A Business Degree in One Post

Roosh recently wrote about a book that had the goal of being an MBA in one book.  His conclusion after reading it:

I reluctantly recommend this book if you want to start a business, mostly due to the strong value chapter. I think the book succeeded in its goal on educating readers about the universal fundamentals of business, but you’ll probably need a bit more in applying them.

Roosh doesn't realize that it is the subject that is lacking not necessarily the book.

I happen to have a business degree and can give you all of what I learned in one post.

Accounting

There are such things as a balance sheet, an income statement, and a statement of cash flows.  They work together to explain, in numbers, a company.

There are lots of accounting laws; try not to break too many.

GAAP is an acronym for the standards by which the financial statements (see first paragraph) are laid out.

Human Resources

There are lots of labor laws.  Lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of labor laws.  Try not to break too many.

Marketing

Best explained by examples:

If you are going to sell something in a new place, check to make sure that the translated name of your product isn't something like "big toilet" in the new language.

If you want to sell your product to old people, then don't advertise on cartoon network.

If you sell car parts, then don't advertise in a cooking magazine.

Operations

Hire engineers and chemists, people which actual knowledge, not possessors of business degrees. (Not covered in school.)

Economics

I like the subject but don't remember anything that I learned in the college economics classes.  Although 2 of my 3 economics teachers wrote their own text books, which were awful.

I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead while in these classes.

What you may want to know are the basics of supply and demand, and the appropriate graph.

 
Miscellaneous

There are such things as business plans and marketing plans.  You will need one to get a loan from the bank.

(Not covered in school: even the best business plan won't get you a bank loan until you first get started with your business and have been in operation for a few months, or years.  Lots and lots of my classmates would have been much less confused about what it was the teachers had wanted us to do had they been told the previous sentence.)

What you actually need to know to start a business:

• Scrounge whatever money you can, from wherever you can

• Pick a business that interests you

• Hire the best people that you can, and let them work

• Hire an accountant so that you meet the accounting laws

• So long as your monthly income exceeds your expenditures you will be in good shape

• A business plan is useless until you have the business running
  

The idea for the business is not important, only the execution of the idea is.

If you want to read a book, then How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis is not bad.

If you've read this post through, then you too have the knowledge of a business degree.  And an MBA is more of the same.

There's a reason I have my own idea for a business school.

Beer!

As a college graduate I can tell you two things that non-college graduates cannot:

1. College is a waste of time, money, and effort
2. College student's don't know anything about alcohol

While in that waste of time I tried all the different beers that I could find.  My rankings are as follows:

1. Samuel Adams Imperial Stout

2. Samuel Adams Brown Ale

3. Samuel Adams Boston Lager

4. All other Samuel Adams brews

5. Guinness

6. Old Rasputin

7. Guinness Extra Stout

8. Labatt's Maximum Ice (not available in U.S.)

9. Lienenkugel's Creamy Dark

10. Killian's Irish Red

11. Molson's Canadien

...skip a few...

15. Old Style

...skip a few more...

Last. Any Michelob


Don't forget this blog's official song:

In closing Samuel Adams is best.

Period.

Extra Period..


 

Khan Academy

A BookTV interview with the founder of the Khan Academy.

The Khan Academy is recommended by me for learning math and science.

Learn about economics, math, history, etc for free.

College Stinks

When I graduated high school, I thought that I was set to go to college to become a mechanical engineer.  I found CADD to be very interesting and I always found it much easier than most of my classmates did.  But once I got to college the classes were just awful.  I didn't get to any engineering classes but all of the standard college classes were dreary and painful.  I switched to a business major in order to, hopefully, get out quicker.  (4 out of 40 of what would have been my mechanical engineering class had a job a year later.)

Prior to college I was energetically ready to go to work, but while at college I got lazy.  And I found the classes to be mostly stupid. 

A marketing class consists of things that are mostly obvious.  If you want to sell stuff to senior citizens, don't advertise on Cartoon Network.  If you are going to do business in a foreign country, then you should know their customs so that you don't offend anyone. etc. 

An  accounting class was about accounting laws.  Human Resources is about knowing all of the labor laws.

Required classes on how to use a computer seem quite silly when we are all college students and almost certainly needed to know how a computer works just to sign up for the classes.  Having it as an optional class would not seem as stupid.

