The 30 Day MBA Read Free Page B

business and the management of organizations.
    You certainly don’t need to spend a fortune in time or money to gain MBA knowledge and skill. There is no aspect of business school teaching and virtually no world-class professor that you can’t listen to for free to complement the content of this book. But you do need willpower! If you do decide that business school is right for you, the appendix will help you choose the right one for you, and the book will be a sound preparation for the programme and a worthwhile resource when you start revising for the exams.
    How this book is organized and how to use it
    All business disciplines claim, some with more justification than others, that theirs is the overarching subject or starting point. The marketers claim the customer as king; human resources specialists persist in believing that nothing happens without people; strategists insist that competitive ad-vantage is fundamental to enduring success; entrepreneurs say that they are in at the birth of all ventures; accountants see the only truth being in numbers; even quantitative analysis has history on its side as being a founding subject in management theory.
    To sidestep the argument, in part at least, this book is organized alpha-betically, in three groupings. Accounting, finance, marketing and organ-izational behaviour are together at the start of the book. These contain the basic tools that an MBA will use or need to refer to more or less every working day. Strategy comes at the end of the book as the coordinating discipline. It could just as easily come at the beginning, but to understand strategy you need a reasonable grasp of the four first disciplines. The five bookend disciplines are in something of a chicken and egg situation. You can’t have any one of these without the other, but where it all begins is more academic than useful as a point for debate.
    The remaining disciplines are covered, also in alphabetical order, in the middle of the book. Ideally you should read the first four chapters and the chapter on strategy first. These will take about half of your 30 days. If you are an accountant, have taken a business or economics degree, or have a marketing or human resources professional qualification, that time will be scaled back. Then if you have an immediate strategic issue at work, perhaps concerned with an acquisition, divestment, entering a new market or changing direction, go straight to the chapter on strategy. While reading that, you will almost certainly need to refresh yourself on some aspects of the first four chapters. This chapter will probably need a further three or four days to assimilate. The middle chapters and the electives you can read in order of personal preference, or alphabetically as set out. That should take up the remaining 10 days or so of your schedule. By way of a bonusyou will find that a number of the tools and concepts straddle disciplines. For example, while Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is covered in the marketing chapter, it is equally applicable in dealing with employees or negotiating with suppliers. Break-even analysis is equally applicable in accounting, marketing and economics.
    This weighting corresponds closely to the emphasis you will find put on these subjects at top business schools. Also, as at school, you should tackle the subjects in bursts of an hour or so and certainly not in whole days and weeks. You need to take time to assimilate the subject and try the concepts out in live situations. So, for example, you could spend a couple of hours reading the section on balance sheets, then get your own company’s balance sheet and check out your understanding of it. If you need any further clarification you could talk in an informed way with your company’s accountant.
    You should draw up a timetable spread over the time period allocated for your 30-day MBA, say 12, 24 or 36 weeks. Then mark out the hours allocated for each subject, not forgetting to