101 Things I Learned in Business School

101 Things I Learned n Business School by Michael W. Preis and Matthew Frederick, provides a list of things that could be useful to any MBA or MBA aspirant. In a short 101 pages book, the authors provide a number of snapshots of business and management, with each page devoted to a ’thing’. They start by defining business, drawing distinction between business philosophy and philosophy of business, different types of capital all of which are not economic, through running meetings, ways of growing businesses, vision, mission, organizational culture, top-down and bottom-up approaches, the span of control, negotiations, why not to worry about lost opportunities, not to wait for initiating marketing activities till things get bad, cannibalizing your own sales rather than suffer loss at the hands of competitors who introduce new products, take adequate care of substitutes as they can pose competition, different accounting principles and norms and financial ratios, types of bankruptcies, the monetary and fiscal policies of the governments, effective advertising, and a whole lot of tools and organizational processes, with wonderful quotes inserted in between. I found some of the ‘things’ interesting. Among them are the distinction between business philosophy and philosophy of business, that the party that cares less about the outcome of a negotiation is in the stronger negotiating position, suggestion to cannibalize your own sales, the importance of theories, that a good sales person will even talk a customer out of making a wrong purchase(even in the face of lost sales), because in the long run the customer will respect the salesperson’s honesty and may become a repeat customer, group facilitation(through Form, Storm, Norm and Perform or F-S-N-P cycle).One quote that caught my attention was: “If you want to be a leader, you’ve got to be a reader” by Dr.David Noebel, US religious leader. The book concludes by quoting Anu Aga, former chairperson of Thermax Ltd. “We survive by breathing but we can’t say we live to breathe. Likewise, making money is important for a business to survive, but money alone cannot the reason for business to exist.”
The book can be a handy tool for young managers. For the type of content and the target audience, the price at Rs.595 looks pretty high. The book is published by Hachette Book Group.