The Real-Life MBA: The no-nonsense guide to winning the game, building a team and growing your career

Business is the ultimate team sport. Doesn’t make any difference what size your company is, five people, or 5,000, or 150,000, for that matter. Doesn’t matter if it’s in Gary, Indiana, churning out steel, or in Palo Alto cooking up code. Doesn’t matter if you’re three days into your first job in a windowless cube about 10,000 light-years from the action, or if you run the whole enchilada from a corner office on the forty-fifth floor of headquarters.

Business is not a “me” thing. It’s a “we” thing.

It’s an “I’ll take all the advice and ideas and help I can get” thing.

Which is where our congratulations come in. If you’re reading The Real-Life MBA, we figure you’re with us on this one. When it comes to business, you can never stop learning. Business is just too vast, too multifaceted, too unpredictable, too tech-driven, too human-driven, too global, too local, too everything to ever be able to say, “Been there, done that.” For goodness’ sake, we’re still learning, and between us, we’ve been in business for a combined 81 years, with the last ten being the most mind-expanding of all.

Yes, the last ten have been the most full of learning for us, and here’s why. After our last book, Winning, was published in 2005, we hit the road, launching a decade of speaking, writing, teaching, and consulting that has brought us inside scores of companies, each one facing fascinating marketplace and management challenges. We’ve worked with an entrepreneur in China building a firm to link foreign companies and local manufacturers, a winery in Chile transitioning away from family-owned leadership, and a young aerospace venture in Phoenix in the midst of figuring out when and how to go public. These experiences, and many more, have been windows into the nitty-gritty trials and opportunities of business in today’s world. At the same time, our speaking engagements to upwards of a million people, mainly in Q&A sessions, continually allow us to hear what businessmen and women are really thinking—and worrying—about. Add to that the work that one of us (Jack) has been doing in private equity and advising CEOs since 2002, evaluating, guiding, and growing dozens of companies, in industries ranging from health care to water treatment to online dating. Finally, it was in this period that we successfully launched our own online MBA, the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University, now 900 students strong. Their richly varied experiences as working professionals around the world have broadened, deepened, and informed our understanding of business today in new and exciting ways.

If we 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.

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1. Taking the Grind Out of the Game (#ulink_d50cc777-2d63-56bc-99a9-2eb76ad48da1)

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 to make their organizations and lives better. Trying to help their families, their employees and colleagues, their customers, and the communities where they operate.

And in working, people give their lives meaning. Not all of its meaning, of course. Life, with its vast depth and richness, certainly exists outside work. But work can give our lives a goodly portion of its purpose.

Whi ch is why it’s such a terrible thing when companies or teams are stuck in work situations that are buzzing with sound, action, and (occasionally) fury, signifying nothing. Nothing, as in no forward motion, no growth, no winning. Not even a decent shot at it.

That’s not competing. That’s not fun. That’s not business.

That’s just a grind.

Such a dynamic is, however, all too common. As we mentioned in the introduction, we’ve spoken to about a million people around the world since 2001, almost exclusively in Q&A sessions. These individuals have worked at companies large and small, old and new, in heavy industry and in gaming, retail, and finance. They’ve been entrepreneurs, senior executives, MBA students, and individual contributors. Across all these varied sessions, several people in the audience usually ask something like, “Why is it so darn hard to get everyone on the same page?” or describe a work scenario where so many people don’t seem to be playing on the same team, with results beginning to show for it. More evidence, too: probably a third of the nearly 1,000 MBA students in our business school, most of whom are in their thirties and forties and working in managerial jobs at good companies, report experiencing some sense of gridlock at work.

What a mess. And yet, this dilemma is not only fixable, it can be prevented.

All it takes is alignment and leadership.

They’re equally important; indeed, we’d assert that neither can really happen without the other.

And there’s no better way to start The Real-Life MBA than by digging into both.

All Alignment, All the Time

Now, we understand that the importance of alignment is not going to be news to most people reading this book. The concept has been out there in the management stratosphere for a long time, lauded by gurus, professors, pundits, and consultants alike.

The problem is that, in reality, at companies of every ilk, the relentless application (and discipline) of alignment can fall by the wayside.

Work—that infernal to-do list—gets in the way.

We get that. Work feels like it should come first, especially in today’s daunting economic environment. A cranky client, an employee who needs coaching, a competitor’s new technology hitting you blindside, a PR disaster erupting on Twitter. All these can happen in a day’s work, and sometimes even on the same day.

But the fact is, if you want to get off the grind, alignment has to come before, during, and after “the work.” It has to be happening all the time. It has to be part of what “the work” is.