Have you ever seen books that offer to teach you in a few hours what it took an MBA graduate up to two years to learn? That’s a great idea – a single book that provides all the information contained in a two year graduate business degree. So the other day, while strolling through Border’s Book Store, I had an idea. We should team up with our Portuguese translation service, Japanese translators and Russian translation specialists to come up with a 12-minute MBA course for our clients. This way, they will learn everything they ever wanted to know from those types of books, save their money and increase their opportunities to earn future promotion and a big raise. But then it occured to me. Why not offer a course that is even shorter in length?
Granted, a five minute MBA program doesn’t -and can’t exist anywhere. But just as a builder sets out the specifications of a building before beginning building and selling it, we can also map out the specifications of a graduate business program. In a summary, the objective of an MBA is to provide managers with the knowledge and skills they need to run successful companies, so with some help of a few translation professionals we began our outline with some common characteristics of successful companies. Specifically, competitive businesses can create their own demand and provide products of services while holding costs down.
Creating Your Own Demand
Several Portuguese Translation workers were first to outline the way that demand is generated. Truly successful companies can identify, manufacture and deliver products that consumers want to buy. However, this is only the case if the company provides the product at a cheaper price or provides a more desirable product than the competition.
Making Your Business Profitable
The Russian Translation workers aimed to summarize how the creation of profitability works while the Portuguese translators examined how to create demand. It was decided by the Russian translation group that a business organization must set its prices at a level that will adequately pay investors while covering costs. Quite often, companies must be highly profitable and be a leader in market share. It can be quite difficult when trying to make investors and customers both happy at the same time. The fact that all companies are not successful in this respect is a primary reason why managers enroll in MBA programs.
Up until now we are well on the path to providing an MBA in five minutes. I was encouraged by the Russian and Portuguese Translators reported and understand the difficulty faced by companies that must deliver customer and investor value. But while the task is challenging, companies such as the ones on Fortune’s Most Admired list are able to keep their customers and investors happy.
As the Russian and Portuguese translation teams were at work, our Japanese Translation group set out to define business attributes that make up a successful organization. The Japanese translators came back with the assertion that to be successful, a business must have talented workers at every level. They reinforced the importance of executives who create sound strategy, managers who provide positive motivation and make sensible decisions, and front line employees who provide outstanding customer service as a result of posessing the knowledge and skills required to effectively do the job. The Japanese Translators also indicated that successful organizations develop strong relationships with external suppliers, customers and other stakeholders. In conclusion, the Japanese translators reiterated that business success depends on having enough capital to carry out plans and operate the business.
In conclusion, if you have read to this point you are now realizing that we succeeded in developing a 15-minute MBA program that we managed to teach in 5 minutes – - and it was free.