Honest book reviews: The Visual MBA by Jason Barron
For any noob(like me) who has never had any experience in management and simple accounting but wants to start ‘somewhere’ with their MBA journey.
This review is a part of a series of reviews on MBA books to help you with your MBA journey without spending thousands of dollars on college tuition. The order of the reviews is based on how academically advanced the books are, going from the easiest to the relatively harder.
The complete name of the book is The Visual MBA: Two Years of Business School Packed into One Priceless Book of Pure Awesomeness by Jason Barron and can be found at your nearest Barnes & Noble or on Amazon.com.
The Good
Probably the best part about the book is that it’s the easiest one to start with. The concepts are not explained in detail but give you the flavor of what lies in that world. This is extremely important to overcome your Atychiphobia, which otherwise will only increase if you start with some advanced books.
The book in itself is a pretty light read and can be finished in a day(not recommended) as most of the space is taken by illustrations, even then it successfully delivers a good enough explanation of different accounting and managerial terms including Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Financial ratios like Return-To-Equity, Net-Profit-Margin, Systematic Hiring, Venture Life Cycle, etc, which helped me understand how to measure the financial status/progress of the company on a very high level.
The Bad
It’s funny how illustrations in this book are supposed to be its biggest power, but my personal experience was quite the opposite(most of the time). Let me explain with an example: when you take a class, you take notes that are written in a concise way that only you can understand, you don’t do this on purpose, it is how the notes are supposed to be taken, you can read those notes later and recall all the concepts in detail. If you show them to your classmates, even they can understand the notes almost as well as you, but if you show them to a person who has no introduction to that topic/class, he/she will not be able to understand them.
The same is the case here, most of the illustrations are just visual notes that will make sense to someone who already has been introduced to such concepts earlier, for us newbies, it sometimes gets tricky and does not make sense. The same is with some of the later chapters of the book. But, do not let any of this discourage you, it’s all about learning.
The Ugly
No book is ugly, I’m just writing what I personally found slightly tiresome while reading and that is some of the notes or their parts are written in very light colors on white pages that too in some places with very thin and small font sizes. It gets in the way of reading due to visual irksomeness.
Conclusion
The book will not make you a genius in the subject but is still recommended for novices, especially to overcome their fear of failure and open the gates for more advanced concepts in the subject.
It’s a definite 3 out of 5 stars. ★★★✰✰.
In the upcoming articles, we will discuss some advanced books on the same topic along with sister topics of business and entrepreneurship. So make sure you subscribe :). Thanks for reading!
