YouSaid · the spoken record

Josh Kaufman

lines on the record: 139
first: 2024-07-15
most recent: 2024-07-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It depends on the idea. So, for example, like a manufacturing idea, like this is where we start getting into the different types of businesses, whether you're building a product or building a service, some sort of shared resource membership. I talk about 12 different forms of value in the personal MBA. So the instantiation of the idea really depends on the form of which you're going to deliver it to the end result. But a lot of times the early stages are prototyping, finding people who might benefit from this thing, getting the input, advice, perspective. And that gives you the information that you need to either continue going down that path or sometimes the information is, yeah, this is something that could potentially be a really good idea, but is not going to be a viable.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and the difference between entrepreneurs and non entrepreneurs is the entrepreneur says, and I'm going to be the one that solves that problem.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's difficult with SM7Bs. No, there's a company called Raikote that makes them really amazing Universal Shock Mount adapters for microphones.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's as easy as possible for someone to click a button and something magically arrives on your doorstep within 24 to 48 hours. How can we make just this opportunity a little bit more fun or different or interesting? This is where over the past 20 years in consumer goods, packaging design has come a long way. Because if you can grab someone's attention and give them a little bit of a pleasant experience while they're walking around shopping, that's a good thing.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, start there for sure? And then go out into the world with your eyes open just looking for problems, annoyances, frictions, things that are just a little bit annoying or suboptimal in some way. I mean, I think kind of a general question, like we're not, humanity is not running out of problems to solve. There are millions of opportunities to make someone's life a little bit more pleasant, a little bit more secure, a little bit more interesting, a little bit more fun. And so I think there's a lot of magic to be had in just going out into the world and having experiences in the world with other people and just noticing in a way that you've never noticed before of, oh, there's something there that's a little bit higher friction than otherwise could be. I mean, this was kind of the genesis of like Amazon, Amazon Prime. How can we make...”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's a whole category of candle purchasers who will buy a candle based on what's called cold throw. How much does it smell when it's just sitting on the middle of your table not burning, not doing anything? And so those are the little bits like if you pay close enough attention, if you focus on the right things, the subtle things that people are either saying or not saying You can find those very important unmet needs and then focus on meeting those. And that's the making of a product or an offer that has legs to it.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a difference in how something smells, for example, when you take a cap off a bottle of something and sniff it, smells different than if you, for example, a cleaning product, you pour it into a bucket and dilute it with water and you mop your floor. And so Those things make an enormous difference. Like, how is the product going to be used? And in the case of candles, one of the things that people pay very close attention to is the smell of a candle while it's burning. And the smell of a candle when it's not burning.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The consumer researchers are like, no, this is a psychological need, there's a bit of reassurance here that people don't have. How can we give that to them? And the answer to that was the invention of liquid longitude detergent, which is now a multi-billion dollar a year product category. And it didn't come from a physical need. It came from an unmet psychological need. And I just love that because I remember growing up. Watching my grandmother do laundry, and she did the exact same thing for the exact same reasons. And it's sometimes those subtle things. So for example, going back to our candles, one of the things that just by pure coincidence I was involved in when I worked at PNG was scent research. So the scent of a cleaning product, like there's a lot of psychology, there's a lot of science that goes into that.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why are you doing that? It's like, well, if there's not water in the bottom when I put the powdered laundry detergent in, it's not going to dissolve properly. So you've got to wait. The tub to fill up a little bit, and then you put the powder in and you swish it around the bottom of the basin with your hand so it dissolves all the way. And then you put the clothes in. And so the researcher took this back to the research department and all the chemists are just like, this is dumb. We have science. We have data that says, no, our detergent dissolves completely. This is not a non-issue.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People's behavior says a lot more than people's words. And so if there's a conflict between what people are saying and what people are doing, focus on what they're doing all the time. One of my favorite stories coming out of the Consumer Research Department at Procter& Gamble was there was a researcher in a ladies' home one afternoon and they were just watching her do her laundry. This was back in the days of powdered laundry detergent. So you have the box of powder, you have the scoop, put it in. And so the lady turned on her washer. Just stood there Like 15, 20 seconds, doing nothing, just like waiting. And the researchers watching and then at a certain point, she's like. What are you doing? She's like, oh, I'm waiting for the tub to fill up.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the best way to get around that? Ask for early preorders. Ask people to lay down money on the idea. So, I mean, this is part of how Kickstarter started, right? Here's an idea. Here's a concept. Here's exactly what you're going to get. Please enter your credit card details because it's that act. It's the raising your hand wallet, checkbook credit card, and saying, yes, I'll take one. That's the signal that you're looking for. And that can be everything from, you know, Kickstarter and the consumer side to letters of intent on the mid to large side. So finding that buying signals is really important. And then going back to your comment earlier about noticing the subtle things”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then if you do more formal research, you can start asking people to make explicit trade-offs between options. And so if you could have a candle that lasted a long time versus had the most amazing scent throw ever, which one would you pick? And you can start to kind of navigate the space of possible solutions in that particular category by talking to people who buy candles because you don't want to ask a random person on the street. You want to talk to people who actually purchase the things that you're creating. But by paying attention and by asking questions and starting to get a feel for how. People who are making these buying decisions actually navigate the process of narrowing down options to make a decision. That's where you find sometimes the very tiny things that make an enormous difference.