The Shocking Truth

When it was my turn to answer the question of what I was most thankful for at our family Thanksgiving dinner, 2019 and I answered “The great people of American Airlines who took care of me during the 232,000 miles I flew last year to deliver in-person leadership and business simulation workshops around the world.” I never would have imagined in a million years that just a few months later I would be writing a blog about how virtual simulation workshops are in many ways better than in-person simulation workshops.

But we must face and acknowledge the realities of our new normal and think deeply about the feedback we received from a high-level decision maker at a global pharmaceutical company who ran a virtual business acumen workshop for their high potential leaders last week:

Later this week we will get word that because of COVID-19 the US economy is in a full blown and significant economic recession. As many of our readers of this blog work in large businesses, I wanted to take some time to enhance your Business Acumen and share some data insights and potential implications to your decision making as we anticipate and decipher the US industrial production reports that will be released on Wednesday and Thursday.

One of our recent innovations in the area of enhancing Business Acumen skills is called “Decoding the Investor Call.”  The Decoding the Investor call is where our teams of Business Analysts and Consultants listen to a company’s investor call and then “breaks it down” and decode it much like a coach of a sports team breaks down game film to learn about the elements of the game, what went right, and what needs improvement.

Over that past week, we have delivered a portfolio of Decoding the Investor calls to our clients and have poured through hundreds of reports to get our arms around what’s happening and what does it all mean. This blog will share three of our most significant insights and talk about the implications from a Business Acumen perspective.

Over the coming days, months, and years, much will be written about the great “reboot” of the way we live and work in the post pandemic world and beyond. Our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren will study the history of what we did and will learn about the ways that we changed our worlds and created a new path forward.

As we start to think about all the implications of what is before us, I wanted to take a few moments to share some ideas about how business organizations are going to change the way they think about Business Acumen skills and the reboot that has already started to occur. For context, Business Acumen skills are the strategic, financial, and operational skills needed to execute a business strategy to achieve the stated goals and objectives.

Within the next few months, many businesses will be “going back to work.” For the ones that have survived, they will be talking about things like “getting back to normal,” and figuring out how to adjust to the realities of the new workplace.

One of the many stark realities of this new normal is that we must all challenge the orthodoxies of what was the old normal and make significant adjustments to the way we approach things moving forward into the new normal.