Business Acumen Blog

If you’ve read our last two posts you are well aware that Kevin Cope gets raving feedback whenever he has an opportunity to speak. Well, the accolades continue to come in and I’m going to blog them, until someone tells me to stop.

Recently Kevin received a perfect 5 on his Speaker Evaluation and a 4.93 for his Session Average at Richmond Events CLO Forum (it doesn’t get much better than that).

Dear Kevin:

The 2010 CLO & Talent Managemnt Forum has received excellent reviews from its attendees, thanks in huge part to your hard work for providing the Forum with enlightening and provocative conference session.

Each year, attendees are asked to provide feedback on the quality and content of the conference program, which allows us to gauge our effectiveness and level of success.  As a speaker at the Forum, we’d like to share the results with you.  The attendees were asked to give each session a rating between 1 and 5 (with 5 being excellent and 1 being poor).

We’ve analyzed the results from your session evaluations with the following results: 

Overall Value as a Learning Experience
4.91    Content Quality
4.91    Content match to program description
4.96    Needs met

4.93    Session Average

Speaker Evaluation
5.00    Presentation delivery

The following comments were also made about your session:

• Excellent session. Could easily be a keynote with more time
• All presentations should be at this level
• Increased our xxx on the spot! The proof is in the pudding. It was delicious!
• Excellent presentation
• Excellent job showcasing your offering. Well delivered, highly engaging
• Far and away the best presentation I’ve seen so far
• Have the impact list pre-printed.
• Loved interaction /w polling & videos & challenge to think bigger picture. Loved that this wasn’t a sales heavy pres. Painted big picture of the pain and an ‘easy’ solution
• Best session so far. Engaging & excellent. A bit less writing of bullets on screen so could attend. Some ok not so much
• Very helpful info
• Good interaction material. Real timer noting – good learning tool
• Excellent
• The presenter presented difficult info in a very simple, straightforward way. He made it interesting & engaging. I learned an awful lot

Kevin, thank you, again, so much, for all the time and effort you generously provided in putting together your session, and for your participation in making this year’s Forum another resounding success!  Please feel free to call us if you have any questions.

Many thanks!
Chyai
Richmond Events

The SHRM 2010 ANNUAL CONFERENCE & EXPOSITION featured more than 150 breakout sessions featuring leading experts speaking on some of the most important HR topics, including talent management, legislative compliance, strategic HR practices, and global HR issues.

Twenty-five of these experts received a speaker rating of 4.8 or higher (out of 5), making an exclusive list of SHRM’s Top Rated speakers.

Kevin Cope’s Building Business Acumen session almost made this list… just kidding! He made the list.

Here’s the list…
SHRM’s Top Rated Speakers PDF

And we’re not shy, here’s a scanned copy of Kevin’s scores and attendee comments…
Kevin’s Scores & Feedback

Keep in mind that Kevin doesn’t throw out stuffed carrots and talk about soft skills like positive thinking or inspiring creativity. He’s taking the subject of business acumen head on – a subject that most folks shy away from. So what is it about Kevin’s approach to finance that  gets an HR person to comment, “Best session of the conference!”

There’s likely a lot of answers, but as I sat and listened to the boss-man give his spill, it struck me that financial conversations are too often reserved for the c-suite, and such a mentality creates a culture of exclusion. It must be refreshing for an attendee to be brought in on an intelligent dialogue about the inner-workings of business, to be regarded as a business person first, and an HR professional second.

One last observation, the room was full of HR professionals of varying degrees of experience. Surly some were well versed in the language of finance and could have easily walked us through their company’s latest financial results. Others would likely never admit this to their boss, but they find financial conversations painfully intimidating. But it’s interesting that the scores and feedback were universally kick-butt positive. Nobody made the comment that the material was too basic, and nobody said the material was over their head. I think this is a clear indication that Acumen Learning is onto something! Our approach to business acumen is unique and different from other ideas out there. It’s an approach that resonates with business people who want to make a difference within their sphere of responsibility.

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…

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.