Author Name: Mark Bowden

Welcome and congratulations—congratulations on getting it. No, we're not congratulating you on getting this book, although we're thrilled about it.

But we congratulate you on understanding the fact that no one should do business alone.

Business is the ultimate team sport. It doesn't matter how big your company is—whether it has five employees, 5,000, or 150,000. It doesn't matter if it's in Gary, Indiana, producing steel, or in Palo Alto, developing code. It doesn't matter if you started your first job three days ago, sitting in a windowless cubicle some 10,000 light-years from Earth, or if you run everything from a corner office on the 45th floor of a headquarters building.

Business is not an "individual" business, it is a "team" business.

It's like, "I'll get all the advice, ideas, and help I can get."

And that's what we're congratulating you on. If you're reading this book, we think you agree. When it comes to business, you can never stop learning. Business is too vast, too complex, too sudden, too technology-driven, too people-driven, too global, too local—you can use the hyperbolic phrase for any description you can come up with, "it's not new to us." Amazingly, we're still learning. We've been in this business for 81 years, a secret between us, and the last ten have been the most mind-expanding.

Yes, the last ten years have been the most educational for us. This is because, after our last book, Winning, was published in 2005, we embarked on a decade of speaking, writing, teaching, and consulting that has made us the target of countless companies, each facing incredible management and workplace challenges. We've worked with an entrepreneur in China creating a company that connects foreign companies with local manufacturers, a beverage manufacturer in Chile breaking away from its controlling family, and a fledgling aerospace venture in Phoenix in the midst of deciding when and how to go public. These experiences, and many others, have been windows into the nitty-gritty details of today's business tribulations and opportunities. At the same time, our talks to over a million people—particularly our Q&A sessions—always allow us to hear what businessmen and women are really thinking—and what worries them. Add to this the work one of us (Jack) has been doing in private equity and advising CEOs since 2002, evaluating, guiding, and growing dozens of companies in industries ranging from healthcare to water treatment to online dating. Finally, it was during this time that we successfully launched our own online MBA program, the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University, which now has 900 students. Their richly diverse experiences—as professionals working all over the world—have broadened, deepened, and enriched our understanding of business today in new and exciting ways.