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What is business?
Any business is defined by two basic factors - people and systems. For this reason, the key to success is the definition of patterns of thought and human behavior, as well as an understanding of the interaction of repetitive 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 an idea can be values, such as a product, service, resource, rental, resale, subscription, brokerage, insurance, etc. Special attention you need to pay attention to the relevance of your offer and the situation on the market. There are a number of criteria you can use to help you, such as market size, speed to market, persistence of consumption, and so on.
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 aspiring entrepreneurs often make mistakes in strategic assumptions. To prevent them and reduce risks to zero, shadow testing is required - testing the proposal before the project is launched.
How to attract attention?
In order 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 in a complex way.
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 get what you need to keep the job going and compensate for the time and effort of your employees, you've already achieved the result - your business is functioning.
Third-party funding 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 keep control of your business. 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 goal setting
Allows you to visualize the final result. Don't be afraid to articulate your goals in a positive, immediate, and concrete way. 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 more likely we are to make the right decision. Although decisions should not always be made on the basis personal experience- from time to time you should refer to the "database", which will indicate the right direction.
How to have time to do everything and not go crazy: everything has its time
In order to run your business efficiently, you must always remain calm, and especially in this era of information overload. You can concentrate on one task and eliminate all distractions. If there are many tasks, then you just need to group them and allocate them for each group. Remember that the energy rhythms of a person change all the time, depending on the time of day, and at different times people are active in different ways.
What if it doesn't work?
This question is asked great amount people starting their own business. And if you tried to do something, but you didn’t succeed, 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 the acquisition of skills and knowledge and, as a result, 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 determining the comparative advantages of people, supporting the interest of employees, emphasizing significance, and others.
More about systems
For a system to be viable, it must meet environmental conditions. If we talk about business, then these conditions are: the presence of a sufficient amount of profit, income and product. However, the environment can be volatile, and in order for a business to seamlessly adjust to changing circumstances, you must always be flexible. Business efficiency is based on the efficiency of the system, but in order to improve the system, you need to understand as much as possible how it functions in this moment.
Conclusion
As already mentioned, many people believe that obtaining an MBA is a guarantee that a person will become a business professional. But any business school has drawbacks: they are expensive, out of touch with life and do not give any guarantee that you will get a high-paying position. Do you want to spend years of your life and a lot of money to get a diploma? Perhaps it is worth learning everything on your own, thereby guaranteeing yourself success?
The book “Myself MBA. 100% self-education" will be useful to everyone who decides to create own business or just 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 the author of the publication, Josh Kaufman, defends, who, by his own example, tells the reader about the benefits of self-development and self-education, subject to the desire to work and move forward, destroying the usual comfort zone.
In most cases, people inappropriately spend huge amounts of money on education at universities, business schools and other 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 “Myself an MBA. 100% self-education” Josh Kaufman helps to look at the role of self-education in a person’s life, which is the best factor for success, from a different perspective. The author in no way expresses the idea of the uselessness of a diploma, on the contrary, Kaufman helps to overestimate his own contribution to the development of himself 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 world of business. Kaufman lays out in an accessible form the basics of the basic disciplines necessary for a successful start in the business arena. In “Myself MBA. 100% self-education” 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 “My own MBA. Self-education at 100%” is its accessibility and brevity in presentation. This is not just 500 pages of abstruse and boring theory that is difficult to fit in your head. Kaufman systematized and adapted complex information for understanding ordinary person. The author offers many options for solving business problems, talks about effective marketing models, helps to understand the psychology of personality. By applying all these tips, you can build your own business much easier and more efficiently.
Download for free the book “Myself MBA. Self-education at 100%"
Read online or download for free “Myself MBA. Self-education at 100%" you can on our website. Start paving the way to a successful future right now with a pep talk from Josh Kaufman. Also on our site you have the opportunity to listen to the audiobook “Myself MBA. Self-education 100%.
Josh Kaufman
Himself MBA
100% self-education
Dedicated to the millions of entrepreneurs around the world who make life better to the best of their ability
From a publishing 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: elementary school (the ability to read, write) and then - the school of life.
business game
Conditions:
At the age of 20, my grandparents got married. Outside in 1924. "Citizen", devastation. There is no food in the villages. There are private farms where something grows, and that can be taken away. There are almost no cattle (they were taken away or died). There are hand tools, of course: saws, shovels, axes, ropes. Living with parents is a NO. Firstly, there is nowhere (seven in shops), and secondly, there is nothing to eat anyway.
