The cohort participating in the Business Acumen for Emerging Leaders learning journey was  paralyzed. They didn’t know where to begin, what to do, or what was going to happen to them. As they read through their materials and analyzed the P&L statements and Market Reports, I heard a voice say, “I never realized how hard it was running a company.”

The email waiting in my inbox on a lazy Sunday morning from one of my close friends from a partner company made my entire weekend.  “Thank you for having the courage to fight for what you believe in and not taking the easy way out by playing ‘not to lose’.  I’m inspired by your desire to play to win and confidence that you can figure out the best solution.”

One of the easiest and most passé things a leader can say to their team is “I wish you all could act like a start-up company.”  The implication of that statement is that the team should be agile, innovative, entrepreneurial, nimble, resilient, disruptive, and every other cool buzz word that you can think of.  Besides being somewhat insulting, teams in large organizations typically push back on this approach by saying that they “don’t have the right resources”, “they will get blamed for making mistakes”, “they aren’t compensated well enough”, “the systems are old”, and “customers don’t really like change anyway.”

For many of the readers of this blog, you are probably wondering “What is Rob Brodo up to this time?”  What do these three things; Business Acumen, Networks, and Getting Things Done have in common and why are they the title of this blog?

The harsh realities of selling in today's complex markets means you must change the game

“My Sales Manager was so upset. I literally thought she was going to fire me on the spot.  I had to make that call that we were going to lose the deal with a potential customer we had been targeting for months because our prices were too high.  I really did everything possible to position value, make the economic case, build the relationship, and do everything else they teach us in Sales Training school but it wasn’t going to be good enough because the customer had a specific budget that he could not go over. He wanted us to get the business but unless we lowered the proposal price by more than 34%, he was going to give it to our largest competitor.  It’s just brutal.”