The Personal MBA
Josh Kaufman
“The best businesses in the world deliver the value they’ve promised to their customers in a way that surpasses the customers’ expectations
What I like
A solid primer on the business side of product design
Information density - great info into tightly knit chapters
Utility- Part reference book, part guide, good balance
Context- examples, quotes, and stories to illustrate concepts
Connectedness - author connects concepts, it flows (sorta)
What’s missing
Transitions - transitions between sub-chapters sometimes felt harsh
Novelty - of the content is not unique, other than recommendations and some stories, which were also really nice
Review
The Personal MBA has been sitting on my shelf for a long time, and was one of the first books I ever bought after it was recommended to me on Medium. To be quite honest I was intimidated by it. At over four-hundred pages it is a densely packed beast of a book. My rationale for not reading it was something along the lines of “i’m a designer! i don’t need to worry about the business side of things.” ... I decided to dive in as I have recently been doing more work as a Product Designer- where it’s important to not consider just the user’s needs, but the business needs as well. I’ve found that without homeostasis between both parties needs, it’s likely not going to be a successful product.
This book covers a lot of ground on business up front, and transitions into more systems thinking concepts that designers, operations, or innovations folks might be familiar with. I found that it deeply dives into concepts like value and systems from a business perspective. These two concepts transcended most chapters value delivery, systems measurement and KPI’s, among others. The chapters themselves varied in length, but didn’t feel too repetitive. There’s a lot in this book to digest, so I found reading it in about 20 - page increments was helpful. But rarely at any point did I feel the reading cumbersome as the sub-chapters are bite-sized and often story-driven.
I’m not necessarily convinced that this book is a pocket-sized MBA. An MBA is a social and experimental commitment whereas reading a book is a more isolated and exploratory experience. It’s a book but the value proposition is compelling enough so I’ll eat it. 😋
Highlights
A product is anything tangible that can be created, multiplied, scaled, and sold.
Attention in the moment, especially in busy settings, can fluctuate, it is attracted to things such as danger, potential losses, or novel stimuli, and disregards what cannot be seen, or what is overwhelming it, and uses our associations and comparisons to predict the effects something might have.
Cash flow is a systemic way of thinking about money flowing in and out of the a business.
Feeling important and safe (to communicate, to have needs met) are two underlying needs that people have.
Good value delivery is making sure your process for getting value to your customer is as efficient as possible and above their expectations.
It’s helpful to think of human behavior as guided by a quick, reflexive system, evolved for survival, which we share with most animals, and a more rational decision-making system that we have specially developed, which is good for things like pattern recognition and association development.
Marketing and attention are synonymous.
Measuring a system and it’s performance can be done by deconstructing it and analyzing its parts and KPI’s, and segmenting it’s data to create meaning.
Memories are not recalled from the same neuronal pattern every time.
Most decisions we make are around incomplete information and we use assumptions, projections, and other mental simulations to help us bridge the gap.
Negotiation involves trading currencies through a three step process which can be mediated by someone else in your stead called a Buffer.
Optimizing systems often involves finding what inputs are the most effective, and trimming or refactoring what is not.
People are strongly guided by social behavior, others around them, norms, social proof.
Power is an accumulation of reputation and capabilities, and the more power you have the more you can influence people.
Sufficiency is a businesses ability to remain in steady operation.
Systems can be incredibly complex, and thus so new systems should be designed as simply as possible to avoid imposing any unnecessary constraints, and to avoid unpredictable second-order effects.
The value something brings is measurable and can be objectively studied.
There are a few biases to be aware of in business which may impact team behavior as a leader.
Value streams can be augmenting based on the design of their systems.
Value will inevitably lead to assumptions: How many customers we need, what our cost should be, how much marketing will cost to acquire new customers.
When evaluating a market it’s also good to be attentive to competition.
Working with ourself is challenging because our attention is limited, which is why it’s important that we focus it on tasks that are most important and we are most capable of handling, while postponing, delegating, or deleting those that are not.