Task:
Survive. Build a farm. Give birth to children.
Now imagine yourself (from the movies) in this setting. 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 just under your feet. At the same time, there is no healthcare, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Pyaterochka and Building Materials stores, transport, and work in the city. Around civil skirmishes.
The only plus 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 set out a detailed grandmother's story, how everything turned out for them further. The meaning 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 log house, fix rafters, etc.)
3. Then the stove, under the guidance of a local stove-maker. (Grandfather learned to make stoves.)
4. Next - winter in your house. Grandfather gets a job on the outskirts of the city as a mechanic in a railway depot. ( He begins to read books on his own and study the locomotive. Passes courses and becomes an assistant driver.) There is little money.
5. Then a fire in the village. The house is burning down.
7. Grandfather builds a second house on his own (log house, stove, etc.). Relatives, who were built later, invite grandfather as construction consultant.
8. Then, with a new house, a barn appears in sequence with three zones:
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;
3rd zone - summer food storage. This is a cellar - a deep pit, which is clogged with ice in winter and serves as a refrigerator for food all summer.
9. And, finally, having a strong base, proceeds to the development of the economy. It was an endless chain of successive, unhurried actions that gradually increased the power and efficiency of the economy. Garden. ( Grandfather studied all the literature on gardening) A boat. ( Learned to build a boat) networks. (I learned to knit.) Fishing. Subsidiary farm. Etc.
Grandfather constantly studied the intended direction. I started to implement, continuing to study a new business, adopting experience and reading books. Soon he became a machinist and then an instructor at the training school for the technical staff of the depot. In adulthood, grandfather and grandmother lived in abundance, were strong and independent.
The red 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 in new projects and developments. This gave new knowledge, broadened horizons, introduced to a large number of people and created more and more “mental models” (the concept from this book), as close as possible to the “truth of life”.
And I remembered all this in connection with reading the wonderful book by Josh Kaufman "My Own MBA". Suddenly, in my head, this "village" block of information that 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.
Copyright © 2010 Worldly Wisdom Ventures LLC.
© Translation into Russian, edition in Russian, design. LLC "Mann, Ivanov and Ferber", 2017
* * *
Dedicated to the millions of entrepreneurs around the world who make life better to the best of their ability
Chapter 1 Why Read This Book
Another business textbook? As if they were not written enough without you.
Customs officer at Kennedy International Airport after I answered a question about what I do
Life is hard. Especially if you're an idiot.
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 you are looking for a promotion. And most likely, you still have not taken action, because the following reasons are holding you back.
1. Business "angst"(German angst- fear). The belief that you do not understand anything about business and therefore will not be able to create your own company or take over about more responsibility in my 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. If you don't have an MBA or a diploma from a prestigious business school, who are you to say, "I know what to do."
3. "Imposter Syndrome." Fear that you will not cope with new tasks and everyone will understand that you are just a liar. But nobody likes them, right?
Dont be upset. Everyone experiences these 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 a 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, with a new perspective on business, you will no longer waste time fighting your own fears, but devote it to your cause.
It is not necessary to know everything
There are wagon and a small cart methods, but there are very few principles. One who has mastered the principles, it costs nothing to choose this or that method. But those who are looking for a method, not paying attention to principles, will have a hard time.
Ralph Emerson, poet and essayist
In the study of 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 go much easier, and learning will become more successful.
"My own MBA" is a set of fundamental principles for the functioning of any business, with the help of which it is possible to fulfill the tasks set. Once you master them, you will be able to solve the most difficult problems and achieve the most difficult goals with amazing ease.
Over the past five years, I have read a huge number of books on economics and business, interviewed hundreds of professionals, worked in a corporation from the list Fortune 50, has repeatedly opened his own business and collected information about various enterprises - from tiny, 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 forth in this book. Understanding these fundamentals will give you a solid decision-making toolkit. 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 your business skills to achieve your personal goals.
You can think of this book as a kind of filter. Instead of soaking up everything written and said about business, it can help you glean from seas information only the most important and focus on what personally will allow you to influence what is happening.
