Want to meet up with friends for dinner? Start texting your group chat of friends to see who’s 
interested. When you hit your goal of at least 3, announce that anyone interested should meet at 7:30 pm at the corner of 16th at Main. When you meet up with everyone, you will figure out what type of cuisine everyone is interested in and use the OpenTable app to make an instant reservation…
Uh-oh, your first choice has no openings? Damn, shame on them. Go ahead and write a negative comment on their Yelp page saying how difficult it is to get in.
But by the time you are done writing the negative comment, someone else in the group has just made an online reservation at another place so let’s meet there and check it out. Nah, the avocado toast with caviar appetizer doesn’t look fresh, let’s cancel and go someplace else…
Hmmm, big football game down at the stadium today. Let’s Uber down and buy some tickets on Stubhub. If we can’t find any cheap tickets, then no worries, we can watch the game at a local bar and have just as much fun. And while at one bar, let’s make sure we are texting with our friends and checking Instagram every 30 seconds to see where an even more happening place to watch the game is. Or not. Maybe there is another group of friends doing something completely different that we should pivot to.
These two stories share several commonalities that have changed not only the way people socialize, but the way the prepare. Or don’t prepare.
In the digital age of instant-social everything, there is no reason to plan. There is no reason to make a reservation at your favorite restaurant. There is no reason to buy season tickets to the local sporting team. There is no reason to think strategically about the long road of life like saving money to buy a house because all of those things don’t exist in the live-in-the-moment culture.
Unfortunately, this live-in-the-moment approach is impacting the way people work in the corporate world and is most noticeably present in the overall lack of Business Acumen skills. I define Business Acumen as the ability to understand how your company makes money, the ability to understand how your customer’s make money, and the ability to understand how competitors make money.
Businesses can’t make money without preparation. It’s that simple. Preparation means understanding the needs of your customers through rigorous planning, information gathering, research, and dialogues. It means preparing for meetings, presentations, customer service, and all interactions with key stakeholders internally and externally.
Unfortunately, because the art of preparation is disappearing in the social digital world, it is also disappearing in the business world. Prepare for a Sales Meeting? Ha! That’s what your father did back in the 1970s. Prepare for a customer project meeting? Please. Why waste the time with that ridiculous planning non-sense of developing the meeting agenda and materials a week in advance to save on rushed printing fees? We have a budget for that sort of stuff so no big deal waiting until the last possible second and then just send the order in online and pay twice as much as you should if you had planned better.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working with a variety of new and existing managers and the topic of planning and business acumen has become a major issue. For purposes of this blog, the group of leaders came up with a list of three things to do immediately to try to address this challenge:
Aggressively force everyone to be present
The texting, emailing, and checking social media during the business day is an epidemic. In order to successfully execute your plan and achieve your objectives, aggressively force meeting participants to be present by turning the phones off.
Aggressively Plan for Planning
Hoping people are going to plan is not a plan. It’s not going to happen. The only thing that you can do is aggressively plan for planning by reminding people to do their planning. Yes, it’s babysitting, but the investment in time of upfront babysitting is better than the scrambling that happens after everything starts to break down.
Give constant feedback
The third and most critical tip is giving feedback. Feedback around how people prepare is something that you can and should do every day and every moment you can. Not giving feedback on preparation is reinforcing bad behaviors and worst practices.
