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.

As the lead facilitator of hundreds of Business Simulation-Centric Business Acumen workshops I answer dozens of questions a week from our participants about the critical elements of learning around business strategy and financial management.

It’s inevitable. One of the very first questions always asked in a foundational Business Acumen learning workshop is about the concept of Goodwill.

If making rationale an actionable sense of the current global financial situation is extremely difficult for professionals who do it for a living, it is near impossible for the typical business professional who is managing budgets, making forecasts, and working to stay one step ahead of the competition to understand it and then use the understanding to make the right business decisions for their companies and their careers.