The Personal MBA: Update

After posting about the Personal MBA last February, we started up a Birmingham group in March and have spent 2007 reading some great (and some not so great) books about business in all its forms. We’ve just had a summer break and will be re-starting in October.

Two highlights for me have been:

• The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun. A really great guide to management and leadership; well worth it as a complement to highly structured methodologies such as Prince.
• Getting Things Done by David Allen. If you’ve seen me in person at any point in 2007 I’ve proabably chewed your ear off about this one. It has genuinely transformed my working life.

I recommend giving the Personal MBA a go if you want to learn more about business but don’t have the time or the money to pay for a real MBA course (or if like me you think they’re over-rated and expensive).

Our group is pretty varied: we have amongst us an assistant head-teacher; three people involved in entrepreneurship education; an IT business owner; two digital consultants and a photographer.

The debates following each book’s discussion have been most interesting for me. It’s fascinating how people from such different disciplines can talk about a single subject from different, but empathetic and complementary perspectives. There’s a big gap between photography and IT but it works really well.

People are coming and going all the time so if you’re interested in getting involved let me know.