This isn't a great list--it's a lot of fluff, and self-help books masquerading as business content.
There are basically two skills you really need to hone in an MBA. The first are the hard skills/knowledge on finance, accounting, (basic) stats, and (basic) economics. The second is being able to assess and analyze business models, from both strategic and operational angles. The former can be learned in MOOCs, while the latter is best approached with case studies, ideally discussed as a group. I'd honestly suggest trying to start a business/entrepreneurs book club with ~12-20 people to try to replicate that experience over reading books on your own.
What are some good publicly-accessible collections of case studies if someone wanted to start a discussion club? Someone once told me that part of the value proposition of the best business schools is the library of case studies that they amass (and sell). Is that true?
If you want good, you're unlikely to get free. We are talking about business, after all. The standard is HBR, which you can buy for what I believe is a reasonable cost: https://store.hbr.org/case-studies/
The BU libraries have a bunch of links. If someone had some knowledge of what they were looking for they could probably assemble a decent collection of relevant studies. The Harvard ones are the gold standard but, really, they're just a jumping off point for discussion if someone knows enough to capture the most important points.
The real value of an MBA is the network you create with other MBA students.
That's why a Harvard MBA is worth more than (unknown school) MBA - the top companies hire Harvard MBAs who then have a business network with other Harvard MBAs - who of course got hired at other top companies.
I'd say it can be important. I'll also say that, having gone to a top-ish business school, other than getting a (fairly ordinary) job out of campus interviews, I never otherwise benefited from network/connections and mostly didn't stay in particularly close contact with most of my classmates.
Oh, connections can be important. 3 out of the 4 jobs I've had since grad school have been through people I knew and the 4th was an on-campus interview. But none of the subsequent jobs were B-school related in any way though one was peripherally related to undergrad.
I was mostly reacting to the meme that the only reason to go to B-school is the network and in my experience that's not really true and I'd discourage someone from attending for that reason alone.
MBA programs are also often predicated on predicting the next y years based on the past x years.
This is increasingly hard for mbas to do or stay ahead of because how things are done in business isn’t the same, and changing faster than mbas are updated and taught.
Like anything it not what your education makes of you, it’s what you make of your education.
I agree some of these are fluff. However many here are great to have basic knowledge of for specific scenarios one may run into and then know where to dig deeper when needed.
Agree though to marry being a ferocious reader / learner with being a do’er is the way to go. Personally I did not grow up with an opportunity to develop an intuition about business and self-motivated action. Has taken a lot of work to move that direction over the years.
I took some of the Wharton first year MBA classes for free on Coursera. Left me incredulous that people take out huge loans for that stuff. It's Wharton, though, so the signaling alone may be worth the price.
> It's Wharton, though, so the signaling alone may be worth the price.
You’re (mostly) not paying for the content of the courses.
Reasons to go/pay (in no particular order):
1. It’s a finishing school, with all the good and bad that implies. Some of the details below fall into that category.
2. Developing your peer network. Includes classmates, professors, and alumni.
3. Access to incredible research opportunities and research resources (yes, even for MBAs).
4. Access to jobs that (mostly) only go to grads of Wharton and similar. Think consulting and IB.
5. Access to job networks of niche and often super interesting jobs via peers and professors.
6. Signaling, although this does work both ways. While it opens doors for some jobs, it makes you overqualified for others.
7. Being in an environment of driven and (mostly) competent people. The scope of “what is possible” will probably be redefined for most/many Wharton students. (This might be worded somewhat poorly… not exactly sure how to say it).
8. Related to 7, being graded on a curve against motivated and competent peers can… build character. I’m not sure what it’s like these days.
9. In the past, there were some niche concentration courses that were super interesting. I’m not sure what they are now, and I’m not sure they make it to MOOCs.
10. Wharton Follies.
To close, if someone goes to Wharton primarily for access to the classes, then I would say that they have pretty much failed Wharton, regardless of what their grades end up being. Most of the knowledge from the classes can be gained more easily and cheaply in other ways.
I always thought the sums people were paying for MBAs was absolutely outrageous. In tech I feel like MBAs can actually work against you and can be perceived as a red flag. I knew someone a decade ago who paid I believe $120k to Duke Fuqua for a mostly online MBA that also required travel to multiple international destinations. This was a person in their late 20s.
An MBA is a prerequisite for many high level jobs. Management consulting partner, investment banking managing director are just a few. There are paths to those roles that don’t include an MBA, but they are rare.
The reason people pay is the math works out. Spending $120k to unlock career tracks that include roles that pay $500,000 or more is a pretty straightforward cost-benefit analysis.
My spouse did an MBA at a top school and 15 years out a very large chunk of the class are CEOs of large corporations, founders of private equity firms, etc.
The value is mostly in the signaling and network. Being able to get time with half a dozen CEOs simply because you went to the same school is invaluable.
It's also true that MBAs used to be quite a bit cheaper, even accounting for inflation, and that there were almost certainly fewer opportunities for people with "just" solid STEM chops to earn much beyond mid-level professional salaries.
I’ve done part of an MBA program. I’ve only hit pause because I couldn’t make the workload work with how demanding my job is at the moment. That does mean that beyond experiencing the program itself, I spent a fair bit of time looking at MBA program curricula. What I found was a pretty significant amount of study into areas that to me seem integral to actually running a business in reality. The sort of stuff that techies love to pretend doesn’t exist, or that they can just intuit with a combination of reading a few Wikipedia articles + their largely incorrectly self-identified transferable expertise.
I don’t know if my MBA program is particularly good. Whilst it’s run by a legitimate institution it’s certainly not a particularly prestigious one. I’d expect that it is in a lot of ways very middle-of-the-road.
One thing it has done is reaffirm my pre-existing vague suspicion that, whilst there are obviously no shortage of formulaic, uninspired, and largely street-dumb MBAs out there, a lot of the hate for those with an MBA that I see in communities like Hacker News is probably misdirected hatred toward the realities of business. Especially given how many people here have grown up in a zero-interest environment where they could bounce from place to place being paid very well to sit around in beanbag chairs thinking about engineering problems whilst the money fairies without fail backed truckload after truckload of cash up to their San Francisco office loading docks.
You're conflating startups with the broader business world. Startup models are shit because there are so many unknowns and it's in the interests of the people making them to fluff them up as much as possible. In the other 99% of businesses, business models can be quite accurate and are valuable tools for decision making and evaluation. For example, public companies often issue revenue guidance and analysts do their own earnings projections based on models.
Ideally your business model is evidence (including to yourself) that you've done some hard thinking about who your customers, suppliers, and competitors are - and about some basic dynamics of your space.
It doesn't mean anyone should expect it to go that way exactly and the deviation from projection could be quite large, but it's still miles ahead of someone who's not bothered to think through it at all in most cases.
Everyone knows the forecasts don’t accurately predict the future. That’s not the point of forecasts.
The value of models is the assumptions you put in. How big is the potential market? What price do you think you can charge? How much of the market will go to competitors.
The value of forecasts is in pressure testing assumptions and opportunity.
>If it were possible to accurately forecast cost and revenue, then everyone would start a profitable business, right?
that doesn't follow: it's just as likely if you could accurately forecast cost and revenue, then you wouldn't start many businesses because you'd know they wouldn't be profitable
Both of you get to the same place: if it's possible to accurately forecast cost and revenue, then all the businesses started by people who can do that will be profitable.
And there are so few serial entrepreneurs in existence that we have the following pair of conclusions:
A. It isn't very probable (we are mostly seeing survivor bias)
B. People who can do that start exactly one business, which is sufficiently profitable that they never bother to do it again
Both of these conclusions lead to the situation that picking a serial entrepreneur to invest in is just buying a lottery ticket.
As someone who got a long ago MBA (and has also worked as an engineer), a few comments.
That's a lot of books. I'm not sure it's more total reading than I did in an MBA program but it's certainly more books than I read.
I'm not sure the best way to replicate case study discussions--which is a big part of most actual MBA programs and is probably at least somewhat important. (Also projects as opposed to just reading.)
