My Cheap(er) MBA

I have completed the first three books in the Quickstart and have decided to start on the Analysis section of the Personal MBA.  The area of accounting and finance is where my greatest lack of knowledge and experience is.  This is the topic that set me on my research that eventually led to the Personal MBA.  I bought all the books as a pack (you can buy all the books in a section now with a small discount from the Personal MBA site.)  I am starting in today on The McGraw-Hill Finance for Non-Financial Managers.  Should have the rest of my thoughts on Strengthsfinder 2.0 and 10 days to Faster Reading up soon.

The second book in the QuickStart section (of the Personal MBA) is entitled The Personality Code by Travis Bradberry. Travis Bradberry is the president and co-founder of TalentSmart. His background is in clinical and industrial organizational psychology (dual doctorate). He has authored and coauthored several books including The Emotional Intelligence Quickbook and has been featured in many magazines.

The basics of this book are:

• Your personality is fixed by the time you are an adult
• You should understand what your personality is and its strengths and weaknesses
• Success will come through self awareness of your personality and others
• There are key strategies of how to relate and manage to each distinct personality that can be learned and developed

The book provides the reader with an ACCESS CODE to go to a website and take a personality test called the iDISC. The iDISC is based off the DISC test but has been modified and expanded to now map the resulting 4 values of Discipline, Interpersonal, Stable and Conscience to 14 personality profiles. The test basically has you pick between a series of adjective pairs which one describes you more. In the end you get you iDISC profile and associated “personality”. I was a Motivator. Here is my graph:

The book provided with me a new model of thinking about myself. I have taken Meyers-Briggs and other tests including one from a firm similar to TalentSmart (they produced a document that was 130 pages on me). Comparatively this test seemed to be less insightful than others (less money as well). However, the emphasis on personality and that it is fixed was a new idea. The emphasis on how to manage others of specific personalities and what personalities conflict was interesting as well. The thing lacking from this book was any sense of how to determine others personalities. All you get are the generalities of the other profiles that you then need to try and match up to the people you work with and manage. It would have been great to have some more insight and assistance on how to look at others and what to look for to determine their personalities. The iDISC test itself offers little help here since it is all based on your preference and rating of yourself using adjectives.

I have taken time and gone through the team and people I work with on a regular basis and tried to establish a “personality” for them. I reviewed the sections how to manage these profile types and wrote some ideas down for how to manage and communicate with each of these people. I am trying to review these and keep these pointers and approaches in mind as I email, have meetings or interact with these individuals. At a minimum, this book has helped me become more cognizant of how I am communicating and interacting with others and how I should be adjusting it to different people’s personalities.

The original plan was to read 1 book every two weeks.  For maybe the first and only time, I am ahead of schedule.  I have completed two point five books so far (in the first week).  This week my goals are as follows:

• Complete 10 Days To Faster Reading
• Work through results of StrengthFinders 2.0
• Finish comparison of SF vs Personality Code
• Develop plan for going through StrenghtFinders with my leadership team
• Order books for next phase (Analysis)

I really enjoyed the StrengthFinders 2.0 material.  I look forward to really thinking through it this week and seing how it lines up with what I learned from the Personality Code.

It seems common at the start of any new eduational experience to perform personal assesments.  This makes sense for the most part, as the educational insitution wants you to undertand who you are in hopes that it will help you with your learning.  The funny thing to me is, that in each of the experiences I have had (undergrad, grad school and work), the use of the results is shortlived beyond the individual.  Not a single one of my professors ever brought up my Myers-Briggs score or asked me how I learned best.  The approach never changed towards educating me, I had to change my approach based on my understanding of myself.  Even at work where we had our entire leadership and executive team take these tests and meet with coaches to udnestand it, we never really met and figured out how this meant we could work better together or what changes we should make to the team structure or organization.  I am sure there are places and organizations who make better use of this information but to date my experience has not been great.

I was not surprised that in starting the Personal MBA, their were books meant to help us understand who we are and how we work most effectively.  I am through the first of these (The Personality Code) and getting ready to start the second (StrenghtFinder 2.0).  The great thing about a self-driected program is I can adjust it completely to my style.  I am going to post my results under a page here (Self-Awareness).  The goal is to remind myself as I approach each book and application of information to revisit this understanding of myself and make sure I am refining it and applying it (if applicable) to whatever I am working through.

