Name: Mobile MBA, The: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster
Rating: 3.58 (6 reviews)
ISBN: 9780273750215

Author 6 books136 followers

March 30, 2013

Do *not* be put off by "MBA" in the title. Ignore that.

Some of the best lessons I've had were given to me by older and wiser folks, relating their own tales and experiences. Some of the worst I've had have been lectures about frameworks and hierarchies of thought divorced from action. Owen's excellent book has the feel of a wise advisor, without repeating the pap and blather of the zillion other books on the market. It's brief, readable, and always practical.

For example, here is Owen on something as simple as getting up in the morning:

Here are three ways of getting up in the morning. I have tried all three. Take your pick.
• Option 1. Wake in the middle of wars, natural and man-made disasters; lying politicians, greedy business people, doom mongering lobbyists and scientists, and scandals and corruption. That is called waking up to the news. Even the weather forecast may or may not cheer you up. Leave just enough time to get to work, so that each traffic delay, red light, or problem with public transport will send your anxiety and frustration soaring. I have tried this option for years: unlike wine, it does not improve with age.
• Option 2. Wake up with no radio, electricity, or running water. Your nearest water is 5 miles away in a muddy and crocodile infested river. By the time you have carried the water back, on your head, the temperature will be past 100° and your working day has yet to start. I spent seven years hanging out with tribes like this one in Africa, and started to develop a nostalgia for waking to news of war and cataclysm on the radio.
• Option 3. Wake up to your favorite music station. Go to the bathroom and discover a miracle: turn on the tap and fresh, cold, clean water comes out. Just like that. Turn on another tap and find another miracle: hot water comes out, without the need to collect firewood from the bush. After two miracles in two minutes it is pretty hard to have a bad day. Leave for work early, listen to an audio book or music. Feel fresh and relaxed, even if public transport has gone missing.
We can all choose how we feel. If we want to feel miserable, cynical, and stressed then that is our choice: option one will justify our decision.

Hells yes! Or on reading for business vs reading for pleasure:

I thought I knew how to read, until I came across Andrew. We were all sitting in the old-fashioned partners’ office. We thought we were all pretty bright, except for Andrew. If we shone as brightly as a hundred-watt bulb, he was a solitary, spluttering candle. But much to our annoyance, all the staff reckoned that Andrew was brighter than the rest of us.
One day, I saw Andrew scribbling away. I asked him what he was doing. “I have some associates coming in with a paper to test me,” he said. I had always thought that was our chance to test them, not the other way around. “They want to see if I can add any value to their draft. So I am making some notes.” He then patiently explained to me how he would pass his associates’ reading test. He had three rules:
1. “Make a note of my point of view on the paper. They are all smart, and I do not want to get caught up in their internal logic.” That hurt. I was always getting caught up in the internal logic of what I was reading: I would then find it hard to come up with an original insight.
2. “Make a list of all the topics that I expect to see covered. That helps me see the invisible: what they have not covered in their paper.” I was starting to see why they thought Andrew was so smart. I never spotted the invisible until too late: after they had left the room.
3. “Outline a few coaching points I can cover, so that they feel they have gotten something out of me.” Now I started to see why they not only thought Andrew was smart, but they liked him as well.

And some important vocabulary extensions:

Don’t worry about the jargon: at least we all recognize it when we hear it. The really nasty language in business consists of normal words with abnormal meanings. Here are 12 which should put you on high alert
1. Just. This is used to make a huge request or error seem trivial as in: “Could you just do this (500-page) document by Monday?,” a request best made late on a Friday afternoon.
2. But. Remember, whatever is said before “but” is baloney, as in “That was a great presentation, but...,” or “I would like to help, but....”
3. From. Much loved by advertisers, as in “Fly to Rome from $10” excluding $100 of taxes and other “optional” extras for a flight leaving at 4am, going to an airport about 100 miles away from Rome and the ticket has to be booked one year in advance.
4. Might (and any other conditional verb). Might is used to achieve two things: first it sets up a negotiating position as in “I might be able to do that if....” Second, it lays the ground work for excusing failure later on: “I would have done it, if only....”
5. Only. Closely related to “just”: it is an attempt to make a big request or problem seem small. “It was only a small error... we only dropped one nuclear bomb over London.”
6. Important (and urgent). Used to puff up any presentation: “This important new product/initiative....” Important to whom? And why? Maybe it is important to the speaker, but why is it to me?
7. Strategic. Important, with bells on. See strategic human capital division, formerly known as the personnel department. Also used to justify spending which has no financial payback.
8. Rightsize (downsize, best shore, offshore, outsource, optimize, redeploy, downshift, reengineer). How many ways are there of avoiding saying straight up: we are going to lay off staff?
9. Thank you. Normally “thank you” is good, except when used by automated voices at call centers saying, “Thank you for calling, we value your call... (and we have so much contempt for our customers that we cannot be bothered to answer your call promptly so we will put you on hold until you give up and try to use our impenetrable and useless online help instead).”
10. Interesting. Fear this word. When your lawyer uses it, you are doomed. When your doctor uses it, check your will is up to date. The recession is certainly interesting. A slightly less interesting time would be preferable.
11. Opportunity. Because the word “problem” has been banned in business speak, all problems have become opportunities. This means many opportunities are problems. There is a limit to how many opportunities I can solve.
12. Investment. This normally means wild and uncontrolled spending on something for which there is no business case. Important and strategic investments are the high road to bankruptcy.