Seems very light on finance and accounting. Honestly accounting doesn't need a lot--the main lesson is things are this way because the financial accounting standards board says it is--but the equivalent of core Finance 101 is probably necessary even if you're not going to be primarily a finance person. What I didn't have in B-school but would want today is a deeper dive into VC/startup/etc. term sheets and the like.
There's no real operations on that list. Probably don't really need real operations research but some basic manufacturing lingo and concepts would be useful.
I'd probably look for a basic Marketing 101 sort of book/course in addition to UX and things along those lines.
I'll stop there but I'd probably encourage more reading along the lines of what's actually used in MBA programs and looking at ways/materials that are closer to case studies and learning by doing.
I think if I were actually putting together a curriculum (and not worrying about copyright/access), I'd probably have a lot more chapters of books and articles/papers/webpages/videos than I would complete books. And I think you need to bring in discussions/projects in some manner in any case.
> I'm not sure the best way to replicate case study discussions--which is a big part of most actual MBA programs and is probably at least somewhat important. (Also projects as opposed to just reading.)
As someone who did an MBA twenty years ago, I think this is a really important point
The value for me wasn’t the reading, it’s the discussion the exploration of different (sometime opposed) viewpoints and understanding the differences between them
Talking to friends who’ve done other Masters degrees one of the key things we all agree on is they taught us how to “think better” and not sure you’ll get that from reading a bunch of books
I think if I really wanted to put together a DIY MBA, I'd try to gather some friends who would be open for semi-regular discussions, put some lightweight projects together, and some reading/watching that was also relatively short and lightweight. My goal would be to distill things down to something busy, working people with lives might actually be willing to do absent the spur of getting a diploma.
The author missed the Fred Wilson's MBA Mondays Archive [1] which personally was a great resource in the quest for my "business success" (whatever it means). There is a more organized and illustrated edition here [2]. BTW, I always return to some articles such as "Commission Plans" for Sales [3].
Regarding books:
- Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew Grove (Intel) [4]. It is always in my "pocket". It is real experience with pain points from a top CEO, not an academic exercise.
- Other books that are not focused on business but are more "epistemological". For example, "How Life Imitates Chess" by Garry Kasparov [5]. I don't know who created this title for the book though. Many autobiographies, in general, or good business biographies such as "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire" [6].
The author does acknowledge this in thier linked post, but I think it's worth pointing out. They are in the UK, where MBAs are not as credentialized. DIY MBAs are low value.
You can get a BS in Business Administration, or even a minor in it, and have more knowledge and experience than from reading these books. Guess what? Even with those credentials, they will not help you. "I have an MBA from [prestigious school]" are the magic words. The hiring managers don't care about lesser credentials or actual knowledge.
It’s very likely this person doesn’t care about the credentials but rather just wants to gain the knowledge to do something themselves.
I more or less did this for years by reading a ton of books + many years of HN / articles / interviews / videos + startup weekend events + tried starting things + coding hobby for years + enterprise consulting work, and now I’m fairly well equipped to co-lead the company that I do.
The first 5+ years of doing this I debated attempting to go to a prestigious school for an MBA, primary reason (95%) was for the networking opportunity (meeting great likeminded or driven people), (0% because I would’ve been able to tell people I had an MBA from somewhere for job purposes, the snobbery from that would have been a detriment often instead I believe), and 5% for the education which I think has value but when it’s free and I had the motivation there was no reason to pay $100ks for that. At this point this company is doing fairly well so although I would love to meet more driven and likeminded people, I’m not sure it the best path to do so anymore for me.
A classic case of Goodhart's law. If your metric is convincing a (rather bad) hiring manager, why even bother? And once you've convinced them, what do you do?
MBAs are low value...depending on perspective. Around these parts, they are deemed very value, or at least in low regard. Look at Boeing as exhibit A.
If you're an engineering company that allows MBAs to make the decisions, you won't be a good engineering company for long. At that point, you become the dead carcass that the MBAs point to as to what their purpose is.
