The Personal MBA
Josh Kaufman
Summary
This book will teach you everything you learn in MBA school with real world examples. It will also tell you that an MBA is not a significant degree.
However, doing an MBA is an interesting topic I’ve thought a lot about because although the knowledge is nothing special (you’ll find a lot of it below), it can give you value in other ways (network, career reset, etc.)
Rating: 4/5
Notes
Large companies move slowly
Climbing the corporate ladder is an obstacle to doing great work
Key is to recognize patterns and build mental models
Business is value creation, customer demand, transactions, value delivery and profit sufficiency/finance
There’s nothing more valuable than an unmet need that becomes fixable
Drive to acquire, drive to bond, drive to learn, drive to defend and drive to feel
10 ways to evaluate a market:
- Urgency
- Market size
- Pricing potential
- Cost of customer acquisition
- Cost of value delivery
- Uniqueness of the offer
- Speed to market
- Up front investment
- Upsell potential
- Evergreen potential
Rank all out of 10: If under 50 points then pass, if over 75 then go for it
Learn from the competition to create more value
Every iteration of a business has 6 steps:
- Watch
- Ideate
- Guess
- Which change
- Act
- Measure
Give people offering feedback the chance to pre-order
9 values to consider when making a purchase:
- Efficiency
- Speed
- Reliability
- Ease of use
- Flexibility
- Status
- Aesthetic appeal
- Emotion
- Cost
Know the critically important assumptions
Need to create a prototype/MEVO (minimum economically viable offer) and shadow test it before scaling
Market your offer to be remarkable
Know your probable purchaser
Best way to market is education based selling
Framing: emphasize important things and de-emphasize the things that’ aren’t
Coming up with a good hook is very important (emphasize value)
Testimonials are very effective, tell a story
Understand value comparison when pricing
Know your value when pricing a product
Education based selling is worth it to make your customer more informed
Have alternatives and know when to walk away from a bad deal
3 stages of negotiation (make sure to prepare in advance):
- Setup
- Structure: understand framing the proposal for the other party
- Discussion
Don’t give anyone control over decisions affecting your money
Providing free value builds your social capital (reciprocity)
Providing a damaging admission about an offer not being perfect increases trust
Use social proof and referrals to get people to buy
If selling to customers, use risk-reversal (if don’t like, 100% money back guarentee)
Reactivation is easier than acquiring new customers
Understand your value stream from raw materials to customers (maximize for efficiency)
Think about value delivery: giving customers an unexpected surprise
Measure your throughput: rate at which the system delivers to a goal
Scaling is multiplying/duplicating to increase value quickly
The better the systems, the better the business
Create as much value as possible, then capture it to keep the business operating
Understand sufficiency: minimum value to keep the business operating while you can enjoy and afford your life and employees
4 ways to increase revenue:
- Increase customers
- Increase average size of transaction by selling more
- Increase frequency of transaction
- Raise prices
Understand lifetime value of a customer
To get allowable acquisition cost: (lifetime value – value stream costs – overhead) x (1 – profit margin)
Know the breakeven point
Calculating time value of money: dollar today is worth more than tomorrow
Leverage maximizes potential for gains and losses
ROI is return on investment
Sunk costs are important to consider: cut your losses if they can’t be recouped
The environment dictates which actions your brain takes to get perception under control
Change the reference level and your behaviour will change
All you need to know is something you want is possible and you’ll find a way to get it
Change the structure of your environment and your behaviour will change
Loss aversion: people hate to lose things more than they like to gain them
If you can target people’s loss aversion (money back guarentee), you’ll be more successful
If firing people, do it all at once, not incrementally
Personalizing an issue is a way to hack your brains limitation of not processing information (make the layoff like one of your parents)
Cultivate the right associations
Contrast is making a decision based on the surrounding environment
Use scarcity when selling a product: forces people into making a decisions
Eliminate distractions and conflicts before starting to work
Goals are most useful is framed in positive, immediate, concrete and specific format
Focus on installing one habit at a time
When making a decision, always ask ‘which experience do I want to have’
Read books and evidence that directly challenges your view
Every job has its tradeoffs so learn about them early
Invest in a personal R&D budget (5% of your monthly income)
Utilize comparative advantage: diversity in a team will make you more successful
Make other people feel important
Always remember to treat people with appreciation, courtesy and respect
Add social proof to what you’re selling and your sales will increase
Influence your customers into small commitments and they’ll be more likely to buy
Focus on options, not issues and people will trust you
Figure out the selection test: environmental constraint which keeps business alive
Eliminate unnecessary dependencies
Think about second order effects: the indirect consequences
Complex systems will fail so always be ready
Deconstruct complex systems into subsystems and analyze those
Understand your system’s KPI: key performance indicator
Be honest with yourself about data and have a 3rd party look at it
Think about the confidence interval of your data: bigger sample size = better
Segment customers based on past perforrmance, demographics and psychographics
Pareto 80:20 principle: 20% of something owns/does 80% of the other thing
Know your diminishing returns
Work on removing friction in the business
Have standard operating procedures in place for when something happens
Consider doing nothing when something happens
Well designed fail safes should be in place in case the primary system fails
Never stop constantly experimenting
***
Buy the book here
Free E-book download here
Make Something Wonderful
Steve Jobs
Summary
The life of Steve Jobs in his own words
Rating: 5/5
Notes
Make something wonderful and put it out there
‘You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear’
When you’re a stranger in a place, you notice thing you don’t otherwise (Jobs after India trip)
Whenever you start with nothing, always shoot for the moon. You have nothing to lose.
You never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times
Never be afraid to fail. You never achieve what you want without falling flat on your face a few times
We are never taught to listen to our intuitions, to develop and nurture them. But if you do pay attention to these subtle insights, you can make them come true
Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights others don’t see
Believe that some of what you follow with your heart will come back and make your life richer. And it will. And you will gain even firmer trust on your instincts and intuitions
Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work.
The journey is the reward. The reward isn’t in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s in crossing the rainbow
To find A+ talent, if experienced, look at their track record and results
The world we know is a human creation and we can push it forward
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do (read whole ad ‘here’s to the crazy ones)
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit - Aristotle
Hire people better than you are
You can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life
It’s impossible to connect the dots looking forward, but they make sense looking backwards so you have to trust the dots will somehow connect in your future
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you
***
Buy the book here
Free E-book download here
