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The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business QUOTES

The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business QUOTES

1 " Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

2 " Every successful business (1) creates or provides something of value that (2) other people want or need (3) at a price they're willing to pay, in a way that (4) satisfies the purchaser's needs and expectations and (5) provides the business sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

3 " College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

4 " Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

5 " Business schools don't create successful people. They simply accept them, then take credit for their success. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

6 " You can't make positive discoveries that make your life better if you never try anything new. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

7 " Whoever best describes the problem is the one most likely to solve it. — "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

8 " Every time your customers purchase from you, they’re deciding that they value what you have to offer more than they value anything else their money could buy at that moment. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

9 " Retired general Colin Powell famously advocates collecting half of the information available, then making a decision, even though your information is clearly incomplete. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

10 " Improve by 1% a day, and in just 70 days, you’re twice as good. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

11 " Here’s a curious fact about human beings: we have a really hard time realizing that something isn’t there. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

12 " There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else. —SAM WALTON, FOUNDER OF WALMART A "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

13 " Fitbit is a company that knows the value of Shadow Testing. Founded by Eric Friedman and James Park in September 2008, Fitbit makes a small clip-on exercise and sleep data-gathering device. The Fitbit device tracks your activity levels throughout the day and night, then automatically uploads your data to the Web, where it analyzes your health, fitness, and sleep patterns. It’s a neat concept, but creating new hardware is time-consuming, expensive, and fraught with risk, so here’s what Friedman and Park did. The same day they announced the Fitbit idea to the world, they started allowing customers to preorder a Fitbit on their Web site, based on little more than a description of what the device would do and a few renderings of what the product would look like. The billing system collected names, addresses, and verified credit card numbers, but no charges were actually processed until the product was ready to ship, which gave the company an out in case their plans fell through. Orders started rolling in, and one month later, investors had the confidence to pony up $2 million dollars to make the Fitbit a reality. A year later, the first real Fitbit was shipped to customers. That’s the power of Shadow Testing. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

14 " Options are often an overlooked form of value—flexibility is one of the Three Universal Currencies (discussed later). Find a way to give people more flexibility, and you may discover a viable business model. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

15 " If you want an audience, start a fight. —IRISH PROVERB "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

16 " A great example of Guiding Structure is the “Sterile Cockpit Rule” that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) instituted in 1981. Most airline accidents happen below ten thousand feet, where distractions can be deadly. Above ten thousand feet, pilots can talk about anything they want, but below ten thousand feet, the only discussion permitted is about information directly related to the flight in progress. By eliminating distractions, the Sterile Cockpit Rule reduces errors and accidents. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

17 " A good salesman, as the old (and politically incorrect) saying goes, can sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo. It's a cliché, but there's some truth to it: Inuit who live above the Arctic Circle use insulated refrigerators to keep their food from freezing in subzero temperatures "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

18 " Goods in any storehouse are useless until somebody takes them out and puts them to the use they were meant for. That applies to what man stores away in his brain, too. —THOMAS J. WATSON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF IBM "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

19 " Experimentation is the essence of living a satisfying, productive, fulfilling life. The more you Experiment, the more you learn, and the more you’ll achieve. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

20 " Ideas are cheap—what counts is the ability to translate an idea into reality, which is much more difficult than recognizing a good idea. "

― Josh Kaufman , The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business