Josh Kaufman

Josh Kaufman is an American business author and self-educator whose The Personal MBA argues that business fundamentals can be learned outside formal MBA programmes.

Josh Kaufman is a self-educated entrepreneur and writer who built a following through his website PersonalMBA.com before publishing The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business in 2010. The book grew out of Kaufman’s research into whether the core knowledge taught in business schools could be acquired more efficiently and cheaply through careful self-study of the best available books. His reading list and subsequent book attempt to synthesise the essential concepts — value creation, marketing, sales, finance, systems thinking, human psychology — into a single accessible volume.

The Personal MBA is genuinely useful as a map of the conceptual territory of business. Kaufman writes clearly and organises his material well, and readers who are new to business thinking will find the book a more efficient introduction to core ideas than many more specialised texts. The book’s coverage of systems thinking and human behavioural psychology is particularly strong, drawing on a broad range of sources and distilling them without losing the essential insight.

The limitations are worth naming. The book is necessarily broad and sometimes shallow, and it cannot substitute for deep expertise in any single domain. Kaufman’s dismissal of MBA programmes is probably overstated — for careers in certain fields or companies, the credential and the network matter enormously regardless of the knowledge acquired. And some of the book’s summaries of other thinkers’ work are compressed to the point of distortion. But as a starting point for someone who wants to understand how businesses work and what the essential vocabulary of the domain is, The Personal MBA is a legitimate and valuable resource.