Roadside Mba

While playing hooky from a conference in Boston a few years back, three former colleagues from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management hopped in a car and headed on a road trip. They pulled into a shoe store in Maine and noticed that the sales help was unusually pushy. After a few questions, they discovered the store had a "secret shopper" program, in which employees would be marked down if they were not sufficiently aggressive with customers. A lightbulb went off.

Instead of teaching the tried-and-true case studies involving GE and Microsoft, what if these three wise men pulled their heads out of their ivory towers and went in search of insights about product differentiation, pricing, brand management, building a team, and organization? Why study Mrs's Paul's fish sticks when you can learn from the 80-year-old proprietor of Joe Patti's, the leading and legendary local fish monger in Pensacola? Want to learn about scaling a business? Come meet Dr. Burris, the flying orthodontist, who operates multiple, profitable practices in rural Arkansas.

The book isn't all egghead as the chapters are spiced with the type of vehicular mishaps and Maalox moments that are common on any road trip.