The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster (Richard Stout's Library)

112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster

Jo Owen

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© 2012 by Jo Owen
Published by Pearson Education, Inc.
Publishing as FT Press
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458

Authorized adaptation from the original UK edition, entitled
The Mobile MBA
, by Jo Owen, published by Pearson Education Limited, ©Jo Owen 2011.

This U.S. adaptation is published by Pearson Education, Inc.,

©2012 by arrangement with Pearson Education Ltd, United Kingdom.

FT Press offers excellent discounts on this book when ordered in quantity for bulk purchases or special sales. For more information, please contact U.S. Corporate and Government Sales, 1-800-382-3419,
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. For sales outside the U.S., please contact International Sales at
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.

Company and product names mentioned herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Rights are restricted to U.S., its dependencies, and the Philippines.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing May 2012

ISBN-10: 0-13-306633-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-306633-3

Pearson Education LTD.
Pearson Education Australia PTY, Limited.
Pearson Education Singapore, Pte. Ltd.
Pearson Education Asia, Ltd.
Pearson Education Canada, Ltd.
Pearson Educación de Mexico, S.A. de C.V.
Pearson Education—Japan
Pearson Education Malaysia, Pte. Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Owen, Jo.
  The mobile MBA : 112 skills to take your further, faster / Jo Owen.
      p. cm.
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-0-13-306633-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-13-306633-9
  1. Management. 2. Business. I. Title.
  HD31.O8463 2012
  658--dc23
                                                   2012009996

Introduction

1 The world of strategy

2 Marketing and sales

3 Finance and accounting

4 Human capital

5 Operations, technology, and change

6 Lead your team

7 Dealing with colleagues

8 Managing across the organization

9 Managing yourself

10 The daily skills of management

11 Manage your career

Index

Introduction

1 The world of strategy

• The nature of strategy

• Dealing with strategy

• Applying strategy to your area

• Four pillars of strategy

• Strategy and the art of unfair competition

• Portfolio strategy

• Creating a vision for your firm and your team

• Mergers and acquisitions

• How to be innovative

• The language of strategy

• Business start-ups

2 Marketing and sales

• Introduction

• The nature of marketing

• The advertising brief

• How to be an advertising expert

• The marketing brief

• Market segmentation

• How to price

• Market research

• Competitive and market intelligence

• What people buy and why

• How not to sell

3 Finance and accounting

• Introduction

• Math for managers

• Surviving spreadsheets

• The financial structure of the firm

• Models of business

• Financial accounting

• How to use the Capital Asset Pricing Model

• Assessing investments in practice

• Negotiating your budget

• Managing your budget

• Overseeing budgets

• The balanced scorecard

• The nature of costs: cash versus accruals

• The nature of costs: fixed versus variable

• Cutting costs: method changes

• Cutting costs: slash and burn

• Cutting costs: smoke and mirrors

4 Human capital

• Introduction

• Dealing with HR professionals

• HR strategy and minimizing the cost of production

• HR strategy and the quality of production

• HR strategy: enabling growth (or decline)

• HR strategy: compensation

• Organization culture and what you can do about it

• Organization culture and how to change it

• When to fire someone

• Ethics

5 Operations, technology, and change

• Introduction

• How to start a change effort

• Setting up a project for success

• Managing projects

• The nature of quality

• Applying quality

• Restructuring the organization

• Reengineering

• Using consultants

• Dealing with the law

6 Lead your team

• Introduction

• How to take control

• What your team wants from you

• Setting goals

• How to delegate

• How to motivate: the theory

• How to motivate in practice

• Styles of coaching: coaching, counseling, or dictating?

• Coaching for managers

• Giving praise

• How to criticize

• Managing MBAs and other professionals

7 Dealing with colleagues

• Introduction

• Colleagues or competitors?