The woman's studies classes were quite bad too.  Even though I did not get to "learn from" the black feminist that many of my roommates dreaded.  At the college I went to we got to rent our books from the school and their cost was included in the tuition.  I remember going to collect my books for one of my required women's studies classes and seeing "Pride and Prejudice" on one of the shelves.  I thought that maybe the class would be okay.  But then I looked at my list and saw "The Da Vinci Code," something my Maya Angelou, and other crap including something about a ladyboy.  What they essentially told me was that I needed to stop reading the books I was reading (at the time: Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Atlas Shrugged, etc) and pick up some modern popular crap. 

I wish I had skipped the day when the transvestite was a guest speaker.  Instead of hiding behind the person in front of me and thinking, "I don't want to know. I don't want to know...I'm going to be sick."

(Note: I have nothing against lesbians or gays, except their politics; but transvestites are disgusting.) 

Then we come to the economics classes that I was required to take.  I find economics to be fascinating.  When I first read "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell I thought that economics was the study of why I was correct politically.  But in the economic classes that I took we "learned" things like how Henry Ford caused the Great Depression by lowering the wages of his workers, or some such crap.  (Read The Wild Wheel by Garet Garrett to see that, if anything, the opposite is true.)  I noticed that two of my economics teachers wrote their own [unreadable] textbooks.

And business classes are a waste of time. We were told to have group projects and create business plans.  Being in a group, of course, means that you either do all of the work or almost none.  I thought that the highlight was always when the other groups presented their ideas to the class.  "We're going to project our stupid business will have $10 million in sales the first year and grow by $5 million every year thereafter."

So of course when I first decided to plan my own business, I went straight to creating a business plan like I was taught.  My plan will be very useful when I go to the bank for a loan, which I won't get because I have no existing business.  The correct way to start is to start small.  And if you have success while very small, then you might create a formal plan and get a loan, if necessary. 

I can honestly say that I've learned more about running a business from reading a handful of books and a few things on the internet, than I have learned from business school.  (I've probably learned more about running a business from playing Sim City, then I have from school.)

I'm prepared to begin, but I don't know if I want to live in this country anymore.  If we look at the situation, well described by Bill Powell and the college problems outlined by me just now, and a multitude of other things, we know that the western world is not all that appealing anymore.

Rather than starting a business here, I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to move elsewhere and try there.

A Career Not College

I recently heard, on NPR, that 74% of Wisconsin high school students took a college entrance test this year (ACT, SAT).

I wonder if a big problem that we face as a society is that most people's main goal is to send their kids to college.  How many times have you listened to a poor mother talk about all of what she is doing in order to send her kid to a good college.

Why is their goal a good college and not a good career?

For decades we have learned that the way to be successful was to go to college.  And now that is everyone's goal.  We have colleges coming out of our ears.  And a tremendous surplus of college graduates.

We no longer have a respected bunch of citizens who do work without college degrees. 

Forget Buisness School...

...read The Wild Wheel instead.

If experts were needed, they could always be hired,
but no Ford operation was ever directed by a technician.
He always knew too many things that couldn't be
done, whereas a Ford man could do anything because
he didn't know any better. The Ford man's role was
to say to the expert: "Do it anyhow."

-page 47-48

Skip business school and go straight to work (at your own company if need be) and "Do it anyhow."

Economic Policy Debate

Kevin Williamson describes the problem of measuring economic results out of context and when the parts that you should measure are unmeasurable.

"
Which is why even very smart people, such as Atlantic writers, produce maddening paragraphs, such as this one from Mr. Thompson: “Well into the 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was above 90%. Today it’s 35%. But both real GDP and real per capita GDP were growing more than twice as fast in the 1950s as in the 2000s. At the same time, the average tax rate paid by the top tenth of a percent fell from about 50% to 25% in the last 60 years, while their share of income increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% before the recession.”