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Laundry detergent, you know, all of that. I worked on the home side. And one of the things that I took away was every once in a while, you'll read in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, whatever, about the crazy lengths that consumer goods researchers will go to to figure out how people use paper towels or something like that. I got to be one of those people for a couple years. And it was fascinating. I've watched so many people clean their kitchens. And there's a certain amount of the value creation process that is psychology and anthropology of just going out into the world with your eyes wide open, noticing what people do, asking questions, noticing subtle things that they might not even pick up on.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That might be very expensive to do. So the price of the candle might be higher than you otherwise would like it to be. Or you could go the other direction. Let's make the cheapest, most ubiquitous candles ever, but then let's focus on the distribution end of things to have candles in more places. And so you start, this is something that I learned how to do very early in my career. I worked for a consumer goods manufacturer, big company called Procter& Gamble.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so a lot of the early stage value creation process is like, okay, we've identified some areas, like things that people are looking for, things that people want. Can you understand each of those things in detail around, for example, what makes a really good candle set? What makes a candle last longer? What allows candle manufacturing at a relatively inexpensive rate? All of those things. And then most successful businesses pick one or two of those things to focus on and then turn that dial all the way up to 9, 10, 11. And so, for example, you might be able to make the best-smelling, longest lasting candle using some complex chemistry manufacturing process, whatever.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so this is a really interesting thing. A lot of the things around value creation come down to making trade-offs between competing priorities. And so The perfect product or the perfect offering would deliver every single thing that the customer would like and it would be free”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, step one is the value creation component, which is it sounds like in this particular example, the candles are the type of value that would be created. And then the relevant question there is. Why do people buy candles? What are they looking for? When somebody goes out and they say, you know what, I would really like to have a candle right now. What do they want? What do they need? What are they looking for”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A new business, a lot of it comes down to answering those fundamental questions. How are you going to create value that someone else in the world wants or needs?”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do need to grapple with the complexities of the world because, as we were talking earlier, every business has these five major interrelated parts we need to understand how those work. Businesses are created by people for the benefit of other people. And so we need to understand human psychology. both our psychology and the psychology of the people we interact with relate to whether that's customers or employees contractors, the other people in our world. And then there are certain parts about how the world works, system and process, how things tend to interact with each other. That's very valuable and important to know. But again Complex, not complicated. And I think there's a lot of for the person who wants to start.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it is achievable for most people. Yeah. And I think business is complex in the sense of there are many moving parts. It's not just one thing. There are interrelatednesses that you need to understand. It's not complicated in the sense of the most important ideas, principles, things to do, things to understand are not all that difficult when it gets down to it. I think in business in general somewhat for status related reasons, but business people like to feel fancy and complicated. And sometimes you signal status or sophistication by making things sound really big or difficult or complex. I think that's fundamentally not the case for business. Most of the ideas that we deal with are common sense and simple arithmetic. And so”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are people, individuals with skills and abilities and the curiosity and the drive to make things happen, you don't necessarily get that from having three letters after the end of your name.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's funny. This has been asked by very many people, and the answer is always no. So my two favorite studies here, Jeffrey Peffer and Christina Fong at Stanford University at the time. This was the early 2000s. Business school professors did a study of do business school programs work because if they did, you would expect to see more successful executives, professionals having business school degrees. And what they found is no, and makes absolutely no difference. And my favorite quote was, by the lead offer, Jeffrey Feffer, it's like, if you are good enough to get in, you are good enough to do well regardless. It's a credentialing system. It's a pre-selection. But really, the people who make things happen in business.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An enormous amount of money, and that's usually financed with debt. And so if you don't have a, for example, if you're not working for a company that is willing to sponsor your way through and pay the tuition costs, most of these degrees are financed with debt. And that debt is going to be with you regardless of whether or not you like your career, regardless of the economic situation that you graduate into, regardless of whether or not you get a job at the end of it. You're taking on an enormous obligation, spending a lot of money, borrowing a lot of money with a very unsure outcome at the end.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The answer to that is it depends, and it depends is it depends on what you want for yourself and your life. And so approximately two-thirds of business school graduates go into either management consulting or investment banking. The remainder of them, the vast majority, go into working for extremely large companies. And so if you want your life to look like that, then the promise that is very often delivered with business school programs is you're essentially buying yourself a very expensive interview to have an opportunity at a company or a firm or an industry where that is the primary mode of getting into it. The price of that interview can be very, very steep. And so the top 10 business schools, as we're talking right now, charge anywhere between $240 and $250,000 for a two-year program.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is what the owners and operators and executives and managers are looking for in terms of people to hire, people to recruit, or people to start companies. And so the more you understand how all of this works at a deeply fundamental level, the more opportunities you're going to have. I think it's a skill that's essential for every person to know and be conversant.