The Juneteenth day of remembrance gave me a chance to do some reflection and to get caught up on some business reading. As a graduate of the Wharton School, I always look forward to the monthly articles from Wharton Magazine and it was great reading about what is new and exciting. An interesting article about Data Driven Analytics in this month’s edition caught my eye and thoroughly enjoyed it coming a day after I wrote a blog on Critical Thinking.

The Wharton Magazine article was a faculty book review of a new book by Stefano Puntoni of the Wharton School and Bart De Langhe of KU Leuven and Vlerick Business School. The gist of the book is based on their hypothesis that many analytics efforts flounder because data analyses are disconnected from the decisions to be made and they argue that the key to making good decisions with data is to start by putting data in the background.

The article got me thinking about Advantexe’s observations and insights into building business acumen skills to utilize data-driven analytics through the work we do with digital business simulations.

I am asked almost every week about the concept of “Critical Thinking.”

Critical Thinking means something different to a lot of people and you only have to go to Google and type in and search for it to find out that in 1/3 of a second, you get more than 2 billion hits!

Let that sink in—more than 2 billion hits.

One of the things I have been working on over the past few weeks is a short and concise blog about developing Critical Thinking Skills in business professionals and this is the culmination of research and years of experience working with more than 10,000 leaders.

The Advantexe Critical Business Framework

Everything starts with the framework that defines the way we view it…

How to Develop the Skills

You’ve just taken a few moments to read the 8 points and if you are like most people, you are shaking your head and thinking, “Yes, that sounds good, I like it.”

And that is part of the problem of developing the skills. You don’t “get it” by just reading it; you only get it by doing it over and over again until you can use the framework meaninglessly in the flow of work.

The question from one of our participants was very straightforward and something I thought would be easy to answer.

Yesterday while conducting a Business Leadership workshop for a global audience we had a module on “Stakeholder Mapping.” This is a core module in our content library and it is used to build skills and capabilities in a digital simulation workshop and then of course back on the job.

We were discussing one of the most basic tools of Stakeholder Mapping tools where you identify and segment key stakeholders by how important they are to the project, process, or change, and what is their level of support. This graphic provides the four quadrants of stakeholder mapping as each quadrant will inform you of what to do and how to do it.

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!