Unlock Your Career Potential: Mastering Business Acumen for Lasting Success

Recorded Webinar

 

Resources Discussed In The Webinar

Free: Try Two Modules of The Business Acumen Online Course 

Free: Take the Business Acumen Self-Assessment

Free: Download the Business Acumen Canvas

Free: Download the Business Acumen Handbook Executive Summary

Purchase: The Business Acumen Handbook

Get in Touch: Send our host, Steven, an email

Webinar Brief:

Most people know that to get a promotion, they must be strong in their functional discipline. But what if getting that promotion requires more than technical skills?

What if it involves business acumen?

Unfortunately, 8 out of 10 executives… say that middle managers and emerging leaders lack these vital business acumen skills.

In this webinar, you will learn to take purposeful action by understanding the strategic intent of your work and the impact of including business acumen in your professional development.

Today, in this recorded webinar, our host, Steven Haines, will guide you on this learning journey. Click play above to get started,  or feel free to browse the transcript below.

Transcript

Thanks everybody for joining us. We’re happy to be doing this again as a as a co-branded initiative because business acumen has become so incredibly pronounced.

So, we’ll go through a couple of quick introductions. Many of you know me through Sequent Learning, some through Business Acumen Institute.

There are some models that we utilize, the life cycle model or the business admin canvas. There are some QR codes here. You can, of course, take pictures of those and download them.

People will have access to this as a recorded webinar as well as request copies if you’d like.

Some of you also know me through some of the books I’ve written, namely Product Manager’s Desk Reference, Business Acumen Handbook, and so on. So in terms of today, if you have any special requests, you can feel free just to throw things in the chat window.

I’ve got a couple of points I wanna take today. One, just quick introduction. We’ll provide some fundamentals and talk most specifically about core capabilities associated with business hacking. Alright.

So what is going on? I do a lot of research. And, the research is done sometimes to the workshops I deliver. Sometimes to the interviews I conducted through diagnostics.

So just because I reset reach out to a lot of executives because I’m always trying to figure out what the heck is going on in the world’s business.

And and here is something that’s interesting. I called the slide stuck in the middle, but, and, oh, by the way, site side comment, I’m not putting this in full screen mode. Hopefully, you can all see this. The reason is sometimes I can’t see the other controls and other usability issue.

So hopefully you can all see this. If anybody’s having any kind of a problem again, just throw it in the chat window and we’ll take a look. So Notice, on the picture on the right side. I’ve lassoed this, like, a bunch of people sometime somewhere in the middle of the organization.

What it sometimes represents is we have people who operate in functional roles. It could be sales or marketing operations, and they sort of view their world through their siloed or vertical functions. And they don’t necessarily look horizontally across the organization how does the work that I do fit within the context of the firm’s goals?

And what what happens is the bosses, the senior executives, they’re on a talent hunt. And this talent hunt is so incredibly critical to them because they’re worried about who’s gonna start moving into the higher ranks? Now, certainly, many of you work in big companies. There are high potential leadership development programs But if we look a little bit more deeply into the organization, let’s assume all those great high potential people become the future C suite people, who’s gonna move into those next higher level jobs. And it usually is people who work in different functions, but you can’t move into a higher level more general role if you don’t have cross organizational strategic cognizance.

And the way I see it sometimes is through these quick examples. So for instance, if if there’s an engineering person, sometimes an engineer says, oh, I got this great idea. We’re gonna and and they run after this shiny object. And I know you know these people.

And that we create something that that maybe nobody wants to buy. Alright. So we have technical solutions that don’t necessarily solve a customer problem. Let’s take a look at it from another point of view.

Sometimes HR managers hire the wrong people Why is that? Well, they got the job description from the functional leader. They fill the role or they recruit for the role based on what they think they’re supposed to have. And then the hiring manager, maybe they don’t fully understand exactly what the person needs to be doing.

And so we don’t have a complete understanding of that role that needs to be hired in.

HR people could benefit some from some business acumen.

Sometimes we have operations people They they deploy capital. It could be for a production line. It could be for some improvement in a process at whatever. But whatever it is that they’re investing in, maybe to make a product more profitable, that is not we’re making it because maybe that product is not gaining the market share.

