I shared a secret that I probably shouldn’t have. To commemorate the retirement of one of my most favorite people and one of our best clients ever, I told the story of the “Donna Scale.”

The Donna Scale refers to the way many companies have worked with Donna Torelli who is retiring this week from her role as VP & Executive Director of a great company called Greene Tweed.

I first met Donna in the early 1990’s when we were both early in our careers. I was helping to grow our business simulation business and Donna was willing to give us a chance to help build the business acumen and leadership skills of high potential leaders at Rhone Poulenc Rorer which turned into Aventis, which was eventually bought up by Sanofi. For an incredible 10-year run, we built an amazing curriculum of Business Acumen and Business Leadership programs and working with Donna was an absolute pleasure. Around 1999, we worked together to deliver 5 different types of development programs to different levels of audiences and touched the lives of about 5,000 leaders during that time including many high potentials, some of whom are current CEOs of large companies!

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A recent shared post called “The Real Skills Your CEO Wants Everyone to Know” received many nice comments from colleagues and business leaders. We also collected quite a few direct messages sharing alternative ideas and suggestions for additional content and insight into the business acumen skills that the C-suite hopes employees at all levels to possess.

Originally, we wrote a follow-on post that outlined a list of skills that we see a CFO desires, but we once again received feedback asking us to combine both posts together so our readers can have all the information in one spot.

We always appreciate feedback so we decided to combine the posts into one. The one post can be accessed by clicking below. We thank our loyal readers for their guidance, enthusiasm and insights. We hope you enjoy the new complete post that now focuses on the business acumen skills that both the CEO and CFO desire.

Click here.

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The R&D leader was genuinely perplexed and astonished. “Wait, let me get this straight. Our company spends as much money on Marketing and Sales as we do on R&D? I don’t believe it. My team works on developing the most innovative products on the world. They should sell themselves. Why do we need to waste all that money on “Commercial” when everyone knows that we need more money for product development!

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One of the many realizations about our “new normal” is that speed matters more than ever. I was  interviewing a CEO of a large global company today as part of the process to tailor an upcoming Business Acumen program for his direct reports. Within the first few moments, I could feel the instant connection in terms of the way he though about strategy and the way we design our Business Acumen and business simulation solutions. I could also sense that he had an intuitive feel for the rhythm of his business and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead during the rest of 2020 and into 2021.

Seasoned executives like this CEO know how often to make certain decisions, how hard to drive specific objectives, and how quickly to react to changing circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

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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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