The World’s Leading Microsoft .NET Magazine
   
 
timstall

Donate Today!

Search Box

 

Calendar

««Mar 2010»»
SMTWTFS
  12
3
456
7
8
9
10
111213
1415161718
19
20
21222324252627
28293031

My RSS Feeds








Mailing List

Most Popular Tags

                                                           

BOOK: Complete MBA for Dummies

posted Monday, 11 January 2010

I'm always been intrigued by the non-coding aspects of a project that are necessary for that project to succeed. Much of this includes people and business skills. I keep hearing of co-workers who take business classes, and it sounds fun, but it takes more time than I have right now (building snow-dinosaurs, sandboxes, and Christmas lights for the kids takes a lot of time). So I settled for the next best thing: reading the Complete MBA for Dummies. I was impressed.

The book is a casual 400-page read, and certainly lives up the the "for dummies" genre. It offers an overview of starting a small business, from the basics of management to HR to accounting to marketing and economics. I liked the practical tone.

While a book like this doesn't fundamentally change one's view of business, it is useful to get one to casually think about business-concepts during the normal work day. For each project, it prompts me to ask questions like:

  • "where does the revenue come from?"
  • "who is paying for this project?"
  • "how will this project help the business?"
  • "can this thing I built actually be marketed?"
  • "who are the customers for this product?"

Continually keeping these types of questions in mind also helps a developer relate to business-sponsors, who are the people that ultimately write the developer's paycheck.

 

tags:    

links: digg this    technorati