I am curious of what others people’s experiences are with these types of books and tests.  For me they are great when I go through them but qucikly fade from an active component of what I am learning or woorking on.  I am hoping to see if I can change that.

In trolling through the Personal MBA Forums, I found a link to an article called “How to Read a Business Book“. I found the overall idea of the article to be very insightful. The article is a quick read and provides a nice framework to think about in reading business books. His article is a summary of the thoughts of Mortimer J. Adler’s book “How To Read a Book“. He takes the basic ideas and summarizes them in a context for reading a business book and adds some of his own insights and ideas.

It is worth the 10 minutes it will take you to read it. It gave me some good ideas and questions to be asking while I am reading all of my books.

- What is the main “proposition”?
- Is the author using inductive or deductive reasoning?
- If deductive, do I agree with the assumptions being made? Is the reasoning logical?
- If inductive is the data sample resonable?

My favorite quote from the article is “Remember, data is not the plural of anecdotes.”.

Anyhow, this is a worthwhile read and I appreciated the authors insight and summary.

This is the week I am starting to execute my reading plan. I get my first selection of books in the mail tomorrow and I will be getting right to it. Up first is 10 days to Faster Reading. I have read other speed reading books in the past (The Evelyn Wood 7-Day Speed Reading & Learning Program) and consider myself a fairly fast reader. However, I am looking forward to the learning some additional techniques. I will likely start in on the one of the other two books in a few days to start applying the techniques.

I have read the comments on the Personal MBA site regarding planning. I like the idea of synaptic reading. I am going to start with the books in the Quick Start section.

The challenge is where to go after that. I have looked through the different sections and am very interested in a number of the books. I am trying to heed the advice and idea of focusing on an area that I will be easily able to implement the things that I am learning. If I constantly do this I am afraid I will never get to certain areas (as they are not really part of my job). I think I am going to focus on the areas where I know the least amount. I have included below my current prioritized list of the categories, as I will go through it and at least my initial take on a plan for all of the reading.

The recommendation is to go through a book a week. I am not sure I can keep that pace up with my current schedule. My plan is to go through a book every two weeks. The first week I will read the book and the second week I will review what I learned by making notes, writing summaries and using other approached to ensure good retention (need to learn these first).
(I am not really starting until I get the first book (should be starting on September 3). Here is the current reading list: http://personalmba.com/recommended-business-books/

There are 69 books on the list. At 1 every two weeks that is 138 weeks. Just over two years. I think I can do it faster than that. Some books will not require the full two weeks and some I have read before so I can just go through the key points as a refresher. I am going to complete them by category in the following order (at least that is my current plan):

1. Quick Start
2. Analysis
3. Management
4. Personal Effectiveness
5. Business History
6. Applied Psychology
7. Business Reference
8. Strategy
9. Commercialization
10. Entrepreneurship

The only thinking behind this so far is to start with what I think I know the least amount of and am having some challenges with today. I am sure this will change more than once. I have constructed a high level schedule and will create detail plan for each book. The only modification I may make to this is to read one of the Personal Effectiveness books after the quick start or as part of the quick start plan. Bit Literacy is a book about how to use your computer to manage information effectively. It focuses on email from the sounds of it but these improvements in time management earlier will help me have more time to read.

NOTE: The categorization and the recommended books are all the work of Josh Kaufmann. The link to the site is http://www.personalmba.com/.

I am not even sure how I discovered it but I am excited. I have been debating going to get an MBA for a long time. Five years ago, a counselor of mine at work told me I should wait. He said I would be better f getting some real world experience first. It has been 5 years and I think he was right. I have learned so much in the past 7 years in my current job. There is no way I would have the types of experiences I have, had if I left for school back then. However, now as I am in more significant roles, I am constantly running up against the limits of my knowledge and capabilities.

For example, this past year I have articulated a plan for the practice I manage and have been working towards seeing it executed. It has been a real struggle. I have the vision, I am just not sure of the best way to articulate, structure and execute on this. I am sure there is a combination of technical skills and personal skills I need to develop to do these things better.

With that in mind, I have returned to the idea of going to school. The cost and time required are too high for me to learn what I want as fast I want to. As I was searching for online programs, somehow I ran into the idea of the Personal MBA. This program encourages people to use self-study and some online collaboration to learn quickly the areas that are most relevant to you. They provide a reading list, community forums and even a personal coaching if you want help getting started or staying motivated.

The goal of this blog is to help me chronicle my efforts, the things I have learned and to participate in conversations around the topics I am learning about.