Book Review: The 10-Day MBA
By Steven Silbiger. Published by Piatkus, ISBN 0-7499-1401-7. UK Price 10.99
A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering the Skills
The author, who graduated as an MBA in 1990, attempts to convey, in a single book, the basic core competancies of a 2-year MBA post-graduate course. An impossible aim ? I would have said so, before I came across this book. Although the book is quite old now (copyright 1993), it is packed full of useful reference information in a logical, easy-to-master form.
The 10 Days (well, 9 really !)
The basic chapters of this book cover the main topics of an MBA course, ie.
- Marketing
- Ethics
- Accounting
- Organisational Behaviour
- Quantitative Analysis
- Finance
- Operations
- Economics
- Strategy
You will notice that this comprises only 9 topics - the final chapter is a set of "mini-courses", which are basically only reference notes for such topics as public speaking etc.
Don't expect to pick up this book and become an MBA in one sitting. The content is very compacted. If you don't have at least some basic grasp of the fundamentals of each subject, you will be left floundering. This is certainly not an "idiots guide", and there is no attempt to "dumb-down" the content. If you want the qualification, you will need to work hard on it.
Pace Yourself
I found myself having to take time out in order to consolidate the mass of information that was being presented. Taking the first course - Marketing - as an example, the author pulls no punches, and immediately launches into the fundamental aspects of marketing - Consumer Analysis, Market Analysis, Review of Competition and Self, Review of Distribution Channels, Development of Preliminary Marketing Mix, Evaluation of Economics and Revision & Iteration. All this before the first five pages ! I needed to read and re-read the concepts before I was able to go on to the following sections.
Having said that, this book is not a dry, intellectual tome. It is full of diagrams, homely cartoons (which themselves have clearly been chosen to punch home the message), and real-world examples. In fact, it is the "when I was working for a coffee company, we had to ...." narratives which I found particularly helpful to illustrate the principles involved.
There are not many books which I would consider are worth their weight in gold. But if such a book exists, this must be it.
IT DELIVERS.
Book Reviewed by Dennis Adams in February 2000.
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