All of that is trivially true. The tax code in 2012 is different from the tax code in 1955. Lots of other things are different, too: Japan emerged from the postwar rubble to become a major economic power and then went into gentle decline during the subsequent years, the ruins of Europe were rebuilt, a European monetary union was created and then began coming unglued, Germany was reunited, the Soviet Union was disunited, China began to liberalize its economy, a globalized information economy emerged with India and South Korea winning significant places in it, the Internet became a critical economic reality, the population of the planet more than doubled, worldwide markets were integrated, standardized containerization revolutionized shipping, smallpox was eradicated, life expectancies grew in many parts of the world, U.S. birth rates declined . . . and so on. Telling us that tax rates were X in the 1950s and Y in 2012, while growth was A in the 1950s and B today, tells us something approximating nothing."

another quote:

"In spite of the massive piles of evidence surrounding them, politicians routinely tell us that if we will merely give them the power to do X, then Y surely will follow. The Obama administration predicted that if the stimulus and other policies were enacted, then unemployment would decline to 5.2 percent. (It isn’t 5.2 percent.) Mitt Romney says that if we enact his agenda, the result will be 4 percent growth. Personally, I think that politicians should be goosed with a Taser every time they use the word “percent” in a future-tense sentence. But to be more charitable, let’s instead conclude that such projections should be viewed skeptically.

Unhappily, many economists desire to play kingmaker and therefore lend the prestige of their discipline to the wishful thinking of politics, where arguments are oversimplified to a point that is indistinguishable from dishonesty. They are aided in this by journalists who provide a bridge from the rigorous world of academic research to the standards-free world of political discourse. The result is something like a fairy tale or just-so story. That voters choose to accept such fanciful promises is another piece of evidence that our politics is not rational but ritual."

***

On another subject, we were taught in business school (big waste of time, money, and effort) to make business plans with projected budgets.  Many wondered how we could come up with a budget before we've even seen one month's numbers.  If you did not include a projected budget, then your grade suffered.  If your budget, for your incredibly stupid company idea, had a projected growth in sales of $5 million each year, then you were complimented on your budget.

Ain't Public Schools Grand?

A post at the Rebellion University points out 3 big current public school stories.

1. teachers in Chicago don't think a 16% pay increase is big enough.

2. 12 years of school is less influential than a few texts

3. Washington D.C. schools have thought of another way to redistribute wealth to teachers

Tim's Business School Opening Remarks

I've an idea for a business school, these may be my opening remarks:

Welcome to the first day of Tim's Business school.

Are you all excited to begin?

Here at Tim's Business School we plan on giving all of you students actual business knowledge.  You will get actual experience in a real business, and you will work in every part of the business.

We will come up with a business idea, then the lot of us will found it.  We will make plans, we will get funding, we will fill out all of the legal details, we will open up shop, and I will also arrange for successful business speakers to come and give us lectures and advice.

The goal here is to give you work experience and help you find good jobs.  After some time here you will be able to show potential employers the results you've achieved working for a real business, rather than just a diploma that shows your experience listening to teachers.  We will help with resumes, and cover letters.  We will provide data to show your results.  And we will found a working business.

You will get the experience required by employers without many of the worries and pressure that comes with your first professional jobs.  We are here to help you along.  You will not need to fear any disciplinary actions or termination of employment.  You will be here with the focus of learning.

When employers look to hire, they want their new employees to be knowledgeable about their subjects.  But until you do that job you will not have that experience.  We will get you that experience.

Most small businesses fail; we may as well.  But even if our company fails you will be able to see what works and what doesn't.  That is valuable experience that you can bring to potential employers.

Our founding of a business from the ground up also means that you will know exactly what it is like to found your own business. Most small businesses fail.  If you help to found a business with the rest of us, you will be able to get many of your failures and bad ideas out of the way when the business is not your sole problem.

Here you will have the chance to work in each area.  You may prefer marketing, for example, but maybe your experience in finance will change your mind.  In any case your experience in each area will give you a better understanding of the whole of business.

Let's found a business!

Your homework for tomorrow is to come up with an idea for our new business.  Think of an idea, it will have flaws and we'll correct them, but think of an idea and be prepared to argue some of its merits to the rest of us.

Any questions?

College

I'm not a big fan of our current colleges.  Thanks to The Troglopundit, I've come across a blog that is written by a professor who is pointing out the problems in today's universities.

Col-lege In-sur-rec-tion

"What does it say when a University feels the need to have a “free speech zone.”  Well, the obvious point is that speech is not free outside the zone."

The Troglopundit has been added to my blogroll, but we'll wait and see with this one.