How to Educate Yourself

An Interview With PMBA Founder Josh Kaufman

Today, we’d like to feature Josh Kaufman, founder of the legendary PMBA project that has provided a new perspective on business management education.

In his own little way, he has unleashed a momentum that will forever alter the face of MBA and education, people can actually have do-it-yourself-MBAs. In this interview, he shares with us insights into the art and science of education — which after all simply means LEARNING.

Take us back to when YOU were starting PMBA. What was YOUR original motivation?

When I started the Personal MBA, I was finishing my undergraduate degree, and was preparing to start a full-time job in marketing as an Assistant Brand Manager at Procter & Gamble. Almost all of my peers were going to have MBAs from top-15 programs, which was a bit intimidating. I wanted to continue to enhance my understanding of business, but it made no sense for me to give up two years of salary and take on enormous amounts of debt to get a job I already had. Instead of going to school, I committed to educating myself, and started reading business books and resources voraciously.

The official PMBA project came about thanks to the inspiration of Seth Godin, who suggested on his blog that people could skip MBA programs by learning from their current work and reading 30–40 good business books. That was exactly what I was doing, so I shared what I’d been doing on my personal website. Seth was kind enough to direct people to the list of resources I put together, and the project snowballed from there. As more people discovered the project and shared their experiences, my research intensified, and the project grew.

The PMBA reading list is currently in its fifth revision, and I’m in the process of writing my first book, which will come out in September, 2010. In addition, I just launched the Personal MBA Business Crash Course, which provides participants a world-class business education in 12 weeks. I expect the project to be going strong for many years to come.

What’s the best way to get a great education?

Education is about what happens in your head, not what happens in a classroom.

Concepts and information are best learned by reading on your own, conducting personal research, and discussing your thoughts with others. Practices and techniques are best learned hands-on, either via experimentation or some form of apprenticeship.

Classroom education is time-intensive and — for most people — an inefficient and inexpensive way to learn. It’s far better to save time and money by focusing on learning what you need to know by gathering information and seeking out mentors yourself.

Who’s leading in maximizing online methods to market brands?

Good question. Marketing brands is a tough business — you can’t make someone care about something they’re not already interested in. One of the big shifts of the last decade is making business more human, which helps people connect with who you are and what you stand for. Big companies have a lot of difficulty doing this — it’s hard to put a personal face on a gigantic company, and most large companies were built around interruption, which no longer works. It’s difficult to think of a successful brand that was built by a big company advertising campaign in the past 10 years.

The best examples of brand marketing I’ve seen recently have come from smaller online businesses like 37signals, Zappos, and Slicehost/Rackspace. They have a very clear target customer, aren’t afraid of showing that the business is run by real human beings, and consistently do things to increase their reputation with their prospects and customers over time.

“Brand” is mostly a fancy word for reputation, and reputations grow by doing things that make people think highly of you. It’s really not any more complicated than that.

How did YOU learn Tibetan Throat Singing?

Research and experimentation. I was interested, so I started finding more information about how to do it. I’m still not sure if I’m doing it right, but the experiments are fun, and I’m learning.

What should be the right perception of Failure?

Very few “failures” are permanently damaging.

Experimentation is the fastest way to learn, but it also opens you to the risk of experiencing disappointment, confusion, or blowback if something doesn’t work. If you’re not willing to flop every now and again, you’re really crippling yourself — things that don’t work give you a ton of useful information that can lead you to the things that do work.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve tried something on the Personal MBA website that’s flopped — I’m flopping in some way every day. It’s never fun to be disappointed after having high expectations, but without experimenting, I’d never have discovered the things that now allow me to teach business via the Personal MBA full-time.

The trick is to keep your experiments small, fast, and clear. That allows you to learn what works as quickly as possible without risking everything on any single idea. You never really know what will flop and what will stick, so always keep trying new things.

Define Success for us.

Personally, I agree with Thoreau’s definition: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

If you’re spending most of your time working on things you care about and you’re having the experiences you want to be having, that’s success.

Thinking of success more as a “state of being” and less as an accomplishment is a very useful mindshift. Instead of focusing on how to make enormous sums of money or become famous, figure out how you could live your life without worrying about money or without caring whether or not people notice you. The end result is often the same, but it’s a completely different way to experience life.

What’s the best STORY you’ve heard?

I really enjoy this business joke — it’s funny because there’s a lot of truth in it.

“A Japanese company and a North American company decided to have a canoe race on the St. Lawrence River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race.

On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile. The North Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to investigate the reason for the crushing defeat.

A team made up of senior management was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action. Their conclusion was the Japanese had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, while the North American team had 8 people steering and 1 person rowing. So, North American management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion.

They advised that too many people were steering the boat, while not enough people were rowing.

To prevent another loss to the Japanese, the rowing team’s management structure was totally reorganized to 4 steering supervisors, 3 area steering superintendents and 1 assistant superintendent steering manager. They also implemented a new performance system that would give the 1 person rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder.

It was called the “Rowing Team Quality First Program”, with meetings, dinners, and free pens for the rower. There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes and other equipment, extra vacation days for practices, and bonuses.

The next year the Japanese won by two miles. Humiliated, the North American management laid off the rower for poor performance, halted development of a new canoe, sold the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment. The money saved was distributed to the Senior Executives as bonuses and the next year’s racing team was outsourced to India.”

Small teams of people who are actually doing work always do better work — communication overhead is deadly, and the quickest path to mediocrity is to spend more time talking about doing things than actually doing them.

If YOU were Secretary of Education, what would be the top 3 things YOU would be remembered for after YOUR term?

1. Establishing a comprehensive list of fundamental concepts in mathematics, science, business, economics, etc. and synthesizing the best research in how to teach kids to read and write effectively. This information would be made publicly available via the web and local library system, along with recommended resources for learners.

2. Eliminating legal and regulatory barriers to prospective teachers / instructors who want to help others learn, including academic accreditation. (Accreditation is a bureaucratic method of limiting competition in a market, which increases costs — it and does absolutely nothing for educational quality or effectiveness.)

3. Eliminating the Department of Education and compulsory schooling — it’s completely unnecessary, and often does more harm than good. People learn best when they’re learning because they want to or need to, and any necessary structure provided by current educational system can quickly be replaced by the market and individual providers. It’s entirely possible for 99.9% of people to learn what they need to know to succeed in life without 14 years of compulsory schooling.

Who are YOUR personal heroes?

I have a tremendous respect for teachers, whether they work for a school or share their knowledge and experience on their own. Whenever I see a person who has a strong command of a subject and clearly loves sharing it with other, my spirits lift.

What are YOU hungry for?

Wisdom. I’m not content to simply learn more; I want to be able to distinguish what’s really important from what’s not, and to share what I’ve learned with others. If I’m able to do that throughout my life, I’ve lived well.

What’s YOUR favorite quote?

I have two: one that reminds me how to work, and another that reminds me how to live.

James A. Michener, American author:

“The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he’s always doing both.”

William Henry Channing, American writer and philosopher:

“To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard, think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common — this is my symphony.”

About Josh Kaufman

Josh Kaufman is an independent business professor, education activist, and author of the Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume, which will be published by Portfolio in 2010.

Read more: http://personalmba.com/about/.