MBA Mondays Illustrated

I’ve encouraged folks to use the MBA Mondays content in whatever ways they want. It is all creative commons licensed and available to be used freely as long as there is proper attribution. This past week Jason Li emailed me about his illustrated version of MBA Mondays. I took a look and was very pleased to see a curated version of the work with fun illustrations on the table of contents and every post. He also included the best of the comments!

This is an example of why creative commons is such a powerful model. He didn’t have to ask my permission to do this. He added value to my work and created a new and possibly better version of it. His work is also creative commons so anyone can take what he did and add to that.

This is how knowledge should work in the digital age. It should be fluid and iterative. The text book is the old model, GitHub is the new model. So thanks Jason for doing exactly what I had hoped would happen with MBA Mondays.

#entrepreneurship#management

Comments (Archived):

  1. awaldstein

    This is great.Content curation made interesting and personal.

  2. andyswan

    Love this. Everyone wins

    1. aminTorres

      Andy loves a situation where everyone wins.I am playing the lotto tonight. 😉

  3. Virginia B

    Adding value is what every maker should strive to do, Jason Li hits a home run.

  4. Erin

    Pictures about left-brained things! Yay!

  5. Twain Twain

    Bravo, Jason! Fun and en pointe illustrations. And yellow’s the new black, white, space gray! Lol.So… back in Feb my team brainstormed branding and color schemes. Pls see images of personal reference points plus I’m Chinese.We’re looking to get some illustrations and video cartoons done in a few months so will likely connect with you offline. Yes, we went with Yellow!!![Edited comment because henceforth I’m working towards 1 word comment by 4 July 2015 as a challenge.]

  6. Tom Labus

    It looks great, congrats

  7. Al Mazzone

    Thank you Jason.

  8. Sebastian Gonzalez

    This is awesome.

    1. Jason Li

      Thanks Anne (and hi!) – I didn’t feel right self-promoting in a thank you message, so am doubly grateful you’re pitching in here 🙂

      1. Anne Libby

        🙂

    2. Kirsten Lambertsen

      Thanks for sharing this, Anne!

  9. Mario Cantin

    Wow, he did an awesome job of it too!

  10. William Mougayar

    Amazing work, and I can see the hours it took to put it together.Since your hard work is done, have you thought about putting it into an e-book and selling it on Amazon for $2.99 for example? Then you could split the proceeds between yourself and Fred who will undoubtedly donate it.

    1. Anne Libby

      Or Gumroad, where you could post a PDF and let people pay what they want…

      1. Jason Li

        Great ideas @wmoug:disqus @annelibby:disqus 🙂 Love the idea of doing a pay-what-you-want with proceeds going to charity.Think there’s enough interest (any idea how to gauge that)?

        1. Anne Libby

          I would say go for it, if you have time to format as PDF. You can post it immediately to Gumroad and it sort of doesn’t matter what the interest is!I used Gumroad for a smaller effort, with the idea that it would be a test for posting to Amazon. I liked it, and may never make the leap to post to Amazon. Pay what you want option is in the spirit of CC/open source, because people can choose to pay $0. . Relatively speaking, publishing effort is low. With Amazon, you have to format the book pretty specifically. With Gumroad, you just post the PDF. That’s not zero effort, but it requires less specialized knowledge. Many people apparently hire people to format things for Kindle. . Gumroad “take” is lower than Amazon’s. Amazon pricing is tricky, if you charge more than $X, you keep a higher rate of the earnings.. Amazon’s distribution reach is better, as people searching at Amazon will stumble on your book, with right keywords. The Gumroad marketing route is all you. (And this community.). Oh, PS one more thing: “pay what you want” is fascinating. Very few people paid $0. Some people paid as high as $20. Most paid more than double the price I would have set on Amazon.That’s all I can think of here/now…Edit: PPS keep thinking of new things to add (#procrastinating) at Gumroad, you keep the mailing list. People can opt out. So, for example you can send out updates to the book. If Fred starts the series again, and you decide to add something…or if you find out a link has broken.

          1. Jason Li

            Thanks for the insight. Am going to have to pass for now though – websites don’t print well so I’d probably find myself fiddling with layout and design for a PDF/e-book version. Which isn’t to say that’s not worth it, but am having a busy month 🙂

          2. Anne Libby

            It’s not trivial! Even though mine was mostly text, formatting/layout for PDF took some time.

        2. ShanaC

          you may not know until after the fact

  11. Susan Kang Nam

    This is well done. Great creative work. Thank you Jason

  12. Russell

    Call me a bit of a dinosaur, however for this kind of long read, I’d love to see a book! f this were on Amazon I’d pre-order 10 copies … so maybe a Kickstarter thing … with profits to go to CSNY?!

    1. Chimpwithcans

      YOU’RE A DINOSAUR! ….Just cos you told us to 😉 I love the book idea – I think Seth Godin did something similar with turning his blog posts into a book.

