One of the many great benefits of delivering business simulation-centric leadership development workshops is that I get to facilitate a workshop connection almost every day now. And if I’m lucky, I can do two or three sessions in 24-hour global day that starts in Europe and ends in Asia. The conversations, insights, and learnings by participants has been amazing and there are days where I learn as much about Business Leadership and Business Acumen as do our participants.

Last week, I published a blog about The Business Acumen Needed to Understand the Last 2 Weeks of Q1, 2021 which shared insights about the things to look out for from a decision making perspective as most company’s closed the first quarter of 2021.

I received a lot of great feedback and requests for a follow-up as several current and past participants of our Business Acumen programs are getting ready to apply their skills to their own company’s upcoming Q1 earnings call. The most popular request was for me to share my predictions and the common themes and what to listen for so it is my pleasure to do so.

It is truly hard to believe that the end of the first quarter of 2021 is just 2 weeks away. Everyone I work with internally and externally simply can’t believe it. From a business perspective, these next two weeks are going to be very different than most ends-of-a-quarter because we are going to start dealing with the comparisons between 2021 and the pandemic year of 2020.

Most quarterly earning calls and reports follow a cadence of providing insights into the quarter that just closed and then comparing that quarter to the same quarter last year. Sometimes they will also compare the quarter that just closed to the previous quarter if it is not a seasonal type of business. A year ago, the realities and confusion of the pandemic were just starting to hit. Only essential workers were in their workplace and more that 70% of the working population was working remotely. Even though it seemed catastrophic at the time, those first few weeks of the pandemic were at the end of March, 2020 when about 85% of the first quarter results were already in the books. It wasn’t until the second quarter when the financial numbers for some businesses started to dive and for others started to accelerate.

I shared a secret that I probably shouldn’t have. To commemorate the retirement of one of my most favorite people and one of our best clients ever, I told the story of the “Donna Scale.”

The Donna Scale refers to the way many companies have worked with Donna Torelli who is retiring this week from her role as VP & Executive Director of a great company called Greene Tweed.

I first met Donna in the early 1990’s when we were both early in our careers. I was helping to grow our business simulation business and Donna was willing to give us a chance to help build the business acumen and leadership skills of high potential leaders at Rhone Poulenc Rorer which turned into Aventis, which was eventually bought up by Sanofi. For an incredible 10-year run, we built an amazing curriculum of Business Acumen and Business Leadership programs and working with Donna was an absolute pleasure. Around 1999, we worked together to deliver 5 different types of development programs to different levels of audiences and touched the lives of about 5,000 leaders during that time including many high potentials, some of whom are current CEOs of large companies!

As part of a customized business simulation project I am working on, I had the opportunity to interview a group of senior leaders about what they think emerging leaders should know about business acumen. I started the process by getting the usual answers such as, “Understand a P&L,” “Manage Cash Flow,” and “Know how to get a good return on invested capital.”

One answer made me smile and think, “I’d like them to know about the anatomy of an invoice.” I’ve been developing business acumen programs for several decades and I’ve never heard this so of course I needed to dive in and ask the SME to further expand.

“I want these emerging leaders to be able to think backward from the sending of an invoice to understand the value map of our company so they know how we work and how we make money. I want them to understand that an invoice isn’t something the Accounting team sends, it’s the representation of the business acumen of our company.”

It was an intriguing idea and one that we were able to quantify for the program. I am pleased to share the highlights of this interesting concept.