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

#1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller and New York Times Bestseller

The business titans and #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling authors of Winning return with a modern, essential guide for everyone in business today—and tomorrow—that explores the most pressing challenges related to creating winning strategies, leading and managing others, and building a thriving career.

In the decade since their blockbuster international bestseller Winning was published, Jack and Suzy Welch have dug deeper into business, traveling the world consulting to organizations of every size and in every industry, speaking before hundreds of audiences, working closely with entrepreneurs from Mumbai to Silicon Valley, and, in 2010, starting their own fully accredited online MBA program, which now has approximately 1,000 students enrolled. Over the same time frame, Jack has advised more than seventy-five companies through private equity, and dozens more in a senior advisory role at IAC. Now, Jack and Suzy Welch draw on their experiences to address the biggest problems facing modern management—and offer pragmatic solutions to overcome them.

Going beyond theories, concepts, and ideologies, they tackle the real stuff of work today. When you get down to it, they argue, 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. Work is a grind. We just got whacked. 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 Our strategy is outdated the day we launch it. We don’t know what our Chinese partners are talking about. We’re just not growing. These are some of the day-to-day issues the Welches take on. Coupled with Jack’s years of iconic leadership and Suzy’s insights as former editor of the Harvard Business Review, their new database of knowledge infuses The Real Life MBA with fresh, relevant stories and equally powerful solutions that every manager at any level can use right now.

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 practice at NYU Stern School of Business and is the Director of the renowned 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 structure.