Oh, here’s another one. Customer service people understaffed the call center because they didn’t know the marketing programs that drove demand So they got lost sales and unhappy customers who got stuck on hold for way too long a period of time. Or there are some IT folks. Maybe they didn’t build enough capacity for the number of new users for a business application because they didn’t understand the business forecast.

Or, hey, my favorite folks sometimes, the product manager people. We’re rushing the business case. We’re making up the numbers in the spreadsheet, but we didn’t do the proper research. Understand customer needs.

Or the last one is the project manager. The project manager is herding cats to make sure the project deadlines are being met without full knowledge of the strategic intent of the project. An interesting side conversation is I’ve been doing some work with some of the project management Institute PMI chapters.

And this, we talked about this recently in the slide particularly resonated with them. I’ll talk a little bit about what they’re up to these days. So here’s the real problem is that we have functional experts who don’t have sufficient understanding of how the business works. And when they don’t understand those details, we may have higher levels of either business failure, or I’m gonna say failure to achieve the kind of results that even successful companies can actually attain.

Very often in the beginning of my workshops, I say, draw me a picture of a so and so, draw me a picture of a product manager, draw me a picture of a a emerging leader in your company. Join me a picture of a project manager. It doesn’t matter because I I keep getting the same pictures. And I’ve got thousands of these.

And I and I’m saying, well, what do we do? I have meetings and deadlines and interruptions and priorities that shift. You know these Everybody knows these, but how do we sort of pull back and make sense of some of these things? So what do we actually need?

We need people like an engineering manager who needs to understand customer and market problems to innovate around those solutions.

We need an HR manager who needs to understand aspects of the business so they can contribute to the company’s staffing strategy.

We need operations managers need to connect the dots between market demand and factory capacity or a customer service manager understands marketing and ops and IT so that they can properly support the business or an IT manager who believes that they are an internal service provider and need to understand the requirements of users across the organization or a product manager who needs to link customer and market insights to the product strategy and financial performance so that the products can contribute to the company’s bottom line. And ultimately, the project manager needs to ensure they know how the project fits within the strategic intent that they’re position. All of these are vital. Okay? And I’m gonna just I’m gonna transition just for a second.

Because I do a lot of work with the project management community as well.

Project management Institute is there sort of certifying body, and they have all kinds of interesting tools, but one of the things that they focus on is what they call a talent triangle.

And it’s the kind of things that contribute to a project manager’s capability and they PMI recently in the last six months changed the third angle of their town triangle to include business acumen, they are serious, and they have millions and millions of members. Okay? Just just a point of reference. So how do we, as managers, diversify our portfolio of skills and capabilities and how your executives recognize what’s needed to fortify middle management with the needed talent to drive the business into the future.

Alright? So that’s really, really important. Okay? So let’s let’s continue with this thing called, building business acumen.

And how do we actually do this? Right? So let’s talk about the fundamentals.

So when I do a business acumen workshop, I ask the question, what is business acumen? Oops.

And and I will invariably go around the room. I could ask twenty different people their definition and I will get twenty different answers. This happens in a lot of different business definitions, but this one is particularly important. So here’s basic definition, I will read it to you.

Business Acumen is a portfolio of skills, behaviors, and capabilities needed to support an organization and the achievement of financial and strategic goals.

So very often I’ll come back to the first part of the statement, a portfolio of skills.

What is this portfolio of skills? Well, if you’re an investor, an investor has a portfolio of assets.

Sometimes it could be equities or debt or real estate or other things. Those are those are things of value with the eye of hopefully producing a future return on investment. So think about that in terms of you’ve been your own career. What is the return on the investment of things that you’re making in your skills and behaviors and capabilities Okay? What’s a skill is something you can do?

A behavior.

Well, in leadership development, we look at behaviors as What are what is somebody doing? How do we see them? And do does the person see themselves even in terms of what they’re supposed to be doing and are we seeing evolution and growth. Okay?

And then I’m gonna talk about these things called capabilities, which I’ll break into in a couple of minutes, which shows us this is sort of the foundation of everything you need to be able to do. Okay? So what do we need to be able to do? Well, the first thing is how does the company make money?

Now, ask yourselves any question. Just even if you you probe, let’s say you were sitting in a maybe a some kind of a meeting with people from different departments, and you all talk together. How does the company make money?

