How to Get an MBA (education) for $200
People ask me all the time if getting my MBA was “worth it.”
An MBA is an odd degree. For a JD, an MD, or even a PhD, you can say definitively that you have “become” something – a lawyer, a doctor, or an academic. You transform into something new.
What does an MBA make you? A good bullshitter?
It’s not as easy to point out what you have gained as with those other degrees. Plus no one wants to admit they wasted $140,000. So we usually say – of course it was worth it.
But that’s not really the idea behind this post. I wanted to write about how, in my experience, you can get most of the learning from an MBA pretty easily – I’d say for less than $200.
Here’s the list of ten or so books that I think will give you nearly the same educational value.
My List
There’s nothing deep about a lot of MBA courses. I found the most useful were finance, strategy, public speaking, and negotiations, all fairly easy subjects. And yet, these are some of the most useful skills you can have – not even in corporate careers, but for life in general.
That’s because ultimately, these are skills that every leader needs to succeed. My recommendations are all around many of these “soft skills,” and they can be useful even if you aren’t even in corporate: a lawyer, doctor, academic, or anything else.
Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher and William Ury.
Everything in life is a negotiation – you just don’t know it yet.
This book introduces useful concepts like BATNA and expanding the terms of trade. You don’t win by “beating” the other person.
One Up on Wall Street, by Peter Lynch.
Sacrilege! At Columbia b-school, “The Intelligent Investor” is equal to the Bible – but it’s also dense and very long. Unless you want to work in finance, this is enough for an introduction.
The Little Book that Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt also works as an alternative introduction if you are a little more sophisticated.
Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore.
Marketing is all about segments and adoption curves. This classic lays out the most basic concepts around both.
It also provides a structured approach to “innovation,” rather than just throwing crap at the wall.
Zero to One, by Peter Thiel.
There are a lot of books on strategy but few of the classics fit our tech-driven age.
Thiel walks through the lifecycle of starting something new, from ideation to competition to sales.
Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight.
Most modern MBAs focus on cases – situation-based stories where execs had to make a decision. Shoe Dog is like that, except it’s a series of cases on every business situation imaginable and a much more interesting read.
These first five are a good syllabus for understanding strategy, execution and business. I’ll cover the other 5 – more about persuasion and decision making – in next week’s post.
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