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This framework in your head, going back to my friend earlier, her prep for the interview was very simple. We had a 15-minute conversation about what those things might look like. She went away and did her prep, and she went into the interview the next day, and she was offered the job. And one of the things that comes out of having this deep understanding of business, even for potentially very young or very junior people who are just getting started. Understanding these things, being able to ask these questions, being able to know what's important and what's not and think like an owner or an operator of the business.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then how is the business bringing in money? How's the business spending money? And A, is it bringing in more than it's spending? If not, there's a problem and more importantly, is it enough? Is it enough to make all of the time and energy and effort that's being put into the business by the owner and the employees worthwhile? And that's the essence of finance. And so understanding business in this very systematic way is a superpower. It allows you to take a look at anything like the businesses that are happening in the world all around us. It helps you understand them. If you want to create a business, this is the foundation of every business plan that has or ever will exist because each of these parts is universal, essential, and fundamental. You have to answer these questions. And so by having”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That every single business has and how those processes interrelate. And what that knowledge gets you is the ability to take a look at any existing business and understand it in a very deep and fundamental way. So you can take a complex organization, you can break it down into parts that are very simple, straightforward, easy to understand. And then you can take that knowledge to ask a series of very useful questions. How is this business creating value? How do they attract the attention of people who might want or need what this business provides? How do they convince people to pull out their wallet or checkbook or credit card and give the business money? How does the business deliver the value that it...”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So many of the readers of the Personal MBA over the years, our early career professionals are just getting started in their career in some way, shape, or form. And I can't tell you the number of times that I've heard from someone who's like, I'm interviewing for my first job or I'm interviewing for my first big promotion. I actually have a friend who's in this position a couple months ago. She's like, I'm a skilled professional. I've been working for a while. There's an opportunity to move into management here. And part of that interview is going to be they're going to ask me like how do we improve the business that we're in? She's like, I'm trained as an engineer. I don't know about any of this business stuff. And so there's a very simple way of understanding what a business is, what a business does, the primary part.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And explain all of the different parts of a business, how they work, how they interrelate to each other. And so you can take that knowledge and do good work, whatever it is that you do in your life or in your career.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to learn business? There's a reason that people find this area of knowledge useful. And I don't necessarily think academia is the place to start. I think there's an enormous amount of business knowledge and skill that you can develop on your own by understanding the most important concepts around what businesses are and how they work. Using them in your day-to-day life, using it in the career that you already have, using it to start something new on your own. And just a few very simple, straightforward ideas go a very long way. And so my goal in writing the personal MBA was to explain business to someone who has no knowledge, no experience, no idea what's going on, start from absolute square zero.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Masters of business administrations, big degree. Actually, one of the most economically successful academic degrees that exists over the past several decades, growth in businessmaster's programs worldwide has just exploded. And so for better or worse, when adults decide that they're interested in business, the first thing they do is go to Google or Amazon and they type in the letters MBA and they start looking for graduate business school programs. And I think that's a mistake. I think there's a reason that people”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is important to me, and there's something that should exist in the world that for some reason doesn't exist in the world. And I think I need to be the person to make that, to do that. And so that's when the personal MBA went from just this crazy side project that I did post undergrad into essentially a second full-time job, reading and research and trying to decide for myself what are the critical parts of business how do businesses work, how do they function. And then I decided to put that in a form that other people could read and benefit from as well.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go out and find that book and read that book. And then I would understand the fundamentals. Then I would understand the basics of what it is that we're all doing here. And I looked and I looked and I read and I read and I couldn't find it. And so at a certain point I had essentially spent months reading, just going through category after category, just trying to understand for myself what businesses are, how businesses work. And at a certain point, I realized”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, a couple of things. Curiosity and persistence. And I was solving my own problem. So one of the things that happened is right after school, I got a job at a big company. And I was working with a lot of people who had just graduated from top 15 business programs. I got this job straight out of undergrad. I had no idea what I was doing. And I really wanted to learn like what are we doing here? What is business? How does it work? What's important to know? What's not important to know? And so one of the things that I tried to do with the personal MBA and one of the reasons like how the project got started was I figured that there was a book written by a business school professor in the 1950s or something. And I just needed.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The third part of every business is the fourth part is particularly important, which is, and the fifth part is what a lot of people struggle with. But I'm here to help you. So the fifth part is...”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marketing, and humans have five drives the drive to acquire, to bond, to learn, to feel, to defend. And the more drives that you hook into, the more attractive the business offer is going to be.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the foundation of every business plan that has or ever will exist. So step one is value creation. Find those important unmet needs and then focus on meeting those. Is this enough of a problem for you to pay money to solve it?”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, every business from the smallest startup to the largest corporation in the world has five fundamental parts. If you want to create a business or interviewing for your first job or interviewing for your first big promotion, understanding this is a superpower. It's so exciting and fun.”
2024-07-15 · The Diary of a CEO · Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT