I came across a great article by Josh Kaufman on the Personal MBA (PMBA) and I bet we are going to start seeing a bunch more of these Personal [fill in the blank here] degrees.
The PMBA was started by Kaufman and lists 42 books that one should read to start their personal customized journey into learning the art of an MBA without the B-school cost. Kaufman calls it the “getting the 80 for the 20 approach to learning about business.” At the moment he has a site dedicated to it located here. The following is my theory on what we are going to see as this kind of education evolves and why it is happening.
Why?
The internet contains countless areas of both relevant and non relevant information on every subject imaginable. Most of these areas have not been interconnected, but over the course of the next several years we are going to see more related content connected. This is in part due to some innovations in the blogging sector with pingbacks and trackbacks that allow one blog to know about another blog. In most cases content will be about same subject and will continue the flow of the conversation over to more than one blog. RSS is another web standard that will be utilized to interconnect related web content together.
What does this have to do with the Personal MBA? The PMBA will become a community of blogs, forums, and websites. As the PMBA evolves it will add and remove books based on the community of people involved in the PMBA. The community might even then post study materials and presentations to help in their education. This evolution will happen due to a couple of points.
The first point is that the PMBA’s that are out in the real world are going to relay their experiences back to the PMBA community through their blogs, forums, or website. They will list new or more relevant books or materials that will help in areas that were lacking in the original PMBA or other books that might explain a topic better. They will also relate their mistakes to the community and how to avoid a similar mishap from occurring.
The second point will be due to criticisms by students or professors in the MBA B-schools saying that the PMBA is lacking in a particular area, for example linear programming. As soon as a relevant book or several books are found that will easily convey the lacking concept it will be added to the program.
For example, one absent aspect of a PMBA is the network of contacts that a MBA would receive if they were to attend classes at a B-school. This is an important part of getting an MBA. How would the PMBA make up for this? If you were to look at the PMBA’s forums there are already discussions going on to help connect PMBAs in a location, i.e. Phoenix, together. This is similar to Microsoft .Net User Groups. Networking and sharing information between people especially if it involved these groups of people teaching each other. If there is one thing that I believe in, it is that one learns considerably more on a subject by teaching it to others. If PMBA groups have people teach different subjects to the rest of the group, these groups will become quite effective, as long as they convey the subject matter correctly. Eventually these groups could take a more school oriented approach and assign homework for those that are interested in taking charge of their education.
As the program evolves we will end up with different philosophies of what a PMBA, or other personal degree, will contain. In essence we will end up with different “schools” of PMBA. Some PMBAs will focus on different implementation strategies and others will focus the PMBA on a specific area such as a PMBA for information technology people. Some will become known as an effective alternative to an MBA and could even eventually offer a certification. In the realm of anything is possible, a PMBA program could even become an actual specialized school.
Programs will eventually become a well oiled education machine that is able to adapt efficiently, effectively, and more quickly than would a normal school that has to deal with internal politics and the board. The main facilitator in this is the community involved with the program. This along with the lower cost will drive the much needed overhaul in education.
Education has pretty much stayed the same with little innovation for quite sometime. We still have teachers, books, paper, and pencils. Although we now have computers to help transform these physical parts of education into the electronic medium, there hasn’t really been any disrupting innovation. Maybe with all these communities we will be able to think of and implement a disrupting innovation.
There are a several aspects that might prolong the evolution of PMBA; if the right steps are taken these problems will be minimized. Some of these are, but not limited to:
- Too many people voicing ideas or changes.
- Too few people being involved.
- Not enough structure.
This is still an evolving theory on PMBAs and other Personal [insert degree here] programs. If you have any thoughts please comment on them below.