Lela Davidson
We offer a lot of book lists here at Business Pundit. Business books give you access to some of the most successful business minds. You can read them at your own pace relatively inexpensively. And no matter what education you pursue, reading makes up a huge part of the learning. This is the logic behind the PMBA (personal MBA), which is essentially a huge list of great business books.
What is a PMBA?
Developed from an original list of books recommended by Seth Godin the Personal MBA is designed to help you educate yourself about advanced business concepts on your own time and without going into a classroom or into debt.
According to the PMBA site:
The PMBA is more flexible than a traditional MBA program, doesn’t involve going into massive debt, and won’t interrupt your income stream for two years. Just pick up one of these business books, learn as much as you can, discuss what you learn with others, then go out into the real world and make great things happen.
How Far Can You Go With Books?
I’m a huge fan of experiential learning. I really think most people need to get out there and get their hands dirty to fully understand something. So what good is reading a bunch of books? Presumably a person who’s going after this PMBA is highly motivated to learn the subjects the reading list covers. And presumably this person has a job – and it could be almost any job – that will allow at least some application of the new knowledge being acquired.
You don’t have to be the head of HR to apply the techniques of team building to your current position. And you don’t have to be a CEO to practice strategy planning. Taking on challenging roles in the job you have now, or even in volunteer opportunities, can build experience into the PMBA.
What do you have to lose?
Oliver Roland at Books That Can Change Your Life is already a successful entrepreneur. He’s set a goal to read 52 books off the PMBA list in 52 weeks, and he’s blogging the experience. I dare you to take a look at this post and not be inspired to read more. Maybe you don’t need to commit to the whole list, but maybe you could do 12 of the books on the list in a year.
So what? Who cares if you study your way to a PMBA? If you don’t value knowledge and education for its own sake, just imagine the conversations you could start with – oh I don’t know – hiring managers?
