Author: Jason Barron

“The Visual MBA: A Quick Guide to Everything You’ll Learn in Two Years of Business School” is an illustration-based book by Jason Barron published in 2019.

The book is made up of 20 chapters, each covering a business school course of the MBA program that ranges from managerial accounting to marketing and entrepreneurial finance.

Chapter one, titled “Leadership,” defines the key concepts to creating your personal brand image, with the five fundamentals being strategy, execution, talent management, talent development and personal proficiency.

The chapter takes the reader into a five-step plan to build a brand that bears fruitful results, starting with step one, “nailing down the results you want to achieve over the next 12 months,” and ending with step five, “making it real.”

It says that managing your energy is more useful than managing your time, warning that while stress can briefly increase performance, it is wise to take breaks to perform better in the long run.

Another chapter that captures the essence of the MBA is chapter 13, titled “Judgment and Decision-Making.”

The chapter discusses the prevalence of decision-making in our daily lives, and Barron relays a simple but effective model to be proactive in making decisions.

The acronym the author introduces, PrOACT, stands for problem, objectives, alternatives, consequences and trade-offs.

Barron says that the model can save valuable time when making a decision. It can also build a confident structure for future processes, he adds.

A Wall Street Journal bestselling author, Barron is now a senior product manager at Adobe.

During his MBA education at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Business, Barron created visual notes of business essentials.

He realized how difficult the MBA course can be, taking it upon himself to compile two years of business school education— 516 hours of lectures — into visual illustrations that can be understood by readers around the world.