Complete MBA For Dummies

Kathleen Allen, Peter Economy

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118052426
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Education
• Index: Business

Your guide to understanding the basics of an MBA Want to get an MBA? The Complete MBA For Dummies, 2 nd Edition, is the practical, plain-English guide that covers all the basics of a top-notch MBA program, helping you to navigate today's most innovative business strategies. From management to entrepreneurship to strategic planning, you'll understand the hottest trends and get the latest techniques for motivating employees, building global partnerships, managing risk, and manufacturing.

This fun, easy-to-access guide is full of useful information, tips, and checklists that will help you lead, manage, or participate in any business at a high level of competence. You'll find out how to use databases to your advantage, recognize and reward your employees, analyze financial statements, and understand the challenges of strategic planning in a global business environment. You'll also learn the basic principals of accounting, get a grip on the concepts behind stocks and bonds, and find out how technology has revolutionized everything from manufacturing to marketing. Discover how to:

• Know and respond to your customers' needs
• Handle budgets and forecasts
• Recruit and retain top people
• Establish and run employee teams
• Use Sarbanes-Oxley to your company's advantage
• Negotiate with the best of them
• Build long-term relationships with clients
• Avoid common managerial mistakes
• Improve cash flow
• Market your products and services
• Make the most of your advertising dollar

Once you know what an MBA knows, the sky's the limit. Read The Complete MBA For Dummies, 2 nd Edition, and watch your career take off!

Part I

The New, Improved Worldof Business

In this part . . .

Today’s increasingly global marketplace is in a constant state of change. Because of this, in this part — after a quick overview of the book’s contents — we consider what business looks like today, and we take a very close look at the forces that have come together to flatten the world. We explore the role of entrepreneurship in the economy. Finally, we span the global business environment and discuss the hows and whys of strategic planning.

Chapter 1

The MBA in a Nutshell

In This Chapter

Determining whether you need an MBA

Eying today’s dynamic business world

Leading the best employees

Understanding the importance of money

Finding and keeping customers through your marketing efforts

Business owners and managers are faced with a perplexing array of management theories and practices and a variety of off-the-wall thoughts on how businesses should be run. Is it any wonder why they tend to resort to tried-and-true ways of running things? People find comfort in the familiar. Besides, it takes time to relearn old habits, and changing the culture of a business to deal with a fast-paced global environment is no walk in the park. If you conduct a search for the term “management” on Amazon.com, you’ll come up with more than 600,000 books on the subject. Add to that the 600,000+ books on marketing and the 500,000+ books on finance, and you may be throwing up your hands and crying “uncle!”

Although all these books claim to offer the latest and greatest in management theory and tools, the reality is that most innovative, state-of-the-art tools are merely elaborate makeovers or the repackaging of fundamental management theory. A rose by any other name is still a rose. How many different ways can you talk about change management or empowered work teams, for instance? To be fair, however, the proponents of these “new” theories and practices do echo a shared truth: The world has changed dramatically, and the way managers run businesses hasn’t always kept pace.

And if the business world has recognized the need for change, that change has been slow to echo in the hallowed halls of business schools, too. Even graduate business schools at the nation’s leading universities are guilty of adhering to old traditions. In many MBA programs, the “big business/Fortune 500” mindset still reigns — the assumption that if you’re plopped into an established business with plenty of cash flow and assets, all you have to do is manage them well. Most business models presuppose a stable and predictable environment, when the reality is that most business environments today are dynamic, fast moving, and anything but predictable.

This chapter provides you with a brief overview of the major areas of study in an MBA program — which just happen to be the same topics we cover in this book. As you read through this chapter, note any topics that you want to explore in more detail and then drop by the table of contents to find out where we locate the topics. Ready? Set? Go!

Do You Really Need an MBA?

For many years, people have gone back to school to get an MBA (Masters of Business Administration) because it’s the “thing to do.” Companies want to see the degree on your résumé, making the degree the fastest track to corporate executive positions and bigger paychecks. This has been the case for some time, and truth be told, this is still the case. Consider the statistics garnered from research with recruiters worldwide:

Demand for MBAs is rising at about 20 percent per year.

Demand for MBA/consultants is up about 35 percent.

Salaries are on the rise, with the average new MBA graduate starting at $84,500; in some areas, the salary is well over $100,000.

But money is just one reason why you may want to seek an MBA. Here are some equally (if not more) important reasons:

To develop skills in business functions: economics, finance, marketing, management, operations, and accounting.

To acquire valuable soft skills: leadership, teamwork, ethics, and communication.

To develop an entrepreneurial mindset: You want to become innovative and opportunistic to tackle the challenges of a dynamic, global world.

But what if you don’t have the time, resources, or inclination to go back to school for two more years to get an MBA? If that describes your situation, this book is for you. An MBA isn’t an end in itself; it’s the means to achieving the goals you’ve set. The skills and attitudes you acquire by reading this book enable you to develop your career (and your company) to its fullest potential in less time and without all the resources school requires. Certainly, putting the techniques we describe to use is better than the trial-and-error method. In other words, the MBA lessons you take away from this book will give you a competitive advantage over peers or other companies.

Exploring the New World of Business

Due to the nature of competition — where only the fittest companies are destined to survive — businesses are always pushing the envelope of creativity, innovation, and technology. They’re constantly testing new approaches, new procedures, new processes, and new ways of doing business — looking for a little (or large) advantage over their competitors. These are exciting times in business, as evidenced by the following:

The Internet has leveled the playing field for small companies. They can now look and act as multinational corporations and reach millions of customers without the burden of physical assets such as plants and equipment.

New business models, communication technologies, and ...