Welcome back! If you are based in the United States, I hope you had a great holiday and break from business in celebration of the 4^th of July. If you are outside of the US, welcome to the second half of the year!

If you are like most of the clients I work with, the first half of the year was an absolute blur. Things are moving quicker than ever before, and it is truly impossible to realize that more than half the year of 2021 is over.

Just six months ago, we were celebrating the New Year and making resolutions for the year ahead in hopes of the pandemic being over sooner rather than later. Well, here we are in the second half of the year, and it feels appropriate to set some resolutions for the rest of 2021.

If that sounds like something interesting to you then let me make another suggestion: do something completely different and set some Business Acumen resolutions! A Business Acumen resolution is a focus on how to do something different in terms setting a strategy, executing that strategy, managing performance, and ultimately making money.

For regular readers of this blog, you know that I often get my material from real-world situations that come directly from engagements I am working on.

This week I was conducting a business leadership simulation workshop and one of the scenarios in the best practices simulation was focused on the leadership challenges of managing a team of people who may have “checked out” after going through a significant amount of change. During the debriefing discussion one of the participant leaders shared something quite profound that got me thinking:

“The way I see it, when dealing with direct reports in a large organization there are two types of employees, those who really care about the business and their careers, and those that don’t. But what I always wonder about is this…is that caring built into the structure of the business or is the structure of the business built into the people that care. If I can unlock that mystery, I think I would be a much better leader.”

As most businesses knows, answering a Request for Proposal (RFP) is a thankless, painstaking, and time-consuming task that too many times is a farce because the procurement department forces stakeholders to go out to bid even when they have already verbally awarded the contract to an existing provider or friend of the firm.

While we would never turn down a great opportunity because it is an RFP, over the years we have become much more rigorous about the types of RFPs we respond to. Recently, we decided to pursue an RFP from “Company X” because it fit the basic criteria we established for pursuit:

• Asking for a business simulation as part of the solution.
• Company X has revenues over $1 billion.
• Has an audience of more than 500 leaders that need help.
• Sees the training initiative as a way to change values and culture.
• Perceived to have a realistic budget for the initiative.

After investing close to 60 hours of team time thinking about, brainstorming, and designing a great solution, we shipped off the RFP and waited for a response.

Consuming training is in many ways similar to consuming entertainment. There are various forms of delivery, you can go through it many times, and if it is good, you remember it forever.

Consider for a moment the phenomenon of the musical Hamilton. Hamilton debuted on Broadway in 2015 and since 1982, it is the 7^th highest grossing show bringing in over $612 million. Hamilton is literally sold out into the foreseeable future, and it seems that a typical seat in a decent location is about $500 per person through the theater. But in reality, the prices are about $1,000 per person when buying through a ticket service which is the only way you can get them.

It feels like we are coming to the end of something, at the same time we are on the doorstep of something new. The end is the end of pandemic living and the new is whatever version of blended work and learning is going to happen next.

By September, many people will be “back” in their offices. But it will not be the same. As I scan the literature – and there is a lot of it to read – the prevailing data suggests:

• 80%-90% of organizations will have some sort of flexible work at home policy.
• 75% of all employees have re-thought their living arrangements for purposes of commuting, not commuting and having mobility.
• Workers will never go back to a 100% in-office environment.
• 50% of workers will want more balance and time for living and getting healthy again in the near future.
• 35% of all workers feel optimistic about the future of work (which means 65% feel a lot of uncertainty.