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MBA IN A BOX (Practical Ideas form the Best Brains in Business)
By: Joel Kurtzman
Published by: Crown Business
437 Pages, Hardcover
MBA in a Box brings together some of the best brains in business who show how the core curriculum of an MBA program works in the real world, People like Michael Porter, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Adrian J Slywotzky, Warren Bennis, and Bill George give you a box bull of ideas and tools that can boost your career and help you add value to your organization. For example:
· Why finance is not just about manipulating numbers but of immense importance in sustaining growth, building widespread wealth, and creating jobs.
· The profit zone and how to tell if a business is in one.
· The skill of turning an idea or invention into a product that solves a problem for a market.
· Merging the need of business to produce and grow with the environment so they are both sustained.
· The latest thinking in marketing about branding, pricing, reversing a product’s life cycle, and turning what has become a commodity into a specialty.
· And much more.
And some homilies from MBA in a Box:
INNOVATION: An invention might only slightly improve the ability to do what people were doing before. The significant potential, the key differentiation between invention and innovation, is that a true innovation allows someone to do something they never thought of doing before.
CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY: Under the model of sustainable development, business must embrace the counterintuitive: that through altruism they can actually become more viable, even more profitable.
FINANCE: Most people approach corporate finance the way scientists deal with problems in the physical world: Plug in the right formula and you’ll come up with the solution, But, as any surgeon will tell you, at the very highest levels, even the most technical pursuit becomes an art. In the same way that artists select from an infinite palette of colors, financiers choose from a broad range of financial technologies and securities to build the correct capital structure for a business. As conditions change over time, they modify the structure to keep the business strong.
PROFIT: Success in today’s marketplace begins with several questions: How does profit really happen in our industry? Where is the “profit Zone” – the area within a specific industry in which profit is allowed? How do I design my business model in order to reach and operate in the profit zone?
LEADERSHIP: Leadership is dangerous because people resist refashioning their innermost concerns, surfacing conflicts, and questioning long-held assumptions. They push back in order to resubmerge the issues that the person who leads tries to help the organization address.
TECHNOLOGY: Historians from a later age will no doubt tell us that we overconsumed and underassimilated technology. This is because we focused on the wrong side of the technology equation – the technology itself, not what the technology could do for us.
SALES AND MARKETING: Nowhere is the need to work together more important than in the twin customer-facing functions of sales and marketing. Sales and marketing look similar from a distance, just as Americans think of Singapore and Shanghai as similar and close. But when you get near the functions, you begin to understand the differences and to appreciate the challenge of coordinating and integrating them for improved operating performance and outstanding financial performance.
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