Leadership

Why Our Perspective Is Different

Business Acumen Institute was not born from a consulting framework or an academic theory. It was built from decades of hands-on corporate leadership experience, thousands of competency assessments, hundreds of organizational diagnostics, and the hard-earned recognition that training alone does not create lasting change.

What distinguishes our perspective is longitudinal exposure to patterns across organizations, not just experience inside a single company. Through more than 20 years of diagnostic work across complex enterprises in industrial, financial services, healthcare, technology, and other sectors, we have observed what consistently separates organizations that build durable capability from those that invest heavily in development but return to old patterns.

The pattern is clear. Organizations that achieve lasting performance improvement are not just sending people to courses. They are aligning leadership on expectations and decision rights, building business acumen across levels and functions, strengthening the organizational practices that enable execution, and connecting business thinking, strategic discipline, and product management into a coherent system.

The Evolution: From Training Provider to Growth Capability Firm

Business Acumen Institute began as a training and advisory firm focused on business acumen and product management. Over two decades of diagnostic work, we recognized that training, no matter how well designed, consistently falls short when it operates in isolation from organizational context.

Most consulting engagements fail because they treat strategy, training, and process as separate problems. Strategy consulting may fix the plan, but execution capability remains absent. Training is often treated as an event, but organizational adoption doesn’t happen. Process consulting optimizes workflows, but capability gaps are not addressed.

The companies achieving measurable performance improvement were doing something fundamentally different. They were treating capability building as an organizational discipline, not a series of training events. They were diagnosing where capability gaps created the greatest drag, aligning leadership around clear priorities, and building muscle through applied work rather than classroom knowledge alone.

This recognition led to the development of our Growth Capability Framework, our 54-indicator organizational capability diagnostic, the Growth Accelerator program, and our positioning as a firm that builds organizational capability, not just delivers training.

Steven Haines — Founder and CEO

Steven Haines is the founder and CEO of Business Acumen Institute and Sequent Learning Networks. He is a recognized authority in business acumen, product management, and strategic thinking.

For more than 20 years, Steven has worked with senior leadership teams, product organizations, and HR and L&D functions to improve how organizations build the capabilities that drive growth and performance. His experience spans direct corporate leadership roles — including serving as VP of Product Management at Oracle, where he was a founding member of the CRM division, and as a Director at AT&T — as well as deep diagnostic and advisory work across complex enterprises worldwide.

Steven is a Visiting Professor at Technological University Dublin and has trained more than 30,000 professionals across six continents.

He is the author of 11 books used globally by leaders and organizations, including:

The Business Acumen Handbook: Everything you need to know to succeed in the corporate world

Strategic Thinking in Action: A practical toolkit to sharpen your strategy, mindset, and impact as a leader

Leading Product Management: How to create a high-performance product management organization

The Product Manager’s Desk Reference (3rd Edition): The comprehensive reference for product management professionals

The Product Manager’s Survival Guide (2nd Edition): Everything you need to know to succeed as a product manager

Product Strategy and Roadmapping: A guided tour through the strategic planning process for product managers

How to Create a Business Case and How to Create a Winning Strategy: Two practical how-to guides published by Business Acumen Institute

Business Acumen for HR Professionals and Business Acumen for Project Managers: Two distinct versions of the Business Acumen Handbook with role-specific guides for building business perspective

Steven personally conducts Growth Capability Assessments and delivers diagnostic findings to executive teams.

Learning Across Organizations, Not Just Within One

A defining characteristic of our leadership perspective is exposure to patterns across organizations, not just experience inside a single company. Through decades of competency assessments, business acumen benchmarking, and organizational diagnostics, we have observed how different structures, incentives, operating models, and leadership behaviors affect growth and performance over time.

Our data, including the finding that 81% of organizations don’t fulfill their strategic intent even if they make the numbers, and that 73% of business cases fail to meet forecasts, pricing targets, and impact, comes from this longitudinal diagnostic work.

This perspective allows us to help leaders recognize systemic issues early, avoid common capability-building traps, and make more informed decisions about where to invest in organizational development.

Practical, Not Theoretical

Business acumen, strategic thinking, and product management are disciplines that must be practiced in the real context of an organization’s strategy, markets, and competitive position. Our leadership perspective reflects this conviction in everything we deliver.

We are corporate practitioners, not career academics or consultants who advise without operating experience. We focus on practical application over theory, judgment and decision quality over process compliance, organizational clarity over methodology adoption, and long-term capability building over short-term trend chasing.

Our goal is not to promote a personality or brand. It is to provide organizations with a clear, durable foundation for building the capabilities that drive sustained growth.

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Related Resources

• Growth Capability Assessment 
• Business Acumen Training
• Strategic Thinking Training
• Product Management Training
• The Business Acumen Canvas