The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman, first published by Portfolio in 2010 and reissued in an updated 10th anniversary edition in 2020, is a self-study guide to business. Kaufman, a former manager at Procter & Gamble who decided against business school, set out to teach himself what an MBA covers by reading widely and distilling the ideas that matter. The book is the result: a single volume that explains how businesses work in short, plain entries.
What is The Personal MBA about?
Kaufman’s argument is that most of what makes a business work can be learned without an expensive degree. A business, in his description, does five connected things: it creates something people want, attracts attention to it, turns interest into sales, delivers what it promised and brings in enough money to keep going. If you understand those five and how people and systems behave, you can run a company or judge any business idea.
The book is organised as a reference. Early chapters cover value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery and finance. The middle chapters turn to people: how the mind makes decisions, how to manage your own energy and productivity, and how to work with and lead others. The last chapters deal with systems, explaining how to understand, measure and improve the parts of a business that interact. Each idea gets a short entry of a page or two, so you can read it front to back or look up a single concept.
What sets it apart is its breadth and simplicity. Instead of case studies from big corporations, it gives you a vocabulary of business ideas in plain English, each with a practical angle. The 2020 edition updates examples and adds material on topics that changed during the decade after the first edition.
What are the main lessons for founders?
- Check the five parts. Look at your startup through value creation, marketing, sales, delivery and finance. The weakest of the five is where to spend your time next.
- Sell what people already want. Kaufman stresses that demand comes from existing human desires. Frame your offer around a want your customers already feel.
- Price on value. What a customer pays depends on what the result is worth to them, whatever it costs you to produce. Test higher prices for customers who gain the most.
- Learn the mind. Biases, habits and motivation shape every buying decision. Study how your customers decide before you design your sales pitch.
- Improve systems step by step. Measure the bottleneck, change one thing and measure again. Small, repeated improvements add up fast in a young company.
Who should read The Personal MBA?
It suits first-time founders without business training, especially engineers, designers, scientists and creatives starting their first company. It also helps freelancers turning into business owners and employees who want to understand the whole company instead of their department. Students considering an MBA can use it to see which parts of business interest them.
Skip it if you already hold a business degree or have run a company for years. You will recognise most ideas, though it still works as a refresher.
How do you put The Personal MBA to work this week?
- Write one paragraph for each of the five parts of your business: what you create, how people find you, how you sell, how you deliver and how money comes in.
- Mark the weakest of the five and choose one small experiment to improve it in the next seven days.
- Pick three entries from the book on topics you know least about and apply each to a real decision you face this week.
To map those five parts on one page, the free Business Model Canvas generator from Fe/male Switch gives you a structured template.
Where does The Personal MBA fall short?
Breadth comes at the cost of depth. Each idea gets a page or two, so you learn what a concept means without the detail needed to apply it in complex situations such as fundraising, hiring at scale or international growth. The book has little on venture capital or the specifics of tech startups. Readers who prefer stories to lists may find the reference format dry. For a hands-on guide to building a startup through experiments, read The Lean Startup, and for the management side, read High Output Management.