Jo Owen - The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster

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, .

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.
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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

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 dont 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 thats 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 goyou 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.

The best predictor of next years strategy is this years strategy, plus or minus a bit. Most managers simply do not spend their lives re-inventing the firms strategy every day. Even the CEO does not do this. Most strategy is incremental: it builds from one year to the next. Look at most of the top firms in the world and they have not radically changed their strategies for years.

Firms that try to re-invent themselves as something different often fail: dinosaurs cant dance. Instead, most firms try to get better and better at what they already do, and then hope that no one else comes along with an idea which wipes out their business model.

dinosaurs cant dance

Incremental strategy is risk averse: most businesses do not like risk, unless it is a guaranteed success. So the result is that most firms rise or fall with the market. In 1984 the FTSE 100 was created. It represented the very best of British business: the top 100 public companies. They appeared mighty and impregnable. By 2011, just 28 of them are still in the top 100. The problem is not that management has suddenly become incompetent. The problem is that the world has changed faster than they are able to change: strategic success formulas have become formulas for failure.

The reality of corporate strategy is far removed from the world of the gurus who teach strategy at business schools. But it pays to have an understanding of the two main schools of strategic thinking. Even to talk of the two main schools of strategy puts you far ahead of most of your peers. Here are the two schools: