A Revolution in Learning
The Evolution of You
The Times They Are A-Changed
This is the age of personal empowerment and possibility. At no other time in the history of humanity has each of us had such tools at our disposal to create and disseminate information, products and services. We can broadcast our ideas, target audiences to make them aware of what we have to offer, and create things of value to others from our bedrooms, dens, or garages; or research labs, office cubicles or boardrooms.
The convergence of powerful, portable, personal computers and communications networks has made this possible. They have created a link between our personal creativity and imagination, and the world at large. There are no longer barriers to creating our dream enterprises, careers and lives. We have the potential to free ourselves from drudgery and create ourselves in the image of what we most want to be and do.
If Your Life is in a Rut, Take the Exit Ramp to Opportunity and Adventure!
A major enabler of actualizing this new found agency is business skills like marketing, management, patenting, negotiation, finance and accounting. MBA ASAP provides an overview of these disciplines and how they interact without going into burdensome detail before you need it.
Knowledge to Set You Free
MBA ASAP is designed to provide some quick business knowledge so anyone can start thinking in productive ways to turn your ideas into practical money generating enterprises, and free you from the work-a- day yoke and other people’s over-determination of your life and fate. MBA ASAP can help you trade in the humdrum corporate life for one of opportunity and adventure.
This way of thinking in terms of how to create practical business models and how to operate and manage them, is not only immensely valuable to set up your dream life and income, it is also a powerful way to create sustainable public benefit organizations that don’t have to solely rely on charitable contributions for their existence and growth.
Tilt the Game of Life in Your Favor
Our books will give you the skills and knowledge to get going now. It is just the basics. But that is all you really need at first. To get started you don’t need perfect knowledge, just enough to get going. The perfect is the enemy of the good enough. This is the good enough. You can learn more as you go along. This will get you more than started.
Gauging the MBA Commitment
An MBA degree is a professional Master’s degree in Business Administration. It is a course of study that takes two years full time or four years of night school. This can be a daunting proposition. If you work during the days, hopefully you might have a job and an employer who will pay for your education. But four years of working during the days 40 or 50 hours a week and then going to classes say two nights a week from 6 to 10 and then studying and writing papers on the weekends, makes for a fairly full schedule with not much time for leisure or serendipitous activities. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and Jill a dull girl.
Two years of full time school can be a breath of fresh air. Quit your job and just focus on self improvement by honing very marketable skills, is an attractive alternative. But the costs can be pretty staggering. Tuition alone for an MBA from an elite school typically tops $120,000 over two years. Between tuition and living expenses and forgoing income for two years, you are probably looking at digging yourself a quarter of a million dollar hole.
Both of these options have their pros and cons, costs and benefits, and opportunity costs of what you had to forgo in order to pursue one of these paths. Pursuing the MBA route simply on the notion that it is a ticket to be punched on the way to better paying jobs and more opportunity is a little cynical and maybe naïve. Use this book as a way to gauge your interest in these subject areas before making such a propitious leap.
This roadmap can be helpful in a number of ways:
- Career opportunities and career development. This is a great way to brainstorm and scan the horizon for potential fields and specialties that you may not have thought of as careers. Taken in total, this can help you to plan and become a specialist or a general manager and start the process of developing well rounded C-level management skills.
- Use this material to identify and soar with your strengths and also focus on developing your weak spots.
- As a primer before you jump into a full time MBA program and get caught up in the details: this can help as you go through a program of silo-type courses and have a context and general understanding of how they fit together. This approach can help you remember the material from your classes better as you will have a structure in place in which to catgorize specific detailed information. It can also help prevent you from feeling overwhelmed as you navigate the deluge of information. It will also help you discriminate between things of general importance and relative minutia.
- It can help you prepare for the various subjects ahead of time. If you are committed to getting an MBA and are going to start a program, one of the best things you can do is to bone up on the material ahead of time. This will give you a head start and help you keep your head above water when the onslaught of material starts flowing and you feel like you are drinking from a fire hose! This is especially important if you are coming from a non-business background such as engineering or philosophy, where you had no business classes or training in you undergrad program or in your career. I recall my first accounting class and we hit the ground running and I felt panicked and lost because I didn’t know the jargon and wasn’t previously familiar with any of the concepts. I could have really used this! I felt the same way in economics when we immediately were assigned technical papers by Milton Friedman on monetarist policy. I didn’t have a general context into which to fit that kind of specific detailed technical information from academic research papers.
- As a summary reference after you have completed a program to help synthesize all the specific information you have gathered and help marshal it towards the tasks you face in a job and career. This book can also be a refresher for subjects you studied decades ago.
- This primer can act as a starting platform to point you in the directions of further learning. After I completed my MBA program I had the feeling that a lot of what I learned was fundamentally common sense at base and I could have learned most of it on my own.
You have to be seriously disciplined to be an autodidact and a formal academic program can help immensely in providing the impetus, urgency and schedule to get through the subject matter and materials in a timely and consistent fashion. This is not to be discounted. That being said, not everyone has the time, money, or is limited by logistics or commitments, to spend two years full time in school or four years in night school, to get an MBA. Or at least right now, and you want the knowledge now so you can put it to use; right now. - As technology lowers entry barriers in every industry and field of endeavor, and expands possibilities, many of us can think of feasibly turning our dreams and ideas into viable businesses. Few of us are anointed on a mainstream track to being a CEO of an existing company. The rest of us can use some business skills to complement our creativity and intuition. And we want to apply it all ASAP!
- There is a lot of junior high and high school age computer savvy talent, older individuals with experience and insight, and people in the developing world with new found access to mobile platforms, computing devices and connectivity. If you fall into any of these categories, and are ready to innovate now, this primer is for you.
- The skill sets and disciplines involved in creating and running business are broad, varied and can go very deep. And the power tools available to assist you and augment your efforts are constantly evolving along with the landscape. This isn’t a subject that you study for two years and then feel confident that you know it all. This is an ongoing project of self actualization, development and re-education. This book can help with tips of where and how to keep continually improving and developing.
- It is of general interest to anyone thinking of starting a business or desirous of a quick overview of business administration. It is designed to make you energized, optimistic, and newly purposeful.
Our goal is to help you gain a facility with these business tools in order to get things done. We take the balkanized knowledge of the various business related subjects and knit them together in a cohesive way so you can marshal these resources to accomplish meaningful tasks.
The goal is to be like a musician who has all the skills at the ready and can improvise or orchestrate based on what the situation calls for. Or like an athlete who has practiced many skills and can call on the ones needed and create a play with teammates to overcome the obstacles of defense or create an effective offense.
We want to be able to create mosaics of the right skills and apply them at the right time. The elements can be skill sets and expertise that you have developed, or they may be exercised in assessing and employing others. In the latter case you need to have enough knowledge to evaluate whether the expertise you are hiring meets what you need.
We also set as a goal getting you literate with some of the jargon, buzz words and acronyms in business. The language of business can be a barrier to further reading and study if you are not familiar with it. Think of this as your launching pad.
