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Hi, and welcome to my blog, FourWeekMBA.

I’m Gennaro Cuofano, founder of FourWeekMBA and creator of The Business Engineer’s Newsletter, with well over 100K subscribers among top-level business people!

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About

The Business Engineer is a daily newsletter about business strategy in tech. It provides the most critical insights around strategy and technology, with up-to-date analyses, which you find only here!

My Story

Back in 2011, I enrolled in an International MBA. Coming from a law background to me, an MBA was a way to change direction quickly.

I wanted to undertake a career in business (more as an entrepreneur than a manager).

And I wanted to find a career path to move to the US quickly (I’m originally from Italy).

Fast forward to 2013, after finishing up my MBA, I managed to land a job in California as an Analyst, after completing my MBA, with an emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.

However, rather than becoming an entrepreneur, I had become entrenched in a fixed career path, where I was supposed – like in the military – to take a few linear steps and wait a few more years to move up the ladder.

Fast forward four years since my MBA had started and three years into my new life in California.

The career journey I had gotten into through the MBA wasn’t satisfactory to me.

That’s not why I enrolled in an MBA. So I resigned, moved back to Italy, and started my own digital business (a lot of things happened in between, like me moving to NYC for a few months, but for the sake of shortness, let’s skip that part, for now).

I figured that most of the things I had learned at business school, while very useful, for a linear career path, in a corporation.

They weren’t as useful to me as a digital entrepreneur. So I had to go back to study on my own, experiment a lot, and in the process, learn a bunch of new things from scratch.

To make things more interesting, I also joined a high-tech startup back in 2016, for which I still lead the Enterprise unit.

As a result, the FourWeekMBA was born!

The FourWeekMBA is a real business world journey and a set of resources I learned the hard way over the years to help you progress into an uncertain business world.

After almost a decade of research, the FourWeekMBA curriculum has consolidated around Business Engineering.

When it comes to business innovation, I believe two inexorable forces are working against each other and – at times – working with each other to shape the business landscape.

This is the essence of Business Engineering.

One is top-down, centralized, and controlled innovation. Where companies, institutions, and investors pour billions of dollars into developing new technologies and new markets. This force can be very powerful in specific periods.

The other – which I like to call the “reshuffling force” – is bottom-up, driven by consumer adoption. This force is more unpredictable, when it hits, it does that hard, and it quickly reshapes markets.

You create a new business landscape by combining these two forces, how they interact, and whether they work against each other or together.

It took me years to have this very simple (and, if you wish) trivial way to look at the business world. My view today moves along a few core concepts which make up the “Business Engineering Cloud.”

A business engineer combines the ability to deeply understand the technology (especially the underlying economic incentives/disincentives), comprehend how to distribute it, and the willingness to experiment fast and iterate to create closed customer feedback loops.

This is what the discipline looks like visually!

I argue that the next step to the evolution of business innovation is that of Business Engineering, usually intended as a person using technology to build technical processes within the organization.

However, in the FourWeekMBA view, the Business Engineer is a hybrid between an entrepreneur, a customer-centered business designer, and a business analyst, able to prevent false patterns, thus growing the business with a mixture of intuition, business acumen, testing, and experimentation.

While for many, business engineering is something more technical connected to attaching technology to business processes.

To me, that is more conceptual, and it stands for an understanding of the business world that comes from various disciplines.

In fact, the business engineer borrows experimentation from business modeling: