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, …
Content
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Summary
Small town small businesses serve as case studies for ten powerful lessons in business.
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.
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:Â 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.â€
I think you might find yourself saying the same thing - you’ll get an MBAs worth of knowledge from Roadside MBA.
