One of the hardest skills to develop in 2021 and beyond will be Business Acumen. In the new workplace where employees are working extremely hard in the hybrid work environment and the integration of work, life, and learning will become even more volatile, complex skills like Business Acumen will need new approaches in order to be addressed and learned.

One of the most effective ways of building Business Acumen skills is through business simulation-centric learning where participants learn-by-doing. A digital, cloud-based simulation is a case study that comes to life and presents learners with a chance to set a strategy, execute that strategy through operational decisions, and then measure success by reviewing financial reports.

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 It is the hardest questions that participants ask during a Business Acumen learning journey where we teach strategic thinking and financial management skills. “We just created our winning aspiration and strategy for our simulated company, but how do we know what financial metrics to choose and follow so we know if we are achieving success?”

The first and most obvious response is that it depends on the winning aspiration you are choosing to execute. In business, there are only three different aspirations or value propositions a company can choose and all the research shows that the most successful companies are the ones that choose one value proposition, stick with it, and execute it flawlessly.

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It’s August.

Where did the time go? Seriously. How is it August?

As we move into the heart of the 2^nd half of 2021, there is no playbook for what we just went through and where we are about to go. It is literally changing every day, every week, every month.

With this constant, chaotic, and intensive change, the skills of change leaders are being depleted and change leaders are desperate to gain new skills and tools to be effective.

Over the past few months, I have been privileged to be working on several new change leadership simulations including our new, Practical Change Leadership business simulation being created in conjunction with Dr. Elizabeth Moran who is writing a great new book on the topic.

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Business leaders, mangers of people and processes, and HR Business Partners have heard all the excuses millions of times about how employees in need of critical skills like Business Acumen can’t make it to the stand-up training session:

• “I’m too busy”
• “It’s going to be boring”
• “How can they teach business acumen in a couple of days when it takes years in a university program?
• “Finance is too complicated”
• “What do I need to know that stuff for, I’m just a {fill in the blank}, I don’t make business decisions”
• “I can’t be away from home”

Whether you care to admit it or not, the hard truth is that training and development is more important than ever. Not only is training employees a great retention tool, but in these highly volatile times, having new skills can help create strategic advantage and drive business results.

Up until the pandemic, self-paced learning was mainly libraries of eLearning that was generally hit or miss. But now, as we come out of the pandemic (hopefully), there are new tools and applications that go far beyond traditional eLearning.

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Going through a Business Acumen skill building workshop is hard work. Going through a Business Acumen skill building workshop if you have a limited background in business is even harder work.

This week, I am conducting a virtual Business Acumen session for a global audience of high potential leaders, all of whom have strong technical and engineering backgrounds but little to no business backgrounds.

In the session, where participants are running their own simulated companies, they set strategy and then execute the strategy through a series of interrelated operational decisions. As I was facilitating, one of the groups asked about inflation and whether they should consider it as an important impact on their decision making. The reason behind the question is that a lot of companies are talking about inflation, seem to be worried about inflation, but may not fully understand all the impacts of inflation. The purpose of this blog is to share some of the thoughts and insights discussed in today’s Business Acumen program with our readers.

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