The Weekend MBA: A Complete Business Education in 100 Resources

Learn to separate diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action from motivational posters. Rumelt is the fastest route to seeing why most “strategies” are just financial targets.

Understand disruption as a mechanism, not a buzzword—why good management can still lose to entrants improving on ignored dimensions.

Practice cascading choices from “where to play / how to win” into capabilities—useful template for strategic planning offsites that would otherwise produce slide decks without trade-offs.

Return to the original HBR article to see Porter’s intent before the framework became a checklist cartoon in slide templates.

Mr. Market and margin of safety are finance concepts that generalise to any domain with volatile prices and emotional participants.

Free MBA in accounting quality, M&A discipline, and incentives—read slowly and annotate.

Pick any reputable intro accounting text and master the three statements + cash vs accrual; everything else in finance stacks on that literacy.

Free NYU course materials on valuation and narrative—bridge between storytelling and numbers.

Understand persuasion mechanics—reciprocity, scarcity, social proof—before you spend on channels.

Classic lens for category creation vs incremental competition—pairs with modern growth essays on distribution.

Godin reframes marketing as change-making for a smallest viable audience—useful corrective to vanity metrics.

Empirical marketing science on penetration and mental availability—counters a lot of intuitive-but-wrong brand lore.

The operational OS for managers: meetings, metrics, leverage, performance management.

Constraints thinking through a novel—fastest way to internalise throughput vs local optimisation.

Learn waste elimination, kaizen, and pull systems—whether or not you run factories, software teams borrow lean heavily.

Amazon’s PR/FAQ narrative discipline for new products—operations for decision-making, not only logistics.

Experiment design and validated learning for uncertain product terrain.

Coordination costs and conceptual integrity in software—still true in the age of AI copilots.

Vocabulary for network effects, governance, and pricing in multi-sided markets.

Modern strategy writing on how modular ecosystems and aggregation interact—read a curated bundle of free Stratechery articles if unsubscribed.

Crisis management and CEO psychology when playbooks fail.

Cognitive biases that corrupt forecasting, hiring, and strategy reviews.

Worldly wisdom and mental models across disciplines—antidote to single-variable thinking.

Candour systems for creative organisations—Braintrust mechanics and post-mortems.

Narrative introduction to economic ideas and their human stakes—macro intuition without equations first.

Incentives, securitisation, and institutional stupidity—pair with any finance ethics discussion.

Use structured cases to practice ethical reasoning under commercial pressure—not just compliance checklists.

Know the guardrails that shape M&A, pricing, and platform behaviour—especially if you build at scale.

Separate decision quality from outcomes; build feedback loops that do not fool you with luck.

Standard reference for A/B testing culture—avoid statistical theatre in growth teams.

Forecasting as skill with explicit updating—complements Kahneman’s bias catalogue.

Teaches measurement as uncertainty reduction—useful whenever teams say “we can’t quantify that.”

Clear nonfiction writing is a career multiplier—strategy is worthless if nobody understands it.

Top-down communication structure for executives and consultants—reduces rambling updates.

Attention capital in a distracted workplace—protects learning time this curriculum requires.

Externalise commitments so your headspace stays available for judgment, not memory juggling.

Imitate Buffett’s clarity: thesis, risks, valuation range, kill criteria. One memo beats ten passive reads.

Nothing tests lean startup and positioning faster than charging money. Document what broke in your assumptions.

One-page diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions—present, defend, revise monthly as facts change.

Feynman technique: if you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it—record voice memos if public teaching scares you.