The whispers of a coming recession have turned into shouts just as the leaves have accelerated their fall from the trees. Before we know it, the 4^th quarter, and the year, will be over and we will be facing much uncertainty as we enter 2023. Many business leaders and experts are predicting a significant recession hitting us soon and it seems inevitable that there will be a downturn in the economy.

The best companies are preparing today. They are preparing by assessing their talent and developing plans of action to close the talent gaps that are required to navigate through turbulent times. It’s at this point that leaders should be recognizing they have issues with people who can bring the entire company down as every company is going to be only as strong as its weakest link.

As a talent development professional, I know from decades of experience that every company is on a spectrum of weak to strong based on its weakest links. As you prepare for the inevitable recession, where do you think your organization falls on that spectrum and what can you do to support and develop the weakest links in your organization?

Any professional or amateur athlete will tell you that the most frustrating thing in the entire world is the dreaded “unforced error.” An unforced error is a mistake attributed to your own failure or mistake rather than the skill or effort of a competitor or opponent.

In tennis, you could hear, “She made 88 unforced errors, including a double fault on match point to lose the match.” In business you could hear, “How can he portray himself as an emerging leader when he makes that sort of unforced error like constantly criticizing people and never embracing the power of coaching people for success?”

In the business world, these types of mistakes can be all too common, and they can completely derail success and business results.

During the past year, I have had the unique opportunity of writing several large business simulations in the areas of Coaching and Feedback, Resolving Business Conflicts, Executing Strategy, and Creating an Environment of Psychological Safety. The goals of these simulations are to provide an opportunity for leaders to practice new skills and learn by doing so they make mistakes in the simulated environment and not in the real world.

We are all besieged by advertisements where a company is trying to gain new customers by offering all new customers an incredible discount. “Sign up today and get 50% off for the first year” scream the ads. And then they get to the last sentence, “offer good for new customers only.”

Wow, what a slap in the face to the existing customers who have been loyal for years only to find out that the extra fees they have been paying are now going to augment a discount to new customers only.

We get it, it’s 2022 going into 2023, the world has changed, and things are moving forward. Businesses have accepted the new normal and are evolving their approach to business. As they do that, the typical pressure will be on generating revenues, profit, and cash flow.

We all know we do it.

As the Advantexe team spends the last few weeks of the summer getting ready for an extremely busy fall delivering our Business Acumen programs we are putting the finishing touches on the base conditions and models of the digital business simulations that will drive the programs.

One of the most common questions and challenges our clients continue to face is the impact of inflation on foreign exchange factors on business results. We typically explain a classic business model where exchange rates are determined by the demand for different countries’ assets and by the production of different countries’ goods. Basically, it should come down to supply and demand, or more specifically, the economic variables such as population size, employment, consumption, production, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that are related to supply and demand.