You make a great suggestion. Not that B-schools get everything right or that they're on the cutting edge but, to the degree curricula and lectures are online, I'd probably lean that way more than bestselling business titles. (Which, truth be told, often have a chapter or two that distills down a lot of the key content. In some cases, they're worth the lengthier read to reinforce the key content but often they're not.)
I find lectures much better than books. A lot more engaging and good lecturers are also good storytellers.
Especially if you watch lectures at 2x the speed, you can save A LOT of time. And I'd bet your understanding is better, since lecturers can think through problems out loud. Indispensable, IMO.
I sort of hate doing the 2x thing but I agree with your broader point. My good lecturers were, as you say, good storytellers. Including the guy who won the (I know not really before some pedant corrects me) Nobel Prize for behavioral economics.
His list begins with The 10 Day MBA which is an excellent book I recommend highly. It gives a brief overview constituting 90+% of what you need to know. The other books on his list, many of which I have read and enjoyed myself, “merely” give greater detail on the material covered by T10DMBA (except macroeconomics which is rarely MBA-relevant anyway).
The book is humorous, but quite serious about the material.
It's probably useful to know something about the various macroeconomic theories so you can at least nod knowledgeably :-) But it's not that useful practically. Traditional micro is worth knowing. I was also lucky enough to take a behavioral economics course (before it was called that) and a somewhat related pricing strategy course.
Sounds cliched, but the remaining 10% is real world experience applying and reflecting on a myriad of (sometimes pseudo-) psychology concepts developed over the years in the areas of leadership, self awareness, and workplace behaviour.
I think there’s a lot of ‘teachings’ in those books, but the applying and reflecting it is the ‘10%’.
I also did an MBA, but my incentive was mainly for the technical skills. Ive been lucky in that I’ve always worked in high performing and highly experienced teams within my industry (th cybers), so the need to ‘manage’ people is somewhat moot, but it did teach me a lot about managing and influencing and coaching other less experienced (or unprofessional) teams and stakeholders.
I was going to give the list of readings I had for my MBA which I finished last year, but my comment was too long to be posted here.
I read a lot. Probably at least 10x more than what is listed in this DIY MBA list. However, the reading was probably only 10% of the actual effort that went into my MBA. There were a lot of projects, group projects and case studies to do, as well as real-life consultancy work, and meetings... with other students, and with real companies. And then... there was also lectures, about 8 hours a week worth of lectures, and then annoying interactive activities I had to complete each week, which were designed to prove that I was indeed actually doing the readings. Some courses wouldn't let you progress to the next week of readings etc, unless you completed the interactive activities, which would then unlock the next week's coursework. Other courses would just take a percentage off your final grade for every activity that was missed.
A list of readings is just kind of not really the same experience, even if it contains a bit of the same knowledge. It's also about how you take the knowledge and implement it in real-life situations.
As a previous M7 FTMBA student who dropped out halfway through to do a startup, the real MBA is starting a company. Venture, cash flow/lifestyle or otherwise.
There have been a few companies advertising something like this (e.g., oneday.io) where you build a startup and earn an accredited professional MBA along the way.
You can't get the MBA experience reading books alone. People expect MBAs to be able to communicate effectively, present themselves confidently, and to be able to manage projects. Every MBA program I know requires students to complete projects to apply concepts, often working with other students and real businesses. A DIY MBA experience would involve a lot of consulting with businesses to help solve their challenges.
There's some element of basic accounting/finance/operations/marketing/etc. that you can get pretty quickly. But, as you say, it's not the equivalent of going through a longer interactive program than reading a few books.
PersonalMBA really is a my go-to reference because it is very comprehensive and extremely accessible online. First 5 chapters tackle the strategy behind the '5 parts of every business'
1) Value Creation 2) Marketing 3) Sales 4) Value Delivery 5) Finance
The next 6 Chapters deal with the tactics involved in executing that strategy. 6) The human mind 7) Working With Yourself 8) Working With Others 9) Understanding Systems 10) Analyzing Systems 11) Improving Systems
Been running my startup for 7 years, not a unicorn but fairly successful. Can honestly say I’ve not made it through a single one of these books. Certainly have tried and have got a few nuggets, but nothing has compared to learning this stuff first hand, on the job. Sure having passable knowledge of this list is useful, but you’re going to hire in people/consultants/external providers to do almost every module on this list for you at some point, you’ll learn from them firsthand. You don’t need to read this list to get a business off the ground and by the time you do you’ll need to surround yourself with these specialists in some form pretty quickly.
