The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List

Category: Strategy

2007 Edition: Revised and Updated

by Josh Kaufman

Business schools don’t have a monopoly on worldly wisdom. If you're serious about learning advanced business principles, the Personal MBA can help. The Personal MBA recommended reading list is the tangible result of hundreds of hours of reading and research, and features only the very best books the business press has to offer. So skip the fancy diploma and $150,000 loan - you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.

To learn more about the Personal MBA, read the manifesto.

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Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies by Nikos Mourkogiannis

If you want to lead your company, you must think about purpose.

Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies is about your business' ultimate, fundamental strategy: why does your firm exist, beyond the easy answer of making money? The clarity of you answer will largely determine everything from your company culture to your staff's morale.

The primary insight of Purpose is that people are inspired and motivated by factors beyond the bottom line: they crave a meaning behind their actions powerful enough to give them motivation to complete the work and hope that their work is moving them towards a better future. Mourkogiannis discusses the four primary business purposes: Discovery, Helping, Achievement, and Heroism, and gives many historical examples of businesses that have recognized their purpose.

This is one of the rare books about leadership and business strategy that can fundamentally change how you view your business.

(Tip: This book contains a fantastic appendix with “Fifty Key Points” for easy reference and review.)

(Discuss this book in the PMBA Member Forums)

Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter

Michael Porter has been a world-renowned expert on corporate strategy for decades, and his books and papers are a staple of business school classrooms around the world. The “five forces” model of corporate competition presented in Competitive Strategy provides an intuitive and thorough way to analyze the attractiveness of any existing industry.

By paying particular attention to the power of suppliers and customers, the threats of new entry and substitutes, and the level of internal rivalry in the industry, Porter argues that it's possible to identify opportunities and develop strategies that create a profitable, defensible competitive position for your firm.

If you're involved in or fascinated by the global game of business dominance, read this book: it's still the best overview of competitive business strategy available.

(Discuss this book in the PMBA Member Forums)

Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

The thesis of Blue Ocean Strategy is simple: why compete with other firms if you don’t have to?

In contrast to Porter’s work, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne advocate a different approach to strategy: focus on creating new industries that change the competitive landscape completely. By focusing your resources on creating uncontested market space (a “Blue Ocean”), you’re working to simultaneously make your firm the industry leader and make your current competition irrelevant.

This book will help you identify new areas of business that your company can pioneer. After all, there’s no sense in operating in competitive war-zones (“Red Oceans”) if you have a choice.

(Discuss this book in the PMBA Member Forums)

Seeing What’s Next by Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth, Scott D. Anthony

Clayton Christensen is famous for developing theories of why firms rise and fall in The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution. Seeing What's Next is a comprehensive compilation of the ideas presented in both of these landmark books, with a smattering of business history thrown in for good measure.

This book attempts to answer the question: “How will innovation change an industry, and what impact will this have on the firms I care about?” By building on a framework of three core theories of innovation, the authors develop a three-part process of predicting industry change: (1) identifying signals of change; (2) analyzing competitive battles; and (3) understanding strategic choices.

Predicting the future is notoriously difficult, but the authors provide an approachable model for making the best decisions you can with the information you have at your disposal.

(Discuss this book in the PMBA Member Forums)

The Elegant Solution by Matthew E. May

Most businesses want to be innovative, but struggle to translate new ideas into real results. According to Matthew May, Toyota implements over 1 million ideas every single year, so they're a natural business to study.

The Elegant Solution examines Toyota's corporate culture of innovation and continual improvement to discover the principles that enable them to generate ideas and put them into practice every single day.

According to May, the best innovations are "elegant" - they completely resolve the need, expend a minimum of effort and expense, and set the stage for further improvements. Using a useful "Problem / Cause / Solution" format, you'll learn how to identify elegant solutions, find areas of your business that are stifling innovation, and reinforce cultural principles that will encourage your colleagues to bring their best ideas to the table.

While this book is ostensibly about the Toyota Production System (which is also covered in PMBA selection Lean Thinking), the focus of the text is not operations: it's culture, process, and experimentation. You'll learn how Toyota's people work together to examine their business, create hypotheses and small tests that fit, then systematically roll-out the solutions that work to improve the business continually over time.

(Discuss this book in the PMBA Member Forums)

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