, so to speak, grew into a slight insanity. Every day I spent hours reading and comprehending business literature, piece by piece accumulating precious knowledge about the laws by which the business world lives.
That summer, after receiving my diploma, I did not go on vacation. Instead, I spent my days in the business book racks at the local bookstore, soaking up as much as I could handle. By September 2005, when I officially started working full-time at Procter & Gamble, I had read hundreds of books on all the subjects taught in business schools and those not taught there: psychology, physics, and theory. systems So on my first day at the company, I was ready to discuss business strategy with the best business school graduates.
As it turned out, self-education served me well - I became a valuable employee, I really worked useful thing and received high marks from inspectors. However, over time, I realized three important things.
1. In large companies, everything happens slowly. And the most best idea can die in its infancy only because its implementation requires the approval of too many.
2. Obsession with career growth interferes with quality work. I wanted to put my best effort into doing the real thing and doing the best job I could, rather than running around and applying for a promotion. But intrigue and the struggle for a place in the sun are an integral part of every working day in a large corporation.
3. The feeling of dissatisfaction leads to complete exhaustion of strength. I thought the daily work would be fun, but instead I felt like I was being run through a gauntlet. Soon this affected my health, and I began to quarrel with my loved ones. The longer I stayed in a corporation, the more I wanted to break out of this world and work for myself, become a private entrepreneur.
Grain and chaff
It is important that students have a healthy, rowdy irreverence for knowledge; after all, their business is not to worship what they study, but to doubt it.
Jacob Bronowski, writer and host of The Ascent of Man
If there’s one thing that comes easily to me, it’s the ability to isolate the most important things from a large amount of information. I have a synthetic mind, and my journeys into the world of business literature quickly became an exercise in separating the wheat from the chaff.
The amount of business information published every day is amazing. As for books, the general collection of the Library of Congress alone contains about 1.2 million books, textbooks, manuals and other business literature. If we assume that the average reading speed is 250 words per minute, and the average book has 60 thousand words, then it turns out that it would take 528 years to master the entire collection of the Library of Congress, and that’s assuming you read 24 hours a day, and only if you allow yourself such luxuries as food and sleep, then all 822 years.
According to Bowker, which assigns standard international ISBN numbers to publications, 11,000 new business books are published every year, adding to the already multimillion-dollar collection of titles published since the early 1900s. Amazon.com website by request " business literature» produces 630 thousand titles, not counting audio and e-books, as well as books published without an ISBN.
Of course, books are not the only available source of information. Take, for example, newspapers and magazines: in the business catalog periodicals Wilson (WBPI) currently has 527 major periodicals covering various aspects of business. Every year, WBPI adds 96 thousand new items to its archive, which already contains 1.6 million copies of publications. This figure does not take into account blogs - according to Google Blog Search, there are currently more than 110 million blog entries on the Internet related to business topics, and this figure is growing every day.
And I asked myself: what do I need from all this? In fact need to know? How to distinguish valuable information from verbal garbage? I began to look for a “sieve” to separate the rational wheat from the chaff. And the longer I searched, the more I realized that such a “sieve” did not exist, so I decided to create it myself.
This continued until one fateful morning when my “personal MBA course” unexpectedly became public, after which my life changed radically.
“Your own MBA” goes global
The one who can best identify the problem is most likely to be able to solve it.
I read with particular interest the blog of Seth Godin, bestselling author of Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, and Irreplaceable, one of the pioneers of successful online marketing.
One morning, Seth commented on the following news on his page: Harvard University rejected the applications of 119 students who wanted to enroll in the MBA program. It turned out that some hackers hacked the Harvard website and some students were able to view “closed” documents with a preliminary decision on admission. The story caused a lively debate in the media: everyone was discussing whether classic MBA applicants are really liars and thieves, or whether this is what they teach in business school.
Instead of being outraged by the students' behavior, Seth (unsurprisingly) demonstrated his own attitude to what had happened: Harvard gave these students a gift. By denying admission, the Harvard authorities saved them 150 thousand dollars and two years of their lives, which, otherwise, would have been spent chasing a not very useful piece of paper. “I just don’t understand,” Seth wrote, “why studying an MBA program is better than real work experience coupled with the focused study of 30-40 worthwhile textbooks.”
"Damn it! – I thought. “That’s exactly what I do!”
Over the next two days, I compiled a list of books and other resources that I found most useful and posted them on the blog with a link to Seth's post so that those who read the marketing guru's advice and decided to implement it could see my findings. After which I quickly wrote Seth a short letter and sent him a link to my post.
Two minutes later, Seth's blog posted a link to my list, and my site was flooded with visitors from all over the globe.
The topic was picked up on popular self-development and self-improvement resources like Lifehacker.com, after which it migrated to social media resources Reddit, Digg, Delicious, etc. In the first week of the existence of the “Your Own MBA” list, several thousand people visited my little corner of the Internet space . And most importantly, they began to get in touch.
Some readers asked the question: where to start? Others recommended books they had read themselves. Some people were quick to point out that my idea was naive and that I was wasting my time. Despite everything, I continued to read, write out what I needed and add to the list of books. Meanwhile, the number of supporters of business self-education was growing rapidly.
For amazing short term The Own Your Own MBA project grew from one man's personal initiative into a global movement, so I left Procter & Gamble and devoted my time to improving my program and working with clients.
As much as I enjoyed being the admin of my own forum, I quickly realized that just a list of books was not enough. People read business literature in search of a solution to a particular pressing problem or in order to quantitatively and qualitatively improve their own knowledge on a topic. They are looking for answers to questions, and books in this sense are not a panacea.
After all, their main content is ideas and knowledge, but due to the fact that you have to turn pages for hours to get to useful information, many of my followers never discovered it. Readers of my blog, having read the list, enthusiastically began reading, but after finishing several books, they could not stand it - they had to wait too long for the result, and after all, everyone has a family and a job.
And to help them, I took on the matter myself.
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