Gary Slinger

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Audiobooks & the Personal MBA April 13, 2006

I guess sometimes I’m just behind the curve a little… In this particular case, I’m talking about audiobooks. I was never really been a fan of them, for a couple of reasons:

• I know myself to be a visual, rather than aural, learner. I can work in the “speak and listen” mode, but if I’m given a choice, I prefer to work from a written report, book, etc.
• Technology. Some audiobooks are long - very long. In the past, I had no ready way of stopping listening to the file at some particular point, and then coming back to it later, the next day, whenever, and continuing from where I left off. This was made even worse if I wanted to use a portable player to play part of an audiobook, then something else like some music, and then return to the audiobook.

Well, a couple of things have changed my mind on all of this lately.

• Available time. I’m not traveling as much as I used to, which would have been a great time to have been listening to these things, but my commute is running a pretty regular 45 minutes each way at the moment, and that’s working well as a “sensible” block of time to listen to an audiobook.
• Available technology. I acquired an iPod not so long back, and as well as using it to schlep music and video around, as part of trying out the assorted features, I ran a couple of audiobooks off of it. With no additional action on my part, the iPod remembers where I was in the file, and restarts from there, every time. I’ve noticed that iTunes does as well, and with iTunes connected to my home stereo as well, this gives me a lot of options in playing audiobooks if I want to.
• Personal development (I). No-one stays the same, and as we get older, our styles and preferences, while remaining rooted in who and what we are, change, adapt, and mellow. Given the nature of the work I’ve been doing over the last few years (a lot of face-to-face work), I find I’m more comfortable listening to non-fiction audiobooks as an alternative to
  reading the book.
• Personal development (II). I’ve been aware of the Personal MBA website for a while, been a member of the site, and browsed the discussion forums, and I have a list of all the books involved in this project readily available at my desk. I haven’t actually been “doing” the Personal MBA for a while, however. It’s one of my Q2 “things to do” for this year, however, and when I’ve finished my current batch of non-fiction reading, I’ll be moving on to something from the Personal MBA list. In fact, I already own several of the books from the list, and will be rereading
  them.

In addition to the Personal MBA site, however, my eye was particularly caught by an article “MBA On The Run”, which I originally saw here, but now has a dedicated site. A recent full write up on it can be found here. This is essentially what I’m going to do - I’m going to listen, rather than read, to as many of the books on the Personal MBA list as I can, read the rest, and buy physical copies of any that I particularly like, or feel I’ll want to reference more than occasionally (the finance books, for instance). There’s a few books that aren’t on the PMBA list that I want to listen to as well, that I haven’t gotten to yet for various reasons. Right now, for instance, as well as physically reading “The World Is Flat” at home, I’m listening to “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell on my commute. I’ll have completed it after 5 “commute days” (I haven’t been in the office every day this week), and there’s no way I would have finished it in that time if I’d been reading it. For some more reading on the PMBA, if you haven’t seen it already, you might want to read this Business Week article.

There’s another hidden benefit as well - I’m lucky enough to be able to read fast, naturally, but I also speed read, deliberately, when I read non-fiction. Sometimes - not often, but sometimes - I miss a key point because of that, and have to go back and review it. I can’t do that when I’m listening. Everything just “flows”. I can nudge the tempo of the audiobook if I wanted to, but at least in this case, there’s no need. I’m enjoying the book, and I’m enjoying the “lack of effort” it’s taking me to listen to it.

I got it from Audible by the way. I signed up for their one-year plan, so I have a dozen credits to use (books are one credit, periodicals such as the Harvard Business Review are 1/3 of a credit. How you use them is up to you. If you choose not to use a credit, or use them all up, other downloads run at a 30% discount. I’ve got a
few things from them, which will keep me busy for a while - and as a “freebie”, I get a one-hour digest of the New York Times each day, which I listen to while I’m working through the first batch of morning email in the office. All in all, a good deal.

And finally, I should thank Phil Gerbyshak for the link to the MBA On The Run site - his daily links postings made “catching up” a lot less painful when I got back from vacation - thanks!

• Posted in : Process, Management
• Author : Gary Slinger

  Technorati Tags: Process, Management, Personal+MBA, PMBA, MBA, Audiobooks, eLearning

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