Business Acumen Blog

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.

Doing so helps us keep our training relevant and up to date for our clients. Chances are pretty good that your facilitator has looked up your company information on one of these sites just before your training.

1. Google Finance: http://www.google.com/finance
2. Yahoo Finance: http://finance.yahoo.com/
3. Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/home-page
4. Business Week: http://www.businessweek.com/
5. Fortune magazine: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/
6. Hoovers: http://hoovers.com/
7. Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/
8. Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/
9. Microsoft Money: http://moneycentral.msn.com/home.asp
10. CNN Money: http://money.cnn.com/

Regularly visiting these sites can help build your business acumen and show your boss your interest in understanding how your company makes money.

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!”

Many employees view their business much like rocket science—much complexity, many different moving parts difficult to follow and fit together, hard-to-understand data and formulas, communications in confusing language resembling more Greek than English.

One of the main things I set out to do when I started Acumen Learning was to simplify how any business fundamentally operates to make money and to sustain profitable growth over the long run.  I hope to help you to communicate more effectively with managers, other employees, and senior executives using language that ties your ideas and efforts to the important objectives of your company’s leadership.

Perfecting your business acumen will simplify the complexity of business. With time and effort understanding your business will be less like rocket science.

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.

We had a few goals for the new site:

1. Design overhaul. We weren’t in need of a fresh coat of paint, we needed a new site – modernized, cleaner, and clearer. So we set out to build something new, but something that would have some longevity.
2. Rewritten. We spent countless hours articulating to each other what is that we do and why we do it better than anyone else. From there we rewrote every page of the site to clearly communicate our value to our customers and prospective customers.
3. SEO. Organization development departments are searching for business acumen training and we want them to find us. From our tabbed strategy on our home page to our CMS plugins, our site has been developed from the ground up to be optimized for search engines.
4. Content is King. While we teach that Cash is King as part of our business acumen training – on the web Content is King. So we developed a content management system (CMS) that allows anyone at Acumen Learning to publish content to the web. Along with the CMS we’ve started this here blog so we can continue to share our thoughts and insights with our customers.

Here’s our original site from 2004. This was pulled from Internet Archive’s Waybackmachine. A cool site that allows you to punch in any URL and see different versions of it through out it’s history. Check out Apple’s website from 1998.

We think we’ve come a long way. Let us know what you think of our new site.