The Personal MBA is an introductory business primer. Its purpose is to give you a clear, comprehensive overview of the most important business concepts in as little time as possible. The vast majority of modern business practice requires little more than common sense, simple arithmetic, and knowledge of a few very important ideas and principles.
The Personal MBA is comprised of 226 concepts that Kaufman has selected from his analysis of the “thousands of business books” he’s studied over the past five years. Each successive concept builds upon earlier ones, starting with simple definitions of business and then expanding to include supporting concepts. Each concept is presented in one or two pages, and can be read stand-alone. Related business concepts are displayed in bold within the text, so you can go look them up later. At the end of each entry is a link to the corresponding entry on the Personal MBA website, so you can share the link with your friends. It’s very cool, allowing both linear reading and random browsing of the material.
contents of the book, the author has divided into 11 chapter
In chapter 1 Chapter 1: Value Creation
“Make something people want... There’s nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just becoming fixable. If you find something broken that you can fix for a lot of people, you’ve found a gold mine.”
Every successful business creates something of value. The world is full of opportunities to make other people’s lives better in some way, and your job as a businessperson is to identify things that people don’t have enough of, then find a way to provide it.The value you create can take on one of several different forms, but the purpose is always the same: to make someone else’s life a little bit better.
Without Value-Creation, a business can’t exist — you can’t transact with others unless you first have something to trade. The best businesses in the world are the ones that create the most value for other people.
Some businesses thrive by providing a little value to a others focus on providing a lot of value to only a few people. Regardless, the more real value you create for other people, the better your business will be and the more prosperous you’ll become.
Key idea in the chapter 1
What Are The ‘5 Parts of Every Business’?
Josh Kaufman Explains the ‘5 Parts of Every Business’
Roughly defined, a business is a repeatable process that:
Creates and delivers something of value...
That other people want or need...
At a price they’re willing to pay...
In a way that satisfies the customer’s needs and expectations...
So that the business brings in sufficient profit to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation.
It doesn’t matter if you’re running a solo venture or a billion-dollar brand. Take any one of these five factors away, and you don’t have a business — you have something else.
What Is ‘The Iron Law of the Market’?
Here’s the Iron Law of The Market: even the most ingenious idea will fail if no one wants it - creating something no one wants is a waste.
Find ways to serve existing markets vs. building something, then finding a market to sell it to.
This “iron law” is cold, hard, and unforgiving - ignore it, and you will fail.
In The Personal MBA, Kaufman asserts that most people are hamstrung by a feeling they don’t know enough (about business, is his point, but it’s equally true about almost any discipline). They get a formal education, he says, to overcome their “Certification Intimidation: The idea that . . . if you don’t have . . . expensive credentials, who are you to say you know what to do?”
According to Kaufman, he wrote this book to give people more confidence. “You don’t need to know everything,” he cheerleads. “You only need to understand a few critically important concepts that provide most of the value. Once you have a solid scaffold of core principles to work from,” he assures the reader, “building upon your knowledge and making progress becomes much easier.”