Biz/Ed Business Series (Spreadsheet-Based Tutorial)

Editor’s Note: All newly updated in July 2024…

This excellent set of spreadsheets was created by Duncan Williamson back in 2000 for Biz/Ed, which was an excellent site but is not defunct (you can still find it and the original spreadsheets on the Internet Archive). He recently got in a nostalgic mood I think and saw that I had referenced his earlier … [ Read more ]

David K. Hurst

The “scientific model” of management, as Warren Bennis and Jim O’Toole called it, emphasized conceptual knowledge and tools and techniques – what Greek philosophers would have called episteme and techne. It was assumed that organizations could be studied by detached “objective” observers and that management science could be “values-free” – just like the natural sciences. More generally this scientific model has resulted in a misanthropic … [ Read more ]

Napoleon Hill

An educated person is not necessarily one who has an abundance of general or specialized knowledge. Any person is educated who knows where to get knowledge when it is needed and how to organize that knowledge into definite plans of action.

Aristotle

Teaching is the highest form of understanding.

Niels Billou, Mary Crossan, Gerard Seijts

As Guy Claxton, author of the book Live and Learn noted, one of the biggest barriers to learning is our resistance to let go of the 4C’s–the desire to be consistent, comfortable, competent and confident. We add a fifth to the list–the desire for control. Protecting and preserving these five C’s is a huge barrier to individual growth and development.

Peter Senge

There’s an element […] that is completely disregarded in formal management education. We’re supposed to figure things out. We’re supposed to make the machine work and correct problems when they come up. But, in fact, in creating something, a lot of the most important developments are what you didn’t expect. And it’s how you recognize and deal with surprise. It’s a very different mindset. The … [ Read more ]

Peter Drucker

There’s a human law that says that the gap between the one at the top and the average is a constant. And it’s terribly hard to work on that huge average. You work on the few at the top, and you raise them, and the rest will follow.

Christopher Bartlett

The philosophy of case teaching, discussion-based learning, is really that by gathering together a group of smart capable people; presenting them with the kinds of challenges that a manager would face once in a year or once in a lifetime; doing that on a regular basis, 2-3 times a day; and getting them to go through the process that managers do—gathering the data and analyzing … [ Read more ]

MBA Essentials: A free online curriculum to learn skills taught in top MBA programs

The MBA is a famously expensive degree. But most of the academic learning you’ll get in an MBA program can now be had through free online resources. SlideRule ran a detailed study of the “core” curricula of some of the world’s top business schools to determine the essential components of an MBA. Then, we curated the best online resources that teach each of those essential … [ Read more ]

ActionMBA

The ActionMBA is a self-guided learning program to master all the essential skills, best practices and ideas to achieve maximum impact with our businesses and careers. Whether you are a non-profit, artist, author or entrepreneur, there are common skills and knowledge we all must master to get our ideas to the largest possible audience.

The ActionMBA is about systematically identifying and mastering all of those skills … [ Read more ]

Breaking Bad Leadership Habits

Leaders have to learn and practice new management techniques to overcome the habits that could be holding them back.

Charles Kettering

An inventor is simply a person who doesn’t take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college, he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he’s out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails, maybe a thousand times. If he succeeds once, he’s … [ Read more ]

Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

He captivated the world with visions of self-driving cars and Google Glass and has signed up 1.6 million students for online classes. So why is he pivoting away from MOOCs? “We don’t educate people as others wished, or as I wished,” Thrun says.

Henrich Greve

There is no shortage of advice for entrepreneurs, managers, and executives on what they should be doing in order to succeed in business. Some of the advice comes from people who really should be careful about giving advice because they haven’t actually succeeded in business—they are just good writers. Other advice comes from people who really should be careful about giving advice because they have … [ Read more ]

How Corporate Learning Drives Competitive Advantage

We’ve been working with companies and researching this area for nearly ten years, and looked at nearly every possible area of corporate training. It turns out that the development high-impact learning is tricky. Last year we published an important new model which shows how a company’s learning strategy matures. We call it our High-Impact Learning Organization Maturity Model.

Jason Fried

It’s easy to convince yourself you know something until you have to explain it to someone else. Then the truth comes out.

Vannevar Bush

Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month’s efforts could be produced on call. Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who … [ Read more ]