MBA in a Box: Practical Ideas from the Best Brains in Business » (First Edition)

JOEL KURTZMAN is global lead partner for thought leadership and innovation at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Mr. Kurtzman has been an editor and columnist for the New York Times, the editor of Harvard Business Review, and is the founding editor of Strategy + Business magazine.

The best minds in business-at your service

MBA in a Box brings together some of the best brains in business who show how the core curriculum of an MBA program works in the real world. People like Michael Porter, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Adrian J. Slywotzky, Warren Bennis, and Bill George give you a box full of ideas and tools that can boost your career and help you add value to your organization. For example:

• Why finance is not just about manipulating numbers but of immense importance in sustaining growth, building widespread wealth, and creating jobs.
• The profit zone and how to tell if a business is in one.
• The skill of turning an idea or invention into a product that solves a problem for a market.
• Merging the need of business to produce and grow with the environment so they are both sustained.
• The latest thinking in marketing about branding, pricing, reversing a product's life cycle, and turning what has become a commodity into a specialty.
• And much more.

Publishers Weekly

This practical guidebook to business concepts is appropriately straightforward in its approach. Kurtzman, a former New York Times reporter and editor of the Harvard Business Review, explains that the volume is "organized to reflect the way normal people do and think about business." Kurtzman identifies "big ideas" as concepts that... reduce the fog of complexity into something simple, solid, tangible, and most of all workable." Not so much a nuts-and-bolts guide to business, this volume focuses on ideas and takes readers through the process of innovation, the fundamentals of sustainability, finance and accounting, and the intricacies of strategy and management. Kurtzman explains that his book can be read either from cover to cover or thumbed through whenever answers to questions about a creative concept are needed. The book addresses such topics as human resources, leadership, marketing, communication and learning from slip-ups (both one's own and those of others). Lending extra credibility to the volume is an impressive roster of contributors, including Michael Milken, 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe, Segway inventor Dean Kamen and Harvard Business School dean Kim Clark, each writing about his or her area of expertise. In keeping with Kurtzman's philosophy of business (it's "one of life's great games, and it is exhilarating"), the book makes for a refreshing and often humorous read. Whether the book's marketing concept (the "box" of the title is actually a a slip-case) and high price point will attract readers is left to be seen. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.