Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: No MBA? You've Got TV!

To listen to Dan read this column, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...Who needs Harvard Business School when everything you need to get a full-fledged MBA can be found on your television set? That’s right, everything you need to know about business is available with the click of a remote control.

If you’re ready to learn everything you want to know about business (and are not afraid to ask), grab yourself a bottle of Pete’s Wicked Ale, open a bag of salt-and-vinegar Utz chips, hit that remote control, and sit back and relax.

Our first stop is the show “Shark Tank” where you’ll discover how the experts invest their money as five “fabulously wealthy entrepreneurs” decide whether or not to invest in one of the three or four pitches they see. The first thing you’ll learn is how to properly valuate your company: Valuate it too high and you're dead as dead, or as "shark" Kevin Harrington likes to say, “You’re dead to me.” Try to sell some harebrained, holistic, pseudo-scientific fake cure and Mark Cuban will run you out of town faster than you can say “Dallas Mavs.” But come in with a great product and a great pitch and you could go the way of Daisy Cakes and Cousins Maine Lobster and not get only some dough, but get a shark as a partner as well. Great fun! Entertaining and, yes, educational as well.

Then there’s “The Profit,” where entrepreneur Marcus Lemonis invests in troubled companies and works with them to turn their businesses around. But you’d better tell him the truth or he’ll be out of there faster than you can say Swanson’s Fish Market! Marcus is just full of advice to help these companies--all of it good. And I have to say as an occasional turnaround guy myself, I think this guy is spot on.

While on the subject of turnarounds there's nothing like “Hell’s Kitchen,” where Gordon Ramsay rants his way through terrible restaurants serving up fabulously terrible food to terribly unhappy people. Ramsay, not known for his patience and tact, bullies his way around the unfortunate restaurateurs until they give in and do it his way…the right way.

If you want to learn how to perform the best pitch possible, there's a show called, appropriately enough, “The Pitch.” Two ad agencies are pitted against each another to try to win a major account from the likes of companies such as Subway and Fender Musical Instruments Corporation. This one is loaded with fun and some good advice, but you have to be prepared to listen to each ad agency brag about how “there is no other agency like ours our there” or “we think completely out of the box.” Ugh...you hear lines like these on every single show from every single agency, as each of them does the very same thing. Probably the most fun I get from watching “The Pitch” is all the weird battles of egos that goes on week after week. I’m undecided as to who has worse ego problems--the agencies or the companies they are pitching.

In “Undercover Boss,” company leaders go to elaborate means to get an inside look at their company and employees. Presidents, CEOs, and CFOs develop ridiculous disguises; leave their million-dollar estates, slum it for a week in a Super 8 Motel; sometimes eat in their own fast food franchises; and get down and dirty with their minimum wage, underearning, uninsured employees who show them how screwed up the company really is. Once the company leader finds out how the other half (or should I say the other 90%) lives, they listen to their sad stories; shed a few tears, and buy them something. It could be as big as a house (the guy who owns Modell's Sporting Goods actually bought one of his employees a quarter of a million dollar home), or a week’s vacation, or a car, or something equally appropriate. Then they show the rest of the team a video of them screwing up doing "real work" and they all have a big laugh. Then the company president goes back to his multimillion-dollar estate and lives happily ever after. It makes for great entertainment and, to be serious for a minute, there's a lot of good in this show and certainly a lot to learn of you’re looking to pass that course in Human Resources.

These are some of my favorites, but I can’t possibly sign off without going through a few more to round out your MBA curriculum:

• For an ongoing great lesson in no-nonsense leadership and loyalty, nothing beats watching reruns of “The Sopranos.” Nobody leads better than Tony.
• If you want to become one of the great manipulators of your industry, watch “The Boss” with Kelsey Grammar as the mayor of Chicago shows us how to get it done, Chicagoland style.
• “The Newsroom” will show you how a great team works and fights together week after week.
• “Survivor” will show you how to…well, how to survive.
• Finally, “Boardwalk Empire” will show you how things were done in the good old days.

So sit back, get yourself another bottle of Pete’s Wicked Ale, and take it all in. But make sure that like the fabulously wealthy entrepreneurs on “Shark Tank” you have your little black Moleskine notebook by your side. You never know when you’re going to need it to take a note or two. It’s only common sense.