The Personal MBA

Always recommended by Thomas Frank for career growth and understanding how a business works.

It is very long and full of small nuggets, definitely a solid book to get a broad idea of management, entrepreneurship, and soft skills in general. You can tell it is written by a blogger, and the mini-chapter structure got a bit tedious. Not a bad book though; I read it with reasonable interest.

The main point, covered in the first chapter, is that expensive MBAs mostly help with name recognition, but do not help much once you are in the workforce. You need to learn by doing, and the book tries to explain as many concepts as possible in a concise and practical way, and usually clearly.

Macro areas

• Value creation: discovering what people need or want, then creating it
• Marketing: attracting attention to build demand
• Sales: turning prospective customers into paying customers
• Value delivery: giving customers what you’ve promised and ensuring that they’re satisfied
• Finance: bringing in enough money to make your effort worthwhile