Most Important Concepts:

• Complex systems are prone to failure.
• Humans are biased, energy-conserving, and driven by emotion. Cater to these tendencies in marketing, management, and personal productivity.

How I Can Use This Info:

Chapter Recap:

Preface:

• Business degrees are often a poor investment, but business skills are always useful.

My personal MBA:

• When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles - generally 3 to 12 of them - that govern the field. The million things you thought you have to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.

1 - Value Creation

• Roughly defined, a business is a repeatable process that:
  • Creates and delivers something of value
  • That other people need
  • At a price they’re willing to pay
  • In a way that satisfies the customer’s needs and expectations
  • So that the business brings in enough profit to make it worthwhioe for the owners to continue operation
• Iron law of the market. The market matters most, and neither a stellar team or a fantastic product will redeem a bad market.
• According to Harvard professors, all humans have:
  • The drive to acquire: Desire to obrain physical or immaterial objects or qualities.
  • The drive to bond: Desire to feel valued and loved by others.
  • The drive to learn: Desire to satisfy our curiosity.
  • The drive to defend: Desire to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our property.
  • The drive to feel: Desire for new sensory stimuli.
• Value is in the eye of the beholder. Perceived value determines how much your customer will be willing to pay.
• Keep on iterating your product again and again to make it better.
• Nine economic values people consider when evaluating a potential purchase:
  • Efficacy - How well does it work?
  • Speed - How soon does it work?
  • Reliability - Can I depend on it to work?
  • Ease of use - How much effort does it require?
  • Flexibility - How many things can it do?
  • Status - How does this affect how others perceive me?
  • Aesthetic Appeal - How aesthetically pleasing is it?
  • Emotion - How does it make me feel?
  • Cost - How much do I have to give ip to get it?

2 - Marketing

• The cardinal marketing sin is being boring.
• Offering value is not enough, if no one knows about your offer, it doesn’t matter.
• People ignore what they don’t care about.