Roadside MBA: Back Road Lessons for Entrepreneurs, Executives and Small Business Owners

Mazzeo, Michael; Oyer, Paul; Schaefer, Scott

ISBN 10: 1455598895 / ISBN 13: 9781455598892

Published by Business Plus, 2014

About this Item

Seller Inventory # AMTV.1455598895.N

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Roadside MBA: Back Road Lessons for Entrepreneurs, Executives and Small Business Owners
• Publisher: Business Plus
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1455598895
• ISBN 13: 9781455598892
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

In this "refreshingly different" high-toned business book, three leading business school professors take to America's back roads in search of offbeat small businesses—enterprises that hold valuable lessons for executives and entrepreneurs everywhere (Bloomberg Businessweek).

While playing hooky from a conference in Boston a few years back, three former colleagues from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management hopped in a car and embarked on a life-changing road trip. They pulled into a shoe store in Maine and noticed that the sales help was unusually pushy. After a few questions, they discovered the store had a "secret shopper" program, in which employees would be marked down if they were not sufficiently aggressive with customers. A lightbulb went off.

Instead of teaching the tried-and-true case studies involving GE and Microsoft, these three men decided to pull their heads out of their ivory towers and search for insights about product differentiation, pricing, brand management, building a team, and a host of other topics. Why take your cues on employee compensation from Wall Street when you can learn from a Main Street company like Couer D'Alene's best crime-scene cleaner? Want to learn about scaling a business? Come meet Dr. Burris, the flying orthodontist, who operates multiple, profitable practices in rural Arkansas.

Spiced with vehicular mishaps and unexpected finds, this is one business book you won't want to miss. 

About the Author

Michael Mazzeo is an Associate Professor of Management & Strategy at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management where he teaches the school's core MBA class in Business Strategy. Mike has a PhD in Economics from Stanford University, and lives in Chicago with his ten-year old son and many, many Legos.

Paul Oyer is the Fred H. Merrill Professor of Economics at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. Paul has a PhD in Economics from Princeton University, and lives in Stanford, California with his two children.

Scott Schaefer holds the Kendall D. Garff Chair in Business Administration and is Professor of Finance at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business. He has a PhD in business economics from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and lives in Salt Lake City with his two children.