A PGDM in Finance, Marketing, or HR can give you relevant exposure to the functions. A few case studies can help you to envision how the industry puts it into practice. Good books, however, are timeless and priceless. The authors of such books often back their content with deep research. The research and content are woven into a meaningful format to impart invaluable lessons. The lessons are elucidated with relevant examples to illustrate the power of the concepts covered in the book. Spending a few hours in the library and reading the best books is your growth hack into the corporate world.

A PGDM in Finance may give you excellent theoretical knowledge of financial concepts but its application in the real-world is a completely different ball game. A PGDM in Finance may enable you to become a wealth manager wherein you may manage money for either a set of clients, or your company, or the customers of your company. In any case, it is your responsibility to ensure that you make decent returns for the entrepreneurs or investors to whom the money belongs. It’s less about the mind or talent and more about the mindset.

A book titled ‘The Psychology of Money’ is worth its weight in gold for all PGDM Finance students.

Among the many pearls of wisdom, the most important lesson that author, Morgan Housel, shares is that people should leave greed out when managing money. He shares his views on Jesse Livermore who took a short position in the great stock market crash in USA in 1929 and pocketed three billion, only to lose it all a few years later. He couldn’t control his greed and tried his luck once too often. The lesson here is to have goals and ensure that your money can help you to attain them. This will enable you to control ‘greed’ – an emotion which can make one take riskier bets and increase the probability of incurring a big loss.

In the era of digital technologies and social media, financial markets have become omnipresent. What’s more, with YouTube and digital learning tools at your disposal, it is easy to gain basic understanding of the markets to start your investment journey. The impact of digital has been so significant that marketing itself has undergone a paradigm shift from the traditional ways of advertising and promotions.

That’s where the book Contagious: Why things catch on can immensely help PGDM marketing students. They are stepping into an era wherein technology and digital marketing tools have assumed very high importance. Author Jonah Berger has explained why things go ‘viral’. He has laid a strong emphasis on peer reviews and how it can influence purchase decisions. The author enlists six basic principles that form the crux of virality of any product, service, or initiative. The book is a great guide for marketers to use actionable techniques to spread information to the relevant target audience by creating highly viral content.

While PGDM finance and PGDM marketing are both important from a business perspective, a business is nothing more than a set of people with integrity that are working towards a common goal. Hence, people management is a very critical skill. The building blocks for the same is taught at the PGDM HR level. Students of PGDM HR will eventually be the custodians of the human capital – the most important assets that companies possess.  It is extremely essential to drive your human capital towards a common goal and enable them to have a sense of purpose.

Hence, ‘Start with Why’ could be a great book for PGDM HR students. Author, Simon Sinek, says that the employees are always inspired by a sense of purpose or the ‘Why’. Hence, communicating ‘why’ an organization is doing things before the ‘How’ and ‘What’ is critical. He calls this ‘the golden circle’ with ‘why’ being the innermost circle followed by concentric circles representing the ‘How’ and the ‘What’. He talks about how companies like Apple and leaders like Steve Jobs have applied this golden circle to create a purpose that drives the culture at the world’s most valued company.

To wrap it up, a PGDM course can conclude in two years, but the learnings are implemented lifelong. Challenges in the corporate world don’t come with a manual to help you untangle them. However, reading books regularly can always give great insights into how businesses could think out-of-the-box to overcome constraints of time, money, and resources and yet become defining companies. PGDM in Finance, or Marketing, or HR is a definite head-start but reading great books on business is a habit that can empower future managers to succeed in their multi-decade corporate journey.