The Real-Life MBA: The no-nonsense guide to winning the game, building a team and growing your career

• Eyes wide open.
• Concentrate, don't dilute.
• All hands on deck.
• Match the talent to the task.
• Keeping compensation fresh.
• The competition inside.

Familiar or not, let's get at each vital element by asking (and answering) the following four questions:

1. Is our globalization initiative a win-win?
2. Are we sending people with the single quality they need the most, discernment?
3. Are we being real about risk?
4. Are we taking full advantage of our foreign foray's upside?

You don't need to be a math whiz to "do" finance. You mainly need to be curious. Decisions based on sound assumptions, decisions that have examined all the options, decisions that have looked under the hood.

No matter what you do in your organization, be it in frontline sales, manufacturing, or HR, making good business decision is your job. To that end, the numbers are nothing to fear. And with variance analysis, they can even be your friends. 

• Place → profitable accessibility.
• Price → a well-tested, constantly refined cost proposition.
• Promotion → messaging that finds customers with laserlike precision and surprises them to boot.
• People → an organization that deeply integrates marketing into every function.

Principles of crisis management:

• No matter how hard you try to contain it, your crisis will get bigger and deeper than you think.
• There is no such thing as a secret in this world.
• Your handling of the crisis will be portrayed in the worst possible light.
• There will be changes in processes and people within your company because of your crisis.
• Your company will survive its crisis, and become better and stronger having done so.

Leadership is simply about two things:

1. Truth and trust. Truth is a determined pursuit, a personal and unquenchable fire, burning to know what is really happening inside the company and out. Trust is a muscle strengthened by daily exercise.
2. Ceaselessly seeking the former, relentlessly building the latter.

Nothing good in business happens when you're alone on the field. That's why you have to get the right players out there with you. Once you've got the right people, you need to create an environment that motivates and retains them.

Geniuses are a cadre of employees growing in number and importance. Then there are the virtual-ites, working from home or the road, sometimes full-time, sometimes freelance, and also growing in preponderance. And finally, there are the time-stealers, like conflict-creator and uncertainty.

You now have an arsenal of tactics and techniques to manage all three categories:

• Pepper your geniuses with questions and show them you care. Break projects into small parts.
• With remote employees, get deliberate about communications.
• With the thieves, fight back with courage and candor.

We wish the kind of fulfillment for everyone. And it pains us that it can be so elusive.

Dig deep yourself to understand what kind of "balance" you want in your life.. Analyze and assess.

Six action steps to help you demonstrate new and improved breadth and depth:

1. Don't deliver. Overdeliver.
2. Volunteer for hard duty.
3. Acquire followers the hard way.
4. Make sure you're tech-current.
5. Get real about mentors.
6. Love everyone.