This list is long on fluff and extremely short on any hard technical skills such as corporate finance and valuation.
If you're interested in seeing if finance is for you, I highly suggest reading Investment Valuation by Aswath Damodaran. Highly respected professor and most of his stuff is free on his website as well.
The problem with long reading lists is that it forces you closer to a box-checking mentality. That's dangerous for learning because people aren't computers---we don't read a book, ingest all the information, go onto another one, and then end with the sum total of the information as useable knowledge.
We need context. That's why the order of books, selections from books, and the discussion around books is so much more important than the books themselves, at least if your goal is true understanding.
This list is a good start, but if it is to help someone learn, it should be more than a list.
"The problem with long reading lists is that it forces you closer to a box-checking mentality."
Most MBAs are checkboxes so someone can get a higher paying job. Most people do not care about the theory, nor are they really concerned with being a good leader outside of their ego.
You’re being purposefully reductionist. But even if that’s that’s the sole purpose any one would do seek an MBA the GPs point stands — reading this list doesn’t even tick the “MBA checkbox”
The people seeking these kinds of lists are seeking checkboxes to tick. Of course this isn't the same as earning an MBA, but I guarantee some of the people searching for this kind of content will find it and follow it, believing it will get them somewhere because they checked the boxes on the list.
"At that point isn't all you have what you learn?"
Yes, but without the credential will you be given the opportunity to use it? Is it worth anything without being used? These are not the kinds of questions readers are asking themselves when looking for MBA reading lists. Many see the MBA as a checkbox (which it is) and seek checkbox style lists of books. So the length/style of the list isn't leading to the checkbox mentality, rather that mentality is common in the context of credentialization.
Munger recommended 6 intro textbooks that every businessman should know: one each in psychology, accounting, microeconomics, evolution, math and physics.
(1) In finance, there is portfolio expectation and variance in the efficient frontier, e.g., by Harry Markowitz. For more, there is modern portfolio theory. Also might look at the Black-Scholes work. And there is more.
(2) Might want some of the math of optimization, e.g., linear programming, quadratic programming, integer linear programming, dynamic programming.
(3) Some people would suggest some statistics -- random variables, expectation, variance, convergence of random variables, central limit theorem, model fitting (regression), hypothesis testing (Neyman-Pearson, non-parametric and resampling), experimental design.
(4) More generally, might just visit the Web sites of some MBA programs, get the list of courses and, when available, the texts, class notes, and references.
The references in the collection of this original post, what fraction are references of courses in MBA programs?
Listening to our podcast episodes on Business Books & Co. won't quite get you as much as reading the actual books, but it will follow a sort of 80/20 rule in that I think our episodes cover 80% of the major points in each book. Here are the episodes we've done on books in that list based on the categories the author ascribed:
We also have 30+ more episodes... many are book summaries/discussions but about 1/3 of recent episodes are author interviews. You can find all of our content for free on your podcast player of choice here: https://pnc.st/s/business-books
Ah, the book Hooked + the aspiring MBA... A match made in heaven. And probably more responsible for regrettable product decisions than any other combination in modern history.
Schooling should ground one in fundamentals, to some degree.
Maybe target fundamental principles instead of recent opinion if you have the time to learn and want to tranform your thinking for a lifetime?
Both MBA and medical schools are instead practice programs, where case studies exercise knowledge and principles you learned deeply or crammed. If you crammed, you get good at diagnosing and become primary care or first-line specialist. If you learned deeply, you can do M&A or be a researcher or nth-line specialist - likely some combination - or you flame out for lack of political skills or interest in the small niche available. Because they are practical, they produce a large stream of knowledge, for every business or medical case, that outsiders can enjoy and get familiar with. But the knowledge wouldn't qualify them to take on responsibility. That requires a series of validation steps where you handle increasing responsibility. So DIY MD/MBA won't get you in any door.
