The Real-Life MBA
Your No-BS Guide to Winning the Game, Building a Team, and Growing Your Career
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4.2 • 26 Ratings
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
The business titans and #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling authors of Winning return with a modern, essential guide for everyone in business today—and tomorrow—that explores the most pressing challenges related to creating winning strategies, leading and managing others, and building a thriving career.
In the decade since their blockbuster international bestseller Winning was published, Jack and Suzy Welch have dug deeper into business, traveling the world consulting to organizations of every size and in every industry, speaking before hundreds of audiences, working closely with entrepreneurs from Mumbai to Silicon Valley, and, in 2010, starting their own fully accredited online MBA program, which now has approximately 1,000 students enrolled. Over the same time frame, Jack has advised more than seventy-five companies through private equity, and dozens more in a senior advisory role at IAC. Now, Jack and Suzy Welch draw on their experiences to address the biggest problems facing modern management—and offer pragmatic solutions to overcome them.
Going beyond theories, concepts, and ideologies, they tackle the real stuff of work today. When you get down to it, they argue, winning in business is all about mastering the gritty, inescapable, make-or-break, real-life dilemmas that define the new economy, the old economy, and everything in between. Work is a grind. We just got whacked. My boss is driving me nuts. I’m stuck in career purgatory. My team has lost its mojo. IT is holding us hostage. Our strategy is outdated the day we launch it. We don’t know what our Chinese partners are talking about. We’re just not growing. These are some of the day-to-day issues the Welches take on. Coupled with Jack’s years of iconic leadership and Suzy’s insights as former editor of the Harvard Business Review, their new database of knowledge infuses The Real Life MBA with fresh, relevant stories and equally powerful solutions that every manager at any level can use right now.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Business is the ultimate team sport, or so say the Welches, he the former chairman and CEO of General Electric, and she the former editor of Harvard Business Review. Together, they attempt to offer the "best learn-it-today, apply-it-tomorrow techniques," though the result comes up short. They divide the book into three sections, addressing company operations and organization, team-building and leadership, and career management. Starting with a look at how companies should operate, they explain how to align "mission, behaviors, and consequences"; rebound from losses; and stimulate growth. They also explore ways to think about two potentially sticky areas marketing and finance and to deal with crises. The Welches' leadership theory centers on the soft side of being in charge namely, being truthful and building trust with subordinates. They also offer a career-assessment process called the Area of Destiny, in which you imagine your life as two superhighways, one for your passions and one for your skill set, and envision where these two highways intersect. It's rather cheesy, very oversimplified, and, unfortunately, typical of the book as a whole. Though there are a few nuggets of wisdom here to extract, readers will have to dig deep for them, and may not find it worth the effort.
