Learn How to Apply One of the Most Powerful Management Tools to Your Every Day Problems
We worked for many years as management consultants and found ourselves applying this simple yet powerful decision making tool over and over again. Every management consultant worth his salt has used it to help his client in decision making. While it has been used extensively in the corporate world, it can also be a very effective tool for personal growth and development. In this highly visual and easy to follow Nugget, we show you how to apply the two by two matrix for analyzing and simplifying difficult decisions we need to make every day. This book is simple and is meant for a beginner, not for the advanced reader. If you are some hotshot consultant, please do not waste your time reading this. Instead, please write a book that we can read and learn from.
The original two by two matrix was developed by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in 1970 to help its clients make decisions about products and business units. But its vintage has not reduced its effectiveness. It is best used to frame a complex decision making problem into a simpler one that can be analyzed quickly. It is a quasi-quantitative tool because you don’t need actual numbers for it to work. All you need to do is group your options based on the two most important decision making criteria.
There are many personal growth and productivity gurus promoting their books, training programs, tools and other stuff to help you become better and more productive. Some of them work, some don’t. We are not a personal growth or productivity guru. However, we did learn a lot of stuff during our years helping companies become leaner, more efficient and grow faster. We believe many of the tools we used in our corporate avatar can be applied equally well to our personal lives. Our experience in using and teaching these tools inspired us to create the Personal MBA series. Each Nugget in the series will deal with one specific tool or area for personal growth and development. This is the first book in the series and we hope you will be as excited about applying the two by two matrix as we are about writing this book.
This is a nugget or a book that is small in size and high in value. This book is not meant for you if you are looking for a 200 page tome filled with pages after pages of text. This is an illustrated book and has 50 pages. Half of these are images and the other half are easy to read and follow text pages. It is meant for people who want books that are fast and easy to read and who would otherwise not read a long and complex book. If you are the kind that measures the value of a book by the number of minutes it takes to read it (i.e., the longer the book the more satisfied you are) or the number of pages it has (again, the more pages a book has, the more valuable you consider it to be), then STOP. This is not for you.This is for you if you want to read a book quickly and get huge value by:
- Applying what you learnt from a nugget in just a few minutes. Its only the application that generates value, not the mere reading of it
- Being entertained for a few minutes and then it was done. Its brevity is its virtue
This Book is best read in Landscape Orientation