Distilled from the vault canon · July 2026

Harvard Business School, in one page

The usable core of a $250k MBA — every framework in plain words, what it's for, and where the real material lives free. Full depth is in the Obsidian brain: Harvard Business School (the canon) + 6 deep notes.

HBS doesn't teach answers. It trains one reflex: make a decision with incomplete information — and defend it.

Everything below is vocabulary for that reflex. The frameworks organise your thinking; they never replace the decision.

I.The nine tools worth stealing

Each one in a sentence, plus the moment you'd actually reach for it.

Five Forces — is this market worth entering?

Profit in any industry is set by five pressures: how brutal the competition is, how easily new players can enter, whether customers can solve the problem another way, and how hard buyers and suppliers can squeeze you.

Use it whenPicking a niche. A small market with weak forces (loyal customers, no cheap substitute) beats a big one being competed to zero.

Different, not better — how you win once you're in

Only two ways to win: be the cheapest, or be meaningfully different. "Better" is a race everyone runs and margins die in. Small players win by being the best at one narrow thing.

Use it whenPositioning Elysium or TRUEF. Compete on craft and specificity — never on price.

Disruption — why giants fall (and how you sneak in)

Big companies die by serving their best customers too well — leaving the cheap, simple, "not worth our time" bottom of the market undefended. That gap is the small player's front door.

Use it whenAn agency ignores clients "too small" for them. That's your market, on purpose.

Jobs to be Done — what customers actually buy

Nobody wants a drill; they want the hole — actually, the shelf up. Customers "hire" a product to make progress in their life. Sell the progress, not the deliverable.

Use it whenWriting any pitch or page. A guest house isn't buying "a website" — it's hiring more bookings and a legit-looking brand.

Time value of money — is this project worth it?

Money later is worth less than money now. Value any decision by what it returns over time, discounted for risk — if the discounted return beats the cost, do it. (This is NPV, minus the jargon.)

Use it whenWeighing R350/mo recurring vs once-off work: recurring income compounds; a once-off is worth exactly once.

Profit ≠ cash — the accounting lesson that kills businesses

Three statements tell the truth together: profit (income statement), what you own vs owe (balance sheet), and actual cash moving (cash flow). A "profitable" business dies when cash arrives after the bills do.

Use it whenAny order-then-fulfil model (TRUEF): watch the cash gap between customer payment and printer invoice.

Segment → Target → Position — marketing's whole spine

Split the market into groups with different needs, pick the one you can serve best, then own one clear idea in their mind. Every marketing decision after that (product, price, place, promotion) just stays consistent with it.

Use it whenChoosing lead lists. "Garden Route guest houses with good reviews and bad websites" is a segment, a target, and a position in one line.

The bottleneck — why working harder doesn't help

Any process moves only as fast as its slowest step. Speeding up anything else just piles up work in front of the constraint. Find the bottleneck, fix that, ignore the rest.

Use it whenYou feel busy but output is flat. Your bottleneck is usually your own hours on the one task only you can do — protect it, automate the rest.

Incentives run everything — the leadership shortcut

When people (or clients) won't do the obvious thing, the system is rewarding something else. Change what's rewarded, not the speech. And past a fair price, people run on autonomy, mastery and purpose — not money.

Use it whenA client stalls on content or approval. Make the easy path the one you want: deadlines with defaults, "we go live Friday unless you say otherwise."

II.The method — how HBS actually teaches

No lectures. ~500 real business dilemmas in two years, argued out loud. Half the grade is speaking up. You can't buy the room — but you can copy the drill:

  1. Turn a real decision into a one-page case.Situation, options, constraints, deadline. Writing it forces the fog out.
  2. Take a position. "It depends" is banned.What would you do, and what happens Monday morning? Commit on paper.
  3. Get cold-called.Have Claude play the sceptical professor: attack the position, poke the numbers, argue the other side.
  4. Decide, then write down what would change your mind.That one line turns a guess into a testable call — and builds the judgment reflex the degree is actually selling.

III.Where the real material lives

Verified July 2026. The pattern: HBS gives away its research free and charges for its teaching.

SourceWhat it isCost
hbswk.hbs.eduWorking Knowledge — faculty research in plain English, updated weekly. Best free starting point.Free
hbs.edu/faculty + SSRN~2,000 faculty working papers, full PDFs, no login. The raw firehose.Free
Porter's Five Forces (HBR, 2008)The original strategy text, free to read — the one HBR classic that isn't paywalled.Free
online.hbs.edu/free-ebooks-guidesFree e-books & templates intro-ing course concepts. (The old free sample lessons were discontinued.)Free
HarvardX on edXHarvard business-adjacent courses, free to audit (pay only for the certificate).Free
HBS case studiesThe actual classroom cases, bought one at a time at store.hbs.edu.~$8.95 each
HBS Online coursesReal cohort courses (Strategy, Financial Accounting, Negotiation Mastery…), 5–6 weeks each.~$1,949
CORe (foundations bundle)Accounting + analytics + economics in one 17-week program. The single best paid on-ramp.~$2,799
Harvard Business ReviewThe magazine. A few free articles a month, then subscription. HBR ≠ HBS.Paywalled

What this page can't give you — said honestly