How do our competitors make money? And you can say, well, they sell this and they sell that, but what else What is the secret sauce that helps your company produce the revenue and profits it needs? Right? So understanding the business model is one of the vital building blocks to get this business acumen thing.

The second thing is Everybody talks about this big picture. Oh, what’s the big picture of how things are hanging together? Well, you know, we very often in business talk about strategy and and future state vision. Well, where do we see ourselves?

How do we envision all of the things that are going on? I I I like, I’m I’m into these mental models, right? Like, what’s my interpretation of the world? So understanding a business model and seeing that big picture has to be underscored with some of the details. And that is there are bits and pieces of things that are going on you’ve gotta connect the dots. So if I went left to right, understand visualize and associate, you then can go backwards again and go associate visualize and understand.

So it’s iterative the way we build this organizational cod business Right. Well, that gets us to one piece of the business acumen puzzle. The second piece of the business acumen puzzle starts with a canvas, a blank canvas. I’m gonna ask you to to visualize this.

Visualize the fact that you’re driving to work. Whether whether you work at home or not, just imagine you’re driving and you’re driving through the beautiful countryside and you see all of this, this, this, this, and you see foliage and all kinds of things And and you’re taking that in and really being happy with the things that you see. Right? So then you take that larger picture and then you walk in through the doors of your business figuratively or literally. Alright? And you you come down here and you you open the door of the building and you go into your office and you’re down here.

This notion of the broad thinking of about things that are going on outside of the building are represented in a business acumen canvas as external perspectives.

Whether and in business speak or product speak or whatever segments that’s how customers are grouped, customers themselves the competitors that our our company is up against, the industries where we operate, our business model, the value that we deliver to our intended customers, how we get our products from where we create them to how customers can get to to use them and whatever footprint we’re in global local or whatever.

These eight items form these external perspective and the ebb and they flow and they move around. They’re extraordinarily dynamic, very, very data driven. And and so the idea is build a market first perspective note the terms on the chart. Market first value delivery in terms of how we make business decisions.

We have to make something. We have to do something. We wanna improve a process. What are those things?

How does it impact the customer? Does it help us to become more competitive? Those are stakeholder, like, almost non negotiable items, but you can’t just look at these things on your own. Okay?

The second thing you need to look at is our mindset.

This is the second part of this business acumen canvas.

And the first item of the if you see in the upper left hand corner says thinking strategically.

Well, you know, I hear bosses talk about I need my managers think strategically.

But they don’t really talk about what strategic thinking is about. You can talk about sports analogies a lot because in in in let’s say you’re talking about American football, I mean, the plays are moving very, very quickly. You you you have the result of a play. It either it either worked.

It didn’t work. You come back. You resets. You do it again. Alright? But you don’t do it by yourself.

You do it with the people who run your team. Build those internal relationships. Who else do you build relationships with? People are outside of your organization.

They’re sort of this, this ecosystem that you have to calibrate in your head in the context of all the things going on outside of your organization so you can produce outcomes, take action when necessary, be responsible. And of course, all managers and leaders need to earn credibility.

So mindset means the mental lens in terms of how we interpret the world. Which world? The world of that’s going on outside of the organization and inside of the organization. Okay? So that’s the the second dimension of the business at Kim Canvas. The third has to do with what whether we learn it or experiential know how and skills to get our jobs done and capabilities get developed over time.

What are capabilities?

Well, there are eight of them within the context of this canvas. Okay? Now I’ll just sort of repeat here. External Those perspectives help shape how we, number two, develop the mindset, or think about the world, based on three, these eight core capabilities.

So what are those leading teams and influencing people using processes to get work done?

Managing projects to achieve goals, understanding products in markets, go down to the lower left, utilizing financial financial analysis, formulating goals and strategies, analyzing data solving problems and making decisions and ultimately assessing business performance.

So if I look at these things here, alright, think about how many there are. Right? There’s quite a bit. I’ll show you in a second I think I add the numbers up for you.

But here’s the the notion. If I have this canvas, think about think about this. You go to Museum, and you look at a painting. You can look at the painting up close.

Alright. You can zoom in, look at a little detail, pull back out, Now I understand what the artist intended. So this notion of zooming in and zooming out. So in business or in life, there’s a situation that occurs.

