The business world is buzzing today with news that Apple has entered into a partnership with OpenAi to integrate OpenAi’s AI technologies into Apple’s core products. As one writer put it, “Siri is going to get really smart really quickly.”

Developing innovation internally or paying for it through investments and M&A externally has become one of the most popular learning points in Advantexe’s simulation-centric Business Acumen learning programs.

Inevitably, the learning conversation focuses on the positives, negatives, costs, and impact on the brand.

This week, I am delivering a Business Acumen program to a specialty materials client and my cohort is all based in Europe and Asia. While delivering a module on strategic thinking and planning, the question about outsourcing innovation came up so I promised the team I would turn it into a blog for learning purposes. Here goes…

As with many of our blogs, we find deep inspiration and insights from the training sessions with great clients that we conduct on a daily basis around the world. Today, I had the chance to facilitate a Fundamentals of Business Leadership™ simulation workshop working with new and 1–3 year managers on how to be a great business leader. Business leadership is how you execute your business strategy and achieve financial results through people, so setting goals, giving feedback, coaching, resolving business conflicts, and leading change are pillars of success.

One of the simulation scenarios is about creating equity on your team when leading a diverse group of hybrid workers in different time zones. As we were going through the scenario, one of the participants disagreed with some of the core feedback saying that until you have established an environment of trust, nothing else matters. We purposely took a tangent and dug deep into her sentiments. What resulted was an amazing few moments of organic learning which I am sharing in this blog!

I recognize that over the past five months, I have written several blogs about inflation from a business acumen perspective. And just when I thought the thirst for more learning was fading away, I spent a good 30 minutes today during a business acumen workshop for one of our clients discussing inflation from a very practical perspective and more importantly what they can do at their “everyday employee” level to address it and minimize the negative impacts on financial results.

Based on what I hear from our clients every day, inflation is a critical concept that every manager should understand as it affects every aspect of business operations. This blog presents a cleaned-up and concise overview of all the key learning points.

The critical knowledge that everyday managers need to know about inflation:

Last week, I shared several blog posts about Advantexe’s observations and perspectives on the 2024 ATD Conference in New Orleans. We received a lot of great feedback and by far the most popular and discussed concept was about the gigantic shift toward AI-enhanced learning and development.

One of the most exciting parts of ATD for Advantexe was our in-booth business simulation contest where participants ran a business simulation we created just for the show. We had tremendous participation in the challenge and great results from participants.

As an experiment, we took a minute to feed all of the simulation results into the new Chat GPT engine and asked it to turn the results into a blog.

The result is frightening and fascinating. The world of learning and development as we know it is about to change forever.

Everything from this point forward in this post was created in less than 10 seconds by AI.

Advantexe is pleased to share with our Learning & Development colleagues our third in a series of thoughts and insights from the floor of the ATD International Conference and Exposition.

Day 3

1) The Community of Learning and Development

Sadly, it was the last day of the ATD Conference in New Orleans. What a great week to reconnect with clients and colleagues as well as meet exciting and new people who have the same interests in talent development.

One of our many conversations from this morning really stuck out and is worth a topic of conversation for this blog. We met an up-and-coming L&D leader who shared that this was his first show. He was extremely impressed, excited, and a little overwhelmed.

“I am so happy to be here with all of these amazing people. What an incredible chance to meet new people and share ideas about an industry and job I am so passionate about. You can never underestimate the impact of building a community as you build your career of developing the best training and development for your internal stakeholders.”