The Real-Life MBA: Your No-BS Guide to Winning the Game, Building a Team, and Growing Your Career

Mega-bestselling business authors Jack and Suzy Welch return, nearly a decade after publishing their international bestseller, Winning, to tackle the most pressing business challenges related to creating winning strategy, leading and managing others, and building your own career, in The Real Life MBA, an essential guide for every person in business today - and tomorrow.

You can talk about theories, concepts, and ideologies all you want, but when it gets right down to it, winning in business is all about mastering the gritty, inescapable, make-or-break, real-life dilemmas that define the new economy, the old economy, and everything in between. My boss is driving me nuts. I’m stuck in career purgatory. My team has lost its mojo. IT is holding us hostage. Our strategy is outdated the day we make it. We don’t know what our Chinese partners are talking about. We’re just not growing.

This is the real stuff of work today.

In the decade since their blockbuster international best-seller Winning was published, Jack and Suzy Welch have dug deeper into business than ever in their careers, traveling the world consulting to businesses of every size and in every industry, working closely with entrepreneurs from Mumbai to Silicon Valley, starting their own company, and owning and managing more than 40 companies through private equity. Coupled with Jack’s 20 years of iconic leadership at GE and Suzy’s tenure as editor of the Harvard Business Review, their new database of knowledge will infuse the pages of The Real Life MBA with fresh, relevant stories and equally powerful solutions.

Jack Welch (1935–2020) was the Executive Chairman of the Jack Welch Management Institute, an online MBA school with more than 1,000 students. Prior to this, for 20 years, he was Chairman and CEO of General Electric Company, which was named the world's most valuable corporation and was consistently voted the most admired company in the world by Fortune magazine. Welch was active in private equity and consulting, working with dozens of businesses in a wide variety of industries. Along with speaking to upwards of a million people around the world, CNBC named Jack Welch one of the Top 10 "Rebels, Icons and Leaders" of the past 25 years.

Award-winning professor Suzy Welch teaches management at NYU Stern School of Business and is the Director of the NYU | Stern Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing. A leading authority on values-based decision-making and purpose-driven careers, she is also the creator of the Welch-Bristol Values Inventory and the Becoming You methodology, which includes the Values Bridge, PIE360, and the Career Traits Compass. A New York Times bestselling author, acclaimed podcaster, and popular presence on TV and online, she is known for frameworks that blend deep humanity with practical outcomes.