Business Acumen Blog

We’ve received Kevin Cope’s “ASTD 2010 International Conference & Exposition Session Evaluation Summary Report” (that’s a mouthful). The scores and feedback were once again outstanding – and we’re going to prove it this year by posting the reports and all 101 comments (even the two comments that were not so positive) here on our blog. We’ve highlighted some of our favorite comments in green and our not-so-favorite comments in red.

I recently read the book “Rework” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. It begins with this statement…

“We have something new to say about building, running, and growing (or not growing) a business.”

Based on “Rework’s” opening statement, I expected to read about ideas and concepts that would fly in the face of what we teach to some of the world’s most profitable companies; that every business is the same inside and that there are universal principles of business that are the same whether you’re a street vendor or you’re running a billion dollar company. These rules vary of course, but they don’t change… and they are certainly not new.

Surviving the recession takes intensity
Ram Charan speaks about his new book Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty. He tells CEOs to go “granular” — be aware 24/7 of their companies’ cash position (Driver #1) and customers’ needs (Driver #5).

We’re back from San Diego. It was our first time attending the annual SHRM conference, which is the biggest human resource conference in the world. Exhibitors ranged from the expected, like Yahoo Hot Jobs! and ADP, to the unexpected like the guys that make frozen bunt cakes. Bunt cakes – HR? Who knew? Along with the expected and unexpected, there was us. We learned a few things from attending. One thing in particular we learned is that a company has to reach a certain point to implement business skills training in their company.

We deliver business acumen training live and in-person for the majority of our clients, but our newest Business Acumen client is Cisco… and in true Cisco fashion, we’re delivering the training virtually using Cisco’s WebEx platform.

With this arrangement participants are sent out their training materials and a copy of Ram Charan’s book, “What the CEO Wants You to Know” prior to the session. As part of this packet of information Cisco asked that we write a welcome letter to participants that gets them excited to participate in the course. This simple exercise helped us articulate some of the real benefits of business acumen training – and so we figured we’d blog about it and share it with our readers.

Acumen Learning’s CEO, Kevin Cope has been invited to share his thoughts and ideas with Microsoft’s partners. Kevin will be hosting two different session, both focused on business acumen…

Companies are trying to save costs in big ways—such as reducing capital expenditures, eliminating unprofitable product lines, and in all-too-frequent cases, reducing their numbers of employees.

We surveyed our office and asked them what financial sites do they access the most. So this list might make us appear a little financial geeky, but we do it because we love keeping tabs on the markets.

Years ago a colleague of mine was consulting with a group of senior NASA managers at Cape Canaveral. He tried to explain, in simple terms, a somewhat involved organizational change strategy. They seemed confused. In an effort to clarify, he said, “Please don’t try to make this more complicated than necessary; it’s relatively simple. It’s not rocket science.” To which they sincerely answered, “We wish it were. We could understand it better!”

We just launched a redesign of the Acumen Learning Corporate site. We’ve been working on the project since January. Axis41 helped with the design and programming. We love how it turned out.