Content
Freshness
Usefulness
Summary
An educational and entertaining books that uses real cases studies from around the country.
Well, this is refreshing!
Usually I’m reviewing books that take examples from big business and teach them as case studies or stories for small business. But, this time, dear reader, the tables are turned.
I just received a review copy of Roadside MBA: Back Road Lessons for Entrepreneurs, Executives and Small Business Owners by Michael Mazzeo, Paul Oyer, and Scott Schaeffer and I have to say that I’m really enjoying these real-life small business case studies and I think you will, too.
The authors are a group of business professors who teach MBA students; Paul Oyer, a professor at Stanford, Scott Schaefer, a professor at the University of Utah and Mike Mazzeo, a professor at Northwestern University. These guys met at a conference in Boston. But their book writing future was sealed on a trip to a shoe store while killing time before a flight.
They have taken a unique approach by going around the country and interviewing a variety of small business owners, collecting their stories and lessons, and pulling them together into this informative book.
10 Business Lessons From 45 Small Businesses
Roadside MBA is divided into ten chapters with each focused on a common business theme.
Chapter 1: Scaling A Business
Chapter 2: Establishing Barriers To Entry
Chapter 3: Product Differentiation
Chapter 4: Setting Prices
Chapter 5: Managing Your Brand
Chapter 6: Negotiating Affectively
Chapter 7: Hiring
Chapter 8: Incentives for Employees
Chapter 9: Delegation
Chapter 10: Battling The Big Boys
Inside each theme they’ve pulled together stories from the more than forty small businesses they visited on their road trip.
Here are just a few of the lessons that you’ll find inside Roadside MBA:
- How to negotiate: The Deadhead owners of Eko Compost in the hippie town of Missoula, Montana who don’t negotiate recycling contracts until they know what the city’s next best options are.
- How to hire: A windsock manufacturer who uses a reverse hiring strategy that focuses on discouraging the wrong applications and not just attracting the right ones.
- How to compete: See how a small bookstore succeeded against big box stores by focusing on what the big guys couldn’t do.
Because the businesses featured in Roadside MBA are small, you’ll find the way they create, implement and manage a variety of business strategies is inspiring and surprisingly doable.
Roadside MBA is a fun book to read and an even more practical book to put into practice. As the authors say in the introduction:
“We learned far more about business strategy from our trip to the shoe store than we did at the conference.”
I think you might find yourself saying the same thing – you’ll get an MBAs worth of knowledge from Roadside MBA.
Hello there,
Where can I get more information about this?
Thank you.
Hi Ariff – this book will be released soon – I’ll bet you can buy a copy on Amazon
This looks great! Thanks for the review! I will definitely be checking this book out!
Hi Cory – it’s really interesting. I’m really glad someone decided to use real small businesses as case studies of sorts — after all, there are so many more of them than there are big brands and corporations. Honestly, it’s a lot harder than it needs to be to compare a company with a multi-billion dollar marketing budget to a small business.