No experience needed
People tend to overestimate the complexity of a 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 manuals, this book does not require any special knowledge or experience. I don't think that I will be read exclusively CEOs large companies making millions of dollars worth of decisions every day. (But even so, this book will still be very useful to them.)
If you have experience in running a business, take my word for my MBA clients around the world: you will find information in this book that is much more valuable and useful than anything that is taught in business schools.
We will look at 256 simple concepts with which you will learn a completely new business way of thinking. After reading the book, you will have a much more correct and clear idea of what a business is and how to run it successfully.
Questions not answers
Education is not the answer to the question. Education teaches one to find answers to all questions.
Bill Ellen, sociologist, educator
The authors of most business textbooks try to give answers: to suggest a method or a solution to a problem. This book is different. She won't give you answers - she'll teach you how to bet questions. Knowledge of the most important principles any business is the first step to making sound business decisions. The more you learn about what questions to ask in a particular case, the faster you will find answers to them and understand what you need to develop your business.
Mental models, not methods
The limits of my language are the limits 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 it works". Imagine you are driving a car. Here you press the pedal on the right. If your car slows down after that, it will surprise you, right? Because, as everyone knows, the gas pedal is on the right. This "known" is a mental model - a representation of how things work in the real world.
Your brain automatically forms mental models, noticing certain principles in what you do every day. However, the models formed in this way are often not entirely accurate, because the experience of one person, of course, is limited. Education is a way to refine your mental models by assimilating the knowledge and experience that other people accumulate throughout their lives.
For example, many believe that “starting your own business is a very risky step”, “to open your own business, you need to write 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 correct. Adjusting your mental models will help you become more clear about what you are doing right and what is wrong, and as a result, your decisions will be more accurate.
After examining the mental models proposed in this book, many of my clients have realized that their ideas about what is a business and how does it work, are not entirely true - if they had known this before, they would not have had to make such efforts at the beginning of the journey and waste precious time on unnecessary fears and worries.
Himself 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. “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 basically an undergraduate MBA course. The program was heavily subsidized, so I had a great opportunity to learn a lot of what they teach in business school without going into debt.
A year later, under the university's "work-study" program, I received a managerial position at Procter & Gamble - one of the 50 most successful companies, according to the magazine Fortune. In 2005, when I was graduating from university, I was offered the position of deputy head of brand management in a 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 flaunted 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 “crust”, which was necessary, in fact, only in order to get a position that I was offered anyway; besides, I would have had enough work even without a bunch of tasks that would have to be done during part-time study.
As I pondered what to do, I remembered the advice of Andy Walter, the first deputy director of Procter & Gamble, to whom I had to report: “If you spend as much time and effort as it would take you to get an MBA, Good work and reinforcing 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 and oversees some of Procter & Gamble's biggest international projects.)
I eventually abandoned the idea of a business school - but not a business education - and sat down with books to complete my "personal" MBA course.
Self-Made Short Accelerated Business Course
Many self-taught students will easily outdo PhDs, masters and bachelors from top 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 the state of Ohio, whose inhabitants are mainly engaged in agriculture and some produce for their own needs. My mother works in a children's library, my father taught physics to high school students, and then became the director elementary school. So reading played a big role in my life, but business didn't play any.
When I got my first real job, I knew next to nothing about what a business was and how it worked—except, perhaps, that it was the kind of job people go to to get paid. The existence of companies like Procter & Gamble, I had a very vague idea until I applied for a position 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 production process, distributing millions of dollars in marketing costs, and controlling the distribution of products through the largest 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 which had competing projects, plans, and different order of urgency. The stakes were high, and, accordingly, the pressure on me was considerable. Even now, I am amazed at how many thousands of man-hours, millions of dollars and extraordinarily complex technological processes needed to create a regular bottle of dishwashing detergent, which you can buy in any supermarket. Everything from the shape of the bottle to the perfumes is optimized, including the text of the inscriptions on cardboard boxes to deliver goods to stores.
However, at the time, I wasn't just thinking about my job at P&G. The decision to educate myself instead of studying for an MBA program turned from a side project, so to speak, into a slight insanity. Every day I spent hours reading and comprehending business literature, bit by bit accumulating precious knowledge about the laws by which the business world lives.
