Josh Kaufman – Author Biography
Josh Kaufman is an independent business teacher and the author of The Personal MBA, the influential book that argues you can learn the essentials of business on your own — without the cost of business school. A leading voice in the self-education movement, he has helped hundreds of thousands of readers master business fundamentals on their own terms.
Early Life
Kaufman earned his BBA from the University of Cincinnati’s Lindner School of Business in 2005, where he studied business information systems, real estate, and philosophy. Rather than pursuing an MBA, he took a job as an assistant brand manager in Procter & Gamble’s Home Care division, where he worked across the company’s value chain and led the development of P&G’s global online marketing measurement strategy. The experience convinced him that most of what business schools teach can be learned faster, cheaper, and better through deliberate self-study.
Career
While still at P&G, Kaufman began compiling his self-directed business education at personalmba.com, distilling hundreds of business books into their essential concepts. He left P&G to develop the Personal MBA full-time. The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business was published in 2010 and became an international bestseller, praised for making concepts like value creation, marketing, finance, and systems thinking accessible to non-specialists. His second book, The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast! (2013), applied the same self-education philosophy to rapid skill acquisition, arguing that anyone can go from knowing nothing to being reasonably good at something in just 20 hours of deliberate practice. His work has been featured in BusinessWeek, Fortune, and Fast Company.
Major Works
Kaufman’s books are The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business and The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast!
Writing Style and Themes
Kaufman writes with the clarity of a teacher and the efficiency of an engineer. The Personal MBA is organized as a lexicon of mental models — each concept explained in a few crisp pages, stripped of jargon and academic padding. His great theme is educational empowerment: that the credentialing system is largely a tax on ambition, and that motivated people can teach themselves anything, including business. He is part of a broader movement — alongside the open-courseware and “unschooling” worlds — that treats self-directed learning as a serious alternative to formal education. His tone is practical, encouraging, and resolutely anti-elitist.
Legacy
The Personal MBA became a touchstone of the late-2000s self-education movement and remains one of the most recommended business books for autodidacts. Kaufman’s “20 hours” framework entered the popular vocabulary of skill acquisition. As an education activist, he continues to argue that the future of learning belongs to the curious and the self-directed — not to institutions.