He talks about the art of the good meeting, building your career (assuming you're on a corporate ladder and want to play the game), even on how to manage normal people vs how to manage MBAs ("Top MBA graduates can be very high maintenance but very high performance. The trick is to maximize the performance and minimize the maintenance. If there is such a thing as a typical top MBA graduate then he or she will: Have very high expectations and ambition; Have a big but fragile ego; Be a natural over-achiever; Be naive about handling people, at least early on in their career.")

Some other random highlights:

The goal of strategy is very simple: you have to find a source of unfair competition which results in making excess profits. Regulators and competitors should hate you for this, but without it, you fail. Every firm needs to make “excess” profits somewhere to stay alive: this profit sanctuary will help to pay for all the projects that go wrong, for investments that take time to mature, and to offset the impact of competition, customers, taxpayers, and staff who always seem to want more and give less.
[...]
All firms and clients say they like innovation. They lie. They like the results of successful innovation, which may lead to a source of unfair competitive advantage. But they hate the process of innovation. Next time you are asked to innovate, ask in return if your managers enjoy risk, ambiguity, uncertainty, expense, and failure. Then you will find out how much firms really want innovation. Innovation is fine as long as it is tried, tested and bound to succeed.
[...]
Commission focus groups. These are powerful and often misused. Executives often ask, “What did the focus group prefer?” That is irrelevant. You are not looking for a statistically irrelevant conclusion from a group of eight customers. You are looking for the one insight about how they really think about you and your rivals, about how they use your product or service in practice, what annoys them most about the service, and what they would like instead. Given you are looking for insight, it is often worth listening to the entire focus group yourself: do not expect the moderator to hear what you need to hear.
[...]
Some people fall in love with numbers for the same reason people fall in love with distressed donkeys: they are preferable to humans. But numbers are very dangerous. They give the illusion of certainty in a very uncertain world. You cannot run a business just by sitting behind your desk and dealing with the numbers. John le Carré wrote in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” That is as true for managers as it was for le Carré’s spies.
[...]
Don’t be seduced by the average (mean, mode, or median). The average human being is 52% female and has slightly less than two eyes and two legs (go figure that). There is no such thing as the average human. From a business perspective, outliers and segments are much more interesting than averages: they tell you more about your business and its opportunities.
[...]
The banker’s question: what are the assumptions that lie behind the numbers?
[...]
Too many trainers are not up to the job. Once you have sat through two days of watching a facilitator with a flip chart and a franchised theory asking you to guess what they are going to write on the flip chart, the instinctive reaction is to discover your inner axe-wielding maniac.
[...]
You have to find the context in which you can thrive. Above all, that means you have to be happy signing up to the culture of the firm you will join.
[...]
One of the best managers I know makes a habit of ensuring he praises at least 10 times as often as he criticises. He keeps score. His criticisms are sufficiently unusual that people sit up and take notice. He has now found that even his occasional criticisms are a mistake. He can normally achieve the same outcome by making a positive and supportive suggestion which leads to action. He is one of those rare bosses that people want to work for, rather than having to work for.
[...]
Churchill described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” People are even harder to understand.
[...]
Never argue with toddlers, taxi drivers, or God: even if you are right, it will do you no good.
[...]
Once you establish a reputation for tact, even a whisper of disquiet from you will sound like thunder. You build power, credibility, and allies by disagreeing well.
[...]
The simplest way is to have a good coach: a good coach is one who does not answer a question with a question. Your coach should be someone who has seen all the management movies many times and can tell you what is likely to happen next, depending on what you choose to do.
[...]
[on dealing with crises] Over-communicate and build your crisis coalition. As you lead, others will follow. But part of leading is having a clear and simple story which everyone understands about what you are doing. If you do not provide the storyline, then others will create a story about the crisis anyway: their story will invariably be negative. So keep control of the narrative and make sure all the power brokers support what you are doing and your story. This takes an endless amount of time: crises are time hungry events.
[...]
“What did I learn from the meeting?”; “What did I contribute or achieve in the meeting?”; “What will I and others do differently as a result of the meeting?”. A good meeting will have good answers to all three questions for all attendees. If you are invited to a meeting where you expect to draw a blank on all three questions, do not go. If you are inviting people to attend one of your meetings, only invite those who will be able to answer all three questions positively by the end of the meeting. Construct the agenda so that you can achieve this result.
[...]
Finally, remember that meetings should never be used to make decisions: there is a risk that attendees may make the wrong decision. Meetings should be used to confirm in public the agreements you have reached in private. So by the time you get to the meeting, you should know you have enough support, and you should also know who will object and why they will object. There should be no surprises.
[...]
If you do not enjoy work, then your challenge is not about a work–life balance. Your challenge is to find work that you do enjoy.
[...]
There are few good ways, and many bad ways, to die. Perhaps one of the ugliest ways to die is with a hundred bullet points to the head. PowerPoint offers every manager a compelling reason to retire early and start a vegan farm in the sticks.
[...]
As one tribal elder told me: “Words are like gods: words create whole new worlds in someone’s head. So use words well.”
[...]
When I first started out, my boss told me: “One of the benefits of this job is that you will never suffer the rush hour. You will arrive before it and leave after it.”

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

Jo Owen

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