That summer, after graduating, I did not go on vacation. Instead, I spent whole days at the business bookshelves at the local bookstore, soaking up as much as I could absorb. By September 2005, my official full-time employment at Procter & Gamble, I had read hundreds of books in every subject taught in business schools, as well as 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 did useful thing and received high marks from auditors. However, over time, I realized three important things.
1. In large companies, everything happens slowly. And the most best idea can nip in the bud only because it needs the approval of too many to make it happen.
2. Fixation on career growth hinders quality work. I wanted to do my best to do the real thing and do my best, rather than run around and pitch in for a promotion. But intrigues and the struggle for a place under the sun are an integral part of every working day in a large corporation.
3. The feeling of dissatisfaction leads to complete exhaustion of forces. I thought that the daily work would be enjoyable, but instead I felt like I was being driven through the ranks. Soon this shook my health, I began to quarrel with loved ones. The longer I stayed in the 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 hooligan disrespect for knowledge; for their business is not to worship what they study, but to doubt it.
Jacob Bronowski, writer and host of The Ascent of Man
If anything comes easy to me, it is the ability to isolate the most important from a large amount of information. I have a synthetic mind, and my travels in 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 60,000 words, then it will take 528 years to master the entire collection of the Library of Congress, and then, assuming that you read 24 hours a day, and even if you allow yourself such a luxury as food and sleep, then all 822 years.
According to Bowker, the organization responsible for assigning standard international ISBNs to publications, 11,000 new business books appear worldwide every year, adding to an already multimillion-dollar collection of publications published since the early 1900s. Amazon.com website at the request " business literature» issues 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 catalog of business periodicals Wilson (WBPI) you can currently find 527 titles of the largest periodicals devoted to various aspects of business. Each year, WBPI adds 96,000 new items to its archive, which already contains 1.6 million titles. This figure does not include blogs - according to Google Blog Search, there are currently more than 110 million blog entries on the Internet related to business in one way or another, and this number is growing every day.
And I wondered: what of all this to me in fact need to know? How to distinguish valuable information from verbal garbage? I began to look for a "sieve" to separate the rational grain from the chaff. And the longer I searched, the more I realized that such a "sieve" does not exist - so I decided to create it myself.
This went on until, one fateful morning, my “personal MBA course” suddenly went public, at which point my life changed dramatically.
"Myself MBA" goes global
Whoever can best identify the problem is likely to be able to solve it.
I read with particular interest the blog of Seth Godin, best-selling author of Trust Marketing, Purple Cow, and Irreplaceable, one of the pioneers of successful online marketing.
One morning, Seth commented on his page the following news: Harvard University has rejected the applications of 119 students who wanted to enroll in an MBA course. It turned out that some hackers hacked the Harvard website and some of the students were able to view the "closed" documents with a preliminary decision on enrollment. The story caused a lively discussion in the media: everyone was discussing whether the classic MBA applicants are really liars and thieves, or whether this is taught in business school.
Instead of resenting the behavior of the students, Seth (not surprisingly) showed his own attitude to what happened: Harvard gave these students a gift. By refusing admission, the Harvard authorities saved them $150,000 and two years of their lives, which, otherwise, would have been spent chasing a not very useful piece of paper. “I don’t understand,” wrote Seth, “how studying in the MBA program is better than real work experience, coupled with a focused study of 30-40 worthwhile textbooks.”
"Hell! I thought. “That’s exactly what I do!”
Over the next two days, I compiled a list of books and other sources that I found most useful and posted on the blog with a link to Seth's post so that those who read the marketing guru's advice and decided to put it into practice could see my findings. After that, I quickly wrote a short letter to Seth and sent him a link to my entry.
Two minutes later, a post appeared on Seth's blog with 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, and others. In the first week of the existence of the "Myself 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 did not fail to remark that my idea was naive and that I was wasting my time. Despite everything, I continued to read, write out the necessary and replenish the list of books. Meanwhile, the number of supporters of business self-education grew rapidly.
For startling short term The Self MBA project grew from a one-man 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 administrator of my own forum, I quickly realized that a list of books alone 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 found it. The readers of my blog, having read the list, started reading with enthusiasm, but, having mastered several books, they could not stand it - it took too long to wait for the result, and after all, everyone has a family and a job.
And to help them, I took the job myself.
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