The 10th anniversary edition of the bestselling foundational business training manual for ambitious readers, featuring new concepts and mental models: updated, expanded, and revised.

Many people assume they need to attend business school to learn how to build a successful business or advance in their career. That's not true. The vast majority of modern business practice requires little more than common sense, simple arithmetic, and knowledge of a few very important ideas and principles.

The Personal MBA 10th Anniversary Edition provides a clear overview of the essentials of every major business topic: entrepreneurship, product development, marketing, sales, negotiation, accounting, finance, productivity, communication, psychology, leadership, systems design, analysis, and operations management...all in one comprehensive volume.

Inside you'll learn concepts such as:

The 5 Parts of Every Business: You can understand and improve any business, large or small, by focusing on five fundamental topics.

The 12 Forms of Value: Products and services are only two of the twelve ways you can create value for your customers.

4 Methods to Increase Revenue: There are only four ways for a business to bring in more money. Do you know what they are?

Business degrees are often a poor investment, but business skills are always useful, no matter how you acquire them.

The Personal MBA will help you do great work, make good decisions, and take full advantage of your skills, abilities, and available opportunities--no matter what you do (or would like to do) for a living.

The Challenge
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.

But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't.

The Findings
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:

• Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
• The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
• A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”

Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?