In the world of leadership development, it is quite rare to come across a new and fresh topic that has mass applicability.  By sheer virtue of the number of books, magazines, and other outlets there is obviously enough “new” things to go around every day, week, and month, but in all reality too much of it is the same old thing repackaged. That’s why I was so excited to learn something new from a participant of one of my leadership development programs when he shared his insights on a topic he calls becoming an “Activist Leader.”

I hope I grabbed your attention with my headline as my intent for this blog is to present an interesting read for those who enjoy learning more about the world of Business Acumen.

Over the past couple of years, I have been astounded at how large organizations with large personal selling sales teams have not been able to successfully evolve their strategic selling strategy to prospect more effectively.  Recently, our research, design, and development teams completed the development on a new digital sales simulation called Strategic Prospecting and it is based on data that shows:

How Business Acumen and Business Simulation Can Help

In today’s complex business environment, balancing the product portfolio has become more important than ever before.  The product portfolio is defined as a group of products being marketed and sold by an organization.  Sometimes they are related and sometimes they aren’t.  An example of related products in a portfolio are the different types of soft drinks sold by Coca-Cola; they have regular Coca-Cola, Coke Zero, Diet Coke, Sprite, and Powerade just to name a few.  An example of unrelated products in a portfolio are the different types of products sold by a pharmaceuticals company such as a cardiovascular product, a vaccines product, and a couple of new oncology products.

Over the coming months, the level of political conversation in the U.S. will continue to intensify and we all will be subjected to endless hours of propaganda coming from candidates running for office and all sides of the political spectrum. The different perspectives will present themselves in all different shapes and forms with some of them being very explicit and some of them being subtle and unrecognizable.  It’s been interesting for me to begin to integrate some of these current geopolitical issues into our Business Acumen and Business Leadership simulation workshops. Sometimes they are purely conversations and learning opportunities to apply economics and finance to business strategy, and sometimes they are scenarios that we build into our digital business simulations. For example, last week we introduced the notion of tariffs on raw materials and finished goods into the third year of a four-year simulation to see how participants would react in the middle of a planning cycle.