How can you improve your Business Acumen as a B-School student (or otherwise)

(image credits: Unsplash)

Recently I had the privilege to deliver an address to the new MBA batch at my alma-mater, as part of their orientation program. I had spoken about a few things in that address; with significant emphasis on creating and maintaining systems that help you learn and grow; over and above the rigour of the curriculum. (I can share the deck used for it upon request)

I had specifically spoken about a bunch of resources for improving your business acumen and promised to share it later as a link directory.

I like to describe learning, especially business learning, in terms of collecting and connecting dots. The more dots we collect, the more likely are they to connect at the right point in time. Serendipity will kick in. Neurons will fire up from God Knows Where! And hence, creating systems about reading is important.

Below are some of the links I used to improve my learning back in the day, during my MBA (some 10 years back). They are, not by any means, intended to be exhaustive. These are just the ones that helped me the best back in the day and continue deliver very high quality content. Feel free to apply your discretion.

Further, you will notice these belong to a slightly wide variety of topics within business. This is by design. You will eventually gravitate towards things you love. It also helps you naturally filter out career options / subjects for your specialisation.

Lastly, you got to read. You got to get into the habit of reading. You got to make systems for reading these — Fixed time of the day to read, Separate Social and Email accounts to follow these and read, etc.

Do not try to memorize. Read to understand, instead. Your brain memorizes / internalizes what it understands. Also, if you can; every day, try to summarize any 1 piece you read that day to a friend. That piece is never getting erased from your memory.

Happy Learning!

Part A: Discover, consume and engage with content from the top-sources

Journals / Blogs / Newsletters / Twitter Accounts that can bring in a lot of valuable content to your Twitter feed and / or to your email inbox:

Overall Business:

1. Harvard Business Review
2. MIT Sloan Business Review: Twitter
3. Economist: Twitter
4. Forbes
5. Fast Co
6. Inc

Product Management:

1. Lenny Rachitsky’s blog:
2. Shreyas Doshi’s on Twitter:
3. Mind the product

Strategy & Consulting:

1. McKinsey
2. Bain Insights
3. Stratechery
4. Strategy &

Marketing & Advertising:

1. Hubspot
2. Ads of the World
3. Seth Godin
4. Neil Patel

Technology:

1. Techmeme
2. Tech Crunch
3. Smashing Magazine

Startups:

1. A16Z
2. YCombinator
3. Entrepreneur
4. CIIE

Read good business newspapers

1. MINT
2. Business Standard

Read good books

1. Let’s talk about money: (Basics of personal finance)
2. The Hard Things About Hard Things
3. What the CEO wants you to know
4. Atomic Habits
5. Working Backwards

Get access to great data sources:

1. CMIE
2. Statista
3. World Bank Open Data
4. GOI Open Data
5. Gartner
6. Forrester
7. World Economic Forum

Once again, these isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list. Please feel free to add more and share as comments.