• Understanding yourself

• Understanding others

• Negotiating judo: succeed without fighting

• How to disagree agreeably (how to turn disagreement into agreement)

• How to handle exploding head syndrome

• When to fight

8 Managing across the organization

• Introduction

• Networks of influence

• Making decisions

• How to influence decisions

• Managing crises

• The art of the good meeting

• Getting your way in meetings

• Surviving conferences

• Corporate entertaining

9 Managing yourself

• Introduction

• Achieving a work–life balance

• Managing time: effectiveness

• Managing time: efficiency

• Managing stress

• How to get up in the morning

• Dealing with adversity

• When to move on

10 The daily skills of management

• Introduction

• The art of the persuasive conversation

• Listening

• The art of presenting

• How to use PowerPoint

• How to write

• How to read—and seeing the invisible

• Communicating: finding the right medium

• Communicating: principles and practice

• Professional guard

• Etiquette

• Dress for success

• The dirty dozen: the language of business

11 Manage your career

• Introduction

• Paths to power

• Building your career skills

• How to acquire the skills of the leader

• How to get the right boss and the right assignment

• Manage your boss

• How to get promoted

• How not to get promoted

• How to get fired

• Ten steps to a good CV

• What your CV really says about you

• Manage your profile

• What it takes to be a leader

Index

An MBA is a curious beast: it can accelerate your career, even if it has limited practical value in day-to-day management.

Top employers hire top MBAs, but not because MBAs have mastered the mysteries of management. An MBA is a hallmark of personal commitment, effort, and ambition which employers value more than the actual content of the MBA course. Bayesian analysis, the Black Scholes option pricing model, and advanced corporate strategy are all more important in the MBA course than they are for a manager who is faced with a difficult customer, intransigent colleague, awkward boss, and a tight project deadline.

In practice, the MBA is a classic university course: it is very good at transferring a body of explicit knowledge from one generation to the next. Explicit knowledge is about “know-what” skills, like finance, accounting, math. This is useful knowledge to have. But as managers’ careers progress, they find that technical skills become less important and people and political skills become more important. People and political skills are classic examples of tacit knowledge or “know-how.” Universities and MBA courses are simply not very good at dealing with this sort of knowledge.

Like the MBA, the aim of this book is to help you accelerate your career, but not by simply reducing an MBA down to a few simplistic formulas. The aim is more ambitious than that.

This book assumes that you are smart. So
The Mobile MBA
does not spell out each MBA theory in detail: it is not trying to condense an entire MBA into one book. The purpose of
The Mobile MBA
is to show how you can apply MBA ideas in daily management practice. So the first part of the book breaks the key ideas of the MBA into bite-sized chunks and shows how you can use them.

If you already have an MBA you will discover how to use strategy, finance, accounting, marketing, organization, operations, math, and human capital
in practice
. If you don’t have an MBA, this section will show you that there are no dark arts which only $60,000 and an MBA will reveal. It will demystify the mysteries of the MBA and lay out the simple principles which all managers must learn.

The second part of the book fills in the holes left by the MBA. It gives you a quick reference check to the survival skills of management. It is not a substitute for your personal experience: it is a sanity check for you. You can see if your experience is good or bad and if there are better ways of handling the endless ambiguous events which make management both challenging and rewarding.

You can read this book however you want. You do not have to start at the beginning and end at the end. You can dip in and out. You can keep it by your desk and use it as your just-in-time coach, to give you ideas and refresh your thinking when you face a tough challenge, or you can carry it with you, so you can use it on the way to meetings, workshops, or presentations. You can also use it alongside
its online version. The address for this is
www.mobile-mba.com
. As well as this, the book comes with 11 free video
Skill-Pills
. These are brief training videos that can be downloaded to your smartphone, tablet, or computer. They will provide you with the skills and information needed to complete a task, wherever you are. Scan the QR code with your smartphone (you may have to download an app to help you do this). You can use the QR code that’s inside the back cover of the book, or you can use the codes at the beginning of each chapter to take you straight to the interactive version. Keep that section on your phone or laptop and you will have the resource available to you wherever you go—you will have a truly mobile MBA in your hands.

Whether you have an MBA or not,
The Mobile MBA
is a very small investment in your future which can help you achieve very large returns. If
The Mobile MBA
helps you make the most of your career, it will have served its purpose.