For business fundamentals, I would recommend reading transaction cost economics to understand the value of e.g., "disruption" or operations research in business. Marketing or product management is just hunting or bearing fruit; they make you a useful tool. TCE answers the real questions: what makes some companies huge or other markets scattered? It's grounding for strategic decision-making.
The problem with reading "winners" is the huge survivorship bias, and autobiographies are inevitably biased towards showing the author in a good light.
Well, things like law school & medical school have high rates of failure.
So if one of the successful that passed the bar & became doctors people say "They studied hard" — yet many failed, even when the also studied. Does that nullify the value of "studying hard"?
We know what the rates of failure are. We know that studying hard does not guarantee success and what the level of risk is.
We have no idea how many people tried to do the same thing as highly successful businesses and failed. We know that luck or resourced (initial funding, contacts, timing) not available to most people have played a part in many success stories. We know that things could have gone badly wrong for them (e.g. Richard Branson's family had to put up a lot of money including a £70k fine to avoid a prosecution for tax dodging). We know that the rate of failures in businesses (especially ambitious high risk high high risk high reward ones) is far higher than in medical school or law school.
All that makes survivourship bias a lot more relevant
The advice may have merit, but survivourship bias means it is not more credible because it comes from someone successful than the same advice from a random person.
No, it doesn’t nullify it, but it’s not exactly useful info?
And your analogy is a good one. When you read many of these books the “lesson” is really obvious too - “listen to your customer” or “aggressively cut costs in your supply chain”.
Those thinks are the basics of business. Everyone is trying to do those things.
Shout out to Four Steps to the Epiphany, since the act of actually researching and validating business ideas, then developing a sales pipelines touches on the majority of things that are important for early stage startups. Add in some books on leadership, HR and accounting if your product takes off.
Alternate reading / requirement list. Basically covers meaningful coursework and offers some useful books about how large organizations function (or do not), plus some mind-stimulation on power dynamics.
In no particular order.
- MOOC, Fin, Acct, Stat, Calc, Ops 101, 102
- Excel, SQL
- Launch Decision
- The Prince
- Starboard Olive Garden Slide Deck
- Ogilvy’s tips on writing (it’s what you don’t send that counts folks)
- Barbarians at the Gate
- Pearl Harbor Warning and Decision
- On Bullshit
- This is Water
- Invisible Asymptotes
- Toyota Production System
- The meeting scene in Margin Call remains the most accurate portrayal of a high-stakes meeting as a junior staffer
- Deploy a simple marketing and e-commerce stack and make some profit
- Use slides to teach someone about something intensely uninteresting
- Become effective at using CHAMPS KNOW forecasting heuristics
- Read and understand a few mid-cap and large-cap 10-Ks and 10-Qs.
I was surprised when I did my MBA how they didn't cover anything to do with entrepreneurship... but then again it is a masters of business administration.
This is an alright list of books, but as other posters have said anyone following it will sorely miss out on practice experience.
Entrepreneurship is the application of everything else they teach - marketing, communication, finance, etc etc. I have a hard time believing it can be taught. You either have the drive to apply other topics in a risky way or you don’t. In the entrepreneurship courses I took in my MBA, the approach was nowhere near what I did in practice starting a business nor what any other entrepreneur I know did. But the rest of the classes were of value (mostly…)
To the extent that a real MBA credential is important for a job as it was when I was initially hired out of B-school, no? To the degree that an MBA from certain elite institutions can create connections, no? To the degree that you are familiar with various concepts that may be relevant for your job, possibly? Especially later in career. Absolutely no one cares what degrees I have at that point.
There are basically two skills you really need to hone in an MBA. The first are the hard skills/knowledge on finance, accounting, (basic) stats, and (basic) economics. The second is being able to assess and analyze business models, from both strategic and operational angles. The former can be learned in MOOCs, while the latter is best approached with case studies, ideally discussed as a group. I'd honestly suggest trying to start a business/entrepreneurs book club with ~12-20 people to try to replicate that experience over reading books on your own.