  13. JimHirshfield

    Well done, Jason.

  14. panterosa,

    I’m waiting for image people to catch up to where I want them to be in Creative Commons. I add value to their work and get it exposure.

  15. mikenolan99

    Makes me so happy…

  16. pointsnfigures

    Thanks @jasonli!

  17. Ronnie Rendel

    The text book is the old model, GitHub is the new model – says it all.

  18. Tom Labus

    Going with the Warriors in 6. Should be good games

    1. pointsnfigures

      And Hawks in 4 (I wish)

  19. Kirsten Lambertsen

    Respect! This needs to be (and no doubt will be) on every new entrepreneur’s and startup accelerator’s required reading list.Any idea how many hours this took you?

    1. Jason Li

      Short answer: long enough that if I’d known, I’m not sure I would’ve started back in 2013! :)Long answer: so there are 115 posts. Between reading, selecting comments and drawing, let’s say it’s 40-60 minutes per post. So 77-115 hours plus say 10 for admin/overhead? That’d be my guestimate. Tbh I really don’t know as I spread it out in bursts over almost two years.

      1. Kirsten Lambertsen

        Wow, even more respect. Love your Tumblr, as well!

  20. Rob Underwood

    I can’t wait for the creative commons/GitHub models to be more widely adopted in education. BetterLesson, to a degree, among others is starting to this. Think teacher-built curricula and lesson plans that are constantly being expanded and improved.Imagine if the Common Core standard had been created (which also could have been done in an open-source way) and then, in more of an open-source model, it left to teachers and other educators to develop the curricula, lessons plans, and tests based on the standard – instead of leaving it to Pearson, etc. – using tools like Creative Commons and GitHub. (In fairness, some of this was tried and is still entirely possible provided school districts open their minds to the idea of using teacher “crowd-built” “open-source” curricula and lesson plans instead of what Pearson, etc. sell.)I also believe the Github model could be the key to disrupting the massive management/strategy consulting market. Imagine all of the “best practice models” under creative commons and forked and branched a la GitHub. The “best practice” model for, say, the order-to-cash business processes for the discrete manufacturing industry being done via Creative Commons and GitHub instead of paying a consultant $400/hour to advice and then they retain the IP to use at their next client.

  21. Aviah Laor

    This phenomenon is not all rosy. It’s part of the “great decoupling” of income from productivity, discussed here just a few days ago. Time is limited, so all this free work, without a clear monetization, becomes a growing chunk of the productivity-income gap.

    1. Anne Libby

      I agree with you — and one thing I found surprising/disheartening things about the negative reaction here a few months ago about the Eric Ries Kickstarter was the sentiment that Eric should work without compensation.”Everyone should blog!” is impractical, timewise. It has also resulted in the cacophony of unreliable content we now find via search.That said, some tools are emerging that enable some of us to extract monetary value from our work.Elsewhere in today’s comments I mentioned an experiment in self-publishing. 4 years ago, I would have blogged this info, and gotten $0. One year ago I might have blogged a piece of it. Now it’s out there, and people are paying for it. (And it’s useful for me to hand to clients.)These tools aren’t enough. And they currently enable imperfect monetization of a tiny sliver of work. (Over time, how much will I get back for the time I put into my self-publishing effort? TBD.) They only work, today, for a small portion of the population. It’s hard to see how some skills can be “sold” fairly with what currently exists out there.So it’s a challenge.(Edited, clarity and an extra point.)

  22. JLM

    .Well played.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

    1. Jason Li

      Thank you 🙂 And FWIW you’re probably the person I quoted most from in the comment excerpts!

  23. LE

    This past week Jason Li emailed me about his illustrated version of MBA Mondays.The home page makes no reference to who did this and the whois record has privacy protection (for the life of me I wish people would stop doing this it’s only a good idea in certain cases not in most cases..) not that the average person checks that but it does happen.So you need to go here:http://www.mba-mondays-illu…And then follow a link to here http://www.hongkonggong.com/ and then go here http://notebook.hongkonggon… and I still can’t find anything saying exactly who Jason is.Bottom line: If you are putting in the effort to do this you should make it easy for people to find you and to know who you are and what you can do. They shouldn’t have to click on things and go several levels deep and away from your site for that basic information. It should be clearly stated and, most importantly, it should be easy to find. Serendipity doesn’t come by way of a treasure hunt.

  24. Sebastien Latapie

    What an awesome resource. Thank you!

  25. kenberger

    Open Source, FTW.My company is building an open source call center product for (USV portfolio company) Twilio, at their urging and with their blessings, and it will be interesting to release this in the wild and have some companies hire us to build bespoke functionality and others we’ll never meet iterate on it.

  26. ShanaC

    Thank you!

  27. aseoconnor

    On a similar note, CK-12 has made it possible for teachers to modify their Flex Books and iterate on the curriculum. Very coolhttps://www.ck12.org/life-s…