As the number of COVID-19 cases continue to spike and the reality that this situation is going to last for at least another year until there is a viable vaccine or an impactful medical treatment, business professionals are now moving on from just embracing the disruption to aggressively embracing the acceleration of a new world. Having enhanced Business Acumen skills will help support and drive the acceleration. This blog examines four significant trends impacting the business world through the lens of the enhanced business acumen capabilities organizations need to survive, thrive, and then accelerate performance.

Four Key Trends  and Beyond

There are four key trends impacting business leaders that require having strong Business Acumen skills to be effective and to ensure the right business decisions are being made.

Remote Everything

It was happening slowly anyway, but this trend has accelerated more than any other trend. We literally woke up one day and everyone was working remotely and unconnected from physical interactions. Physical interactions have been replaced by technology-driven interactions and to everyone’s surprise, there has been many ways relationships and productivity have been accelerated. For example, organizations are getting closer to their customers by having more frequent and more relevant conversations. Before, you would visit with key customers by traveling to see them and often the journey was expensive and exhausting. Now, you can get close to customers, look them in their eyes (virtually with high def), ask them about their families and health, and have real business dialogues.

And that’s where enhanced skills come into play. With more time for quality conversations, it is imperative to have the skills to talk about strategy, financial goals, financial metrics, and the state of the business.

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It goes without saying that 2020 has been a year like no other. One of the most significant changes to the process of capabilities development has been the overnight pivot and transformation from in-person classroom learning to virtual learning. Literally overnight, corporate talent development professionals were forced to endure a disrupted model and figure out a way to survive.

Not only has everyone survived, but we have all actually figured out a way to make learning experiences better and more impactful.

The use of virtual business simulations is just one way the disruption has been accepted. Instead of having some tired old talking head drone on with endless PowerPoints, learners are embracing the virtual intimacy of running their own businesses and learning by doing in digital business simulation workshops.

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Understanding the essential levers to pull

The second half of 2020 will be challenging, volatile, exciting, exhausting, and any other similar adjective you can think of. From a business perspective, executives, leaders, and individual contributors will be faced with unprecedented situations and scenarios that will limit their ability to achieve or fail to reach their 2H targets.

And it will all be serious business as the poor economic reports and business results continue to pile up over the next few weeks and into August.

Meanwhile, those targets don’t go away. The good news is that those targets can be achieved through hard work, smart work, and by having the right Business Acumen skills to pull the right levers that will lead to success.

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3 areas to think about in the potentially disastrous upcoming company earnings reports  

As we all head off to an incredibly well-deserved long holiday weekend, it’s important to take a few moments to reflect on the first half of the year and start preparing for the second half.

It’s safe to say that the first half of 2020 has been unlike anything anyone has ever seen since the beginning of commerce. Within the next few weeks, many business leaders are going to stand before their boards of directors and in front of their analysts to review Q2 earning results and to paint a picture of the future. For many organizations the news will be grim.

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“Am I going to lose my job?”

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