The Real-Life MBA: The no-nonsense guide to winning the game, building a team and growing your career. Suzy Welch
Читать онлайн книгу.
knew something about business when we wrote Winning, the fact is, we know more now. More that’s relevant. Because business has changed, and we’ve been lucky enough to be in the thick of it. That’s not to say what we’ve learned in the past decade has negated the principles and practices of Winning; quite the opposite. But what we’ve learned since 2005 has expanded, updated, and augmented them, in some cases just a bit, and in others, radically.
Indeed, these are radical times. They’re exciting times. Sure, in some ways, it’s more challenging than ever to do business. That’s undeniable. The economy today isn’t growing as it once did, to put it mildly; governments everywhere are more intrusive; global competition is fiercer every quarter; and technology just keeps propelling things forward faster and faster and faster.
At the same time, we’re in an era of dazzling innovation. Not just in terms of cool new products and engineering processes, which seem to improve every time you blink, but in terms of how companies and people get work done. Back in 1925, President Calvin Coolidge famously said, “The chief business of the America people is business.” Today, nearly a century later, we’d jigger that quote to read, “The chief business of the world is business.” Practically everybody, practically everywhere, is making something, selling something, creating something, building something. This is the era of perpetual entrepreneurism, personal and professional, in organizations both small and massive, in economies old and brand-new.
Stand still at your peril. Or to be more precise, stop learning at your peril.
Better yet, embrace learning, and watch what happens to your organization, your team, and your career. Excitement. Growth. Success.
Our hope and intention is that The Real-Life MBA will be a part of that embrace. A big part, actually; a very current, highly useful, immediately applicable part.
You might want to use this book to supplement the MBA you’re getting right now, either at a traditional campus or online. But this book is actually for anyone and everyone who is looking for a down-to-earth, no-BS primer on the big ideas and the best learn-it-today, apply-it-tomorrow techniques of an MBA. You may have already finished business school, for instance, but there’s some dust on your diploma. Or you may be in a place in your life where suddenly knowing about business matters. Your first job out of college. Your first promotion to boss. Your first managerial role at a nonprofit. Your first day as CEO—and employee No. 1—of your own start-up. (Go for it!)
This book, in other words, is for anyone who doesn’t want to do business alone.
Now, does The Real-Life MBA contain everything you need to know about business? Of course not. We urge you to learn about business from every possible source: colleagues, bosses, TV, websites, newspapers, conferences, podcasts, and, yes, other books. Find experts in your industry that you respect and follow them. Find experts in your industry you disagree with and pay attention to them, too.
Our goal here is not to make you into a functional specialist of any sort. Our goal is to codify the business of business today, to give you a framework for understanding what business is about now, and how the game is played, no matter what industry you’re in or hope to enter someday.
To that end, The Real-Life MBA opens with a section called “It’s About the Game.” Its chapters explore the ways in which companies, no matter what their size or type, should organize and operate to win in the marketplace: how they can get everyone aligned around a mission and behaviors, for instance, create strategy that never gets stale, rebound from a competitive drubbing, galvanize growth even in a slow-growth environment, and impel innovation—not just among the big brains in R&D, but among everyone. The first section of this book also takes a look at how to think about marketing and finance, two subjects that generate a lot of sound and fury and a big dose of anxiety, but definitely need not. And finally, the “It’s About the Game” section of The Real-Life MBA talks about how to deal with one of the realest parts of real business today: a crisis. After all, almost no one can avoid the #RomanColiseum of public opinion anymore.
The second part of this book is called “It’s About the Team.” It contains our new model for leadership; it’s just two imperatives, each one incredibly hard to implement yet incredibly necessary. We’ve also found this model to be incredibly transformative at the companies that have adopted it. Also in this section of The Real-Life MBA, we describe what’s involved in building what we call a “wow” team, covering the blocking and tackling of hiring, motivating, developing, and retaining your best players. Keeping it real, this section concludes with a chapter that looks at managing and working with “geniuses”—that is, people whose work you couldn’t do yourself, a growing phenomenon in this ever more high-tech, high-brain, high-expertise world. It also examines managing and working with people who are someplace you’re not. By some estimates, 20 percent of all professionals work remotely, and the number is only growing. That doesn’t make it easy or productive; we look at the practices that can make it more so.
The Real-Life MBA ends with a section called “It’s About You,” which focuses on career management. One chapter helps you answer the question “What should I do with my life?” Another examines, “How do I get out of my career purgatory?” And the last explores what you should do after you’re officially done with your career. You will probably not be surprised to see that our answer is not “Retire.”
We acknowledge that career management isn’t part of a typical MBA curriculum. But in general, we wrote The Real-Life MBA to reflect what people in business really think, talk, and worry, about. What keeps them (and maybe you) awake at night. What gets them going in the morning.
Doing business smarter. Doing it right. Doing it so it’s really fun. Doing it so it’s growing, and people’s lives are getting better. Doing it with a team. As in, not alone.
Business, to repeat, is a team sport.
Thanks for putting us on yours.
1. Taking the Grind Out of the Game
A few years ago, the two of us took a trip to Las Vegas. Not to play the tables; that’s not our thing. No, we were in Las Vegas to speak to the International Council of Shopping Centers, 60,000 members strong.
It just so happened that the speech was early in the morning, so we arrived the night before, and with an open evening, like good tourists we decided to get tickets to a show. A famous singer was in town, and so off we went, one of us being very enthusiastic, the other being very accommodating.
Cue the 50-piece orchestra and the colored smoke machines. What a production. Big hair, power ballads, backup singers dangling on wires from the ceiling, and an eye-popping procession of costume changes.
Yet, less than an hour in, one of us was fast asleep.
Rattled awake, here’s exactly what he said:
“What’s the score?”
That, in three words, is a person who loves sports—and business.
They’re the same thing, aren’t they? Both are intense and full of fun. They’re hard; they’re fast. They’re a nonstop grapple filled with strategy, teamwork, nuance, and surprise.
And in sports and business alike, the players are in it to win.
A brand manager wallows with his team about how to position a product out of engineering that just might blow sales through the roof. Three friends from college ditch Wall Street to start a microbrewery or launch a new app. A manufacturing manager wakes up one morning with a great idea about how to increase yield at his factory. An HR executive interviews six candidates for a job that should have been filled three weeks ago and, at last, one seems perfect.
People work all day, every day, trying