What are the details? Right? So you get sort of like dragged into those details, but you’ve gotta pull yourself back.

And see how did these things fit together? Well, then something else happens. You sort of zoom back in again and pull back out. And you see things more holistically.

So the idea behind the canvas is that it’s it’s almost like it’s systems model. I have a lot of dynamic interconnected systems that are at play at a lot of different points in time. Nothing is static.

So the thing that’s critical in building business hacking is to recognize the dynamism and the speed with business moves so that you can anticipate what has to happen. The key in being an effective strategist doesn’t even matter what your job is. Your role is in some way a strategist to help the company achieve its goals.

Alright? So we’ve gotta be able to look at these things. Okay? And so now that we understand business acumen as definition, I wanna talk about the capabilities. Okay? So here’s where we are. These are the eighth court capabilities at the twenty five thousand foot level.

And here’s how where we are.

So think about eight core capabilities and forty six subcategories.

That is a huge amount of stuff to figure out. Okay? So let’s talk about the first one, leading teams and influencing people. Now I’ve got seven points here. Well, one of the most important things at the top is making connections.

Who’s who in your organization?

Now, I used to coach my staff, he used to say things like, you know, the HR people can give you a org chart that’s great. What’s your org chart look like? Who are the people that you operate and interoperate with? Where are your dependencies? Who are their bosses?

Right? Like, people used to say to me, oh, I need you to go influence people who don’t work for you. At least, like, get glazed over in my eyes because I didn’t understand what it meant until I sort of got it. What, wait, Maybe I if I established a relationship with their bosses, my the peers the bosses of my peers sort of managing up in a cost, I might be able to figure out what their agendas are and how maybe I can help them.

That’s an informal network. That’s not something that’s on the org chart. Okay. But when you do that, you have a better chance of being clear about roles and responsibilities.

And when you’re clear about what you’re supposed to do with whom and when, Alright? And you’re and you and people see this positive behavior.

You’re earning trust. You’re being more credible. At that allows you to start to influence other people who may not be working for you. You see how this is working.

And the influence builds political capital that that it’s even hard to put words around political capital, but you know the people who know how to sort of get around the organization through those relationships Okay? Again, managing up and across and making sure you’re aligned with the bosses so that you and the work that you do has the best strategic impact to the organization. Okay? So that gets us to to the first capability.

Second one. Using processes to get work done? Well, this is interesting.

Sometimes I work in a company and I say, can you name a process and somebody will name something like local I work with a lot of these people, the product development process. Well, it’s good. What about a strategic planning process? What about a production process? What about a customer service resolution process?

There are so many There are hundreds and hundreds of processes.

How do you know what they are? How do you know who’s doing what was home?

So so the idea even in in in processes is to know that work has to get done and who does the work? People.

So the reason we talk about people first is because people are the main actors on the stage of processes imagine the process is sort of like it’s a performance that we’re laying out. I know it sounds like that a little little weird. Alright. But when you understand those those cross functional and cross organizational dependencies, it’s easier to understand about roles and responsibilities.

I hear people talk about role confusion all the time. It’s sometimes it’s distracting. Ask yourself this question. Is it do you ever have to do the work of other people?

Do you ever find the doing things that they probably shouldn’t be doing. Maybe you should be doing them. You hear about this stuff. Okay.

So role clarity is critical in processes.

Sometimes we have to look at a variance.

What did we say we were going to do? What actually happened? Was there a break point did we accelerate time to market? What were those kinds of things?

Because the main idea is that a process is just is a series of steps that get something done, but sometimes you could just go a little bit faster. How do you improve? How do you create greater levels of efficiency and improve the company’s ability to compete with people Alright. So that gets us to the next one.

Talk about projects.

Now, listen, a lot of people are and and the people I work with are project management certified And but they recognize that it’s people and processes in the world that they have to work in, whether you’re in IT or operations or development or any place else. Right? But the idea is that linkages between people and processes is critical and understanding workflows. Well, A workflow can happen inside of a process and a project is spun off from that workflow.

In project management line, we might call the work breakdown structure. Right? We might wanna look at things like cost and schedule and scope. Those, that’s the triple constraint in project management, right, and using project management overall.

Everybody in a business has worked on a project team. Ask yourself how many of those projects you’ve worked on.

And whether or not you have project management skills.

Alright? It’s it’s a whole entire body of knowledge. There’s a whole entire certification organization around that.

Let’s talk about products in markets.

Well, if if the products are the lifeblood of a company, And if the company doesn’t have products to sell or that they’re competitive, what ends up what ends up happening? You’re not gonna sell. If you don’t sell, you don’t make money. If you don’t make money, you don’t have jobs. Okay? Products are the lifeblood of every company.

And to understand products, you have to understand things like who are the customers of my company, what do they care about, what do they value, Were we competing against what’s going on in a generalized market?

If we get those things and link them to the company’s business model and the products that are developed and sold, we will have a better chance of saying, how does the work I’m doing help the company to achieve the market stature at once, the strategic intent, and the competitive intent.

Right? These are really critical. Right? So I’ll recap people, processes, projects, markets, and products. Alright? So that’s the first four capabilities.

Let’s go to the fifth one. Finance and Financial Analysis.

Now, I’m a finance guy by trade. I love the numbers, I sometimes go into my workshops and they say, how many people like to pay the bills in their house? But I get like four out of twenty people, how many people like money you know, maybe, you know, a few people are raising hands.

If you wanna be a successful business person and develop business acumen, You gotta understand the numbers. Every decision that you make has an economic or financial consequence to the company. Okay? When I when I went to business school, right, first class, I took accounting.

Did I like accounting? Not much, but I ended up being a financial analyst for a little bit. Okay? Did I like finance?

I love finance. Did I like some of the advanced stuff like cost accounting? I did. It made sense to me.

Alright? Because it was some of the building blocks of a company.

Guests understand the financial statements. You and your family have a financial statement. You have a profit and loss statement. I got money coming.

I got money coming out. Hopefully I have something left at the end of the month. That’s a P and L. Companies do the same thing.

I wanna look at variances.

The difference between what I expected and what actually happened. I have to interpret that and take corrective action. Right? Sometimes I look at things like business health, the balance sheet, what I have versus what I owe and what’s left over. You have a house that’s worth a million dollars, lucky you, and you have a half a million dollar mortgage, you have a half a million dollars of equity. You have a company, ten million dollars of assets, and three million dollars of liabilities. You have seven million dollars of owner’s equity.

Is that a healthy company? Depends.

You have to understand what these things are. If you don’t get the numbers, you have to get into the numbers game, you can use your CFO or somebody in your office are plenty of videos on on on understanding this stuff. Okay.

Number six, formulating goals and strategies, not that I ever quoted this. It was probably Lewis Carroll, like, something like that. You know, if you don’t know where you’re going, any roader’s gonna get you there. You need to understand the strategy formulation process where you’ve been, where you are now, where you wanna go, how are you gonna get there, and how do you know?

Right? And and this where we’ve been and where we now becomes what we call the strategic based time assessment. It allows us to say where is the business right now? What are the next steps we can take?

How do we then develop new opportunities and ideas or innovations that allow us to take the company into the future, what are the resources we need, and how do we put the numbers together? K?

People processes projects, products, finance, and strategy.

Right? Now, what do we do with this? Well, sometimes things don’t go according to plan. So data is your friend. We are living a very, very data rich world right now. Do we not?

But if if we’re looking at data and something’s not panning out, there’s a problem.

Now I’ve mentioned various analysis a couple of times. Right? The difference between a plan and an actual or what you expected versus what happens Alright? That difference, if it’s not so good, is problem.

Alright? And it’s it’s an interesting way of looking at a problem. So you need to understand what causes a problem, what’s the root cause of the problem, and how do you take corrective action? Alright? Sometimes you have to think about things like what’s the difference between the outcome I’m trying to achieve for the company and the output maybe from a process?

Sometimes I need to understand where’s my data coming coming from, and and is the data effective?

So we talk about solving problems using data or facts.

That means gathering evidence so it can make informed decisions about what to do next. So in terms of analyzing data solving problems and making decisions, there is a flavor of strategy which is the previous cluster, and we go all the way back to finance because sometimes finance is the root of the problem.

Right? Do you see how all of these things are integrated? Then the last one has to do with business performance?

We’ve got to look at all of these things, data, metrics, scorecards, data visualization to figure out how things are moving along, right, allows us to chart out past present and future, which again has strategic impact. Okay. So what’s the value proposition for you to build business acumen? Number one is say the interconnectedness of the parts of the business. Zooming in, zooming out, seeing the big picture.

Number two, leveraging facts and data, you wanna be able to tell narratives or stories.

You know, the bosses are are getting tired of the bullet points, right? Both points don’t tell a story. Having somebody explain it is more important because it builds greater, I know greater context, therefore greater credibility.

The third point has to do with outside in strategic thinking.

The executives want to know that you’re processing those signals and figuring out how to help influence the strategic intent of the firm.

The fifth point has to do with developing the ability to surface and solve problems.

Somebody you sometimes you just don’t want somebody to go tell you what problem to solve. You gotta go find the problem. Gotta go hunt for them. Alright?

And then ultimately building the connections between customer, strategy, finance, and business performance. Alright? So that’s the value prop for this. Alright?

A little bit of of marketing. We have a portfolio of courses or workshops, applied learning and project learning programs and so on. You could look at this when you read the deck.

We customize our training to fit every corporate environment. Again, it’s critical to understand that we really wanna work with your companies.

As I mentioned earlier, we have two training companies for product management and business acumen, and here’s for you. Here’s here are the gifts for you. Alright? So We have an online version of the business acumen workshop.

So you can take a look at the first couple of modules. We will try before you buy. And click on the QR code. And also when you register to take a look at that, we’ll provide with you with a PDF of the executive summary of the famous Business Acumen Handbook, which is right here.

Inside the book is a self-assessment.

That can be extraordinarily helpful to you because it might allow you to calibrate your strategic plan for your own business academic career development And if we can do anything to help, it would be really great. We I I’d love to help. I think this is a great area. I think it’s something that we really need to pay a lot more attention to.

Which is why I’m incredibly passionate about it. So thank you for all of your time today. And what I’m gonna do now is I’m gonna put this back up again, and I’m gonna open up my question board and pick it up. So let’s see.

I’m a software developer. Why should I care about business acumen. That’s a really, really good one. How do you know what the heck you’re developing?

Alright. Who are you developing for? You know, sometimes I talk to software developers and they they work with, user story, many of you are in, I’m sure, in software.

And they say, Well, I did this user story. Well, who is the user? What are they trying to do? So sometimes they’ll code and they’ll say, wait a minute.

The buttons here, the screen flows here, does it work? So there’s no feedback loop that links what they’re doing to the customer’s to the business. So sometimes we just need to bring the software developers into the business world.

Right?

Let’s see. I think you mentioned this is a canvas. I’m a product manager. Can you explain why understanding customers is so important.

Well, most if listen. It’s customers first. End the story. Regardless of what it is that you’re doing in your role.

If if what you’re doing If you can’t link it to what you’re doing or what your company is doing to help a customer to sell its products to improve the, experience of that customer, then you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. Okay?

I have an opportunity to become manager of a department I only have internal employees as customer’s IT. Could you elaborate on how business acumen can be applied? Absolutely.

You know, I work with a lot of companies in their IT or other infrastructure groups, and it’s just it’s almost like a a nonprofit. It’s a it’s a business in a business.

And so you have customers. They have choices.

They need to feel engaged. I’ve worked at the bank up in I think it was up in Canada. And the IT group, they wanted to bring they wanted the IT people to be more like business people. So they had these sort of business relationship managers.

What they were trying to do is take their business model, a new employee starts, they get a laptop, they get a whatever, and and all this other stuff.

But the employees were putting external apps on their company smartphones which meant that the bank was exposed to potential data leakages and things like that. That was like that was like crazy. So you need to understand what the role of this group is as as business owners, not just service providers so that you can figure out who those people are and how you have structure your organization.

Alright.

What steps can I take to raise my level of business understanding? Well, there are a couple of things. I think It’s here’s my take.

It it really is about your personal interest in business.

It is what I feel. It’s because I’m passionate about business and have been some since I’m a little kid. Right? You wanna sell something to somebody.

The purpose of a business is to provide something of value to somebody who’s going to give you money in exchange.

And so If you have some interest in helping your company make more of that money and be more efficient, then you start to open your eyes to things. Most of us know Enough about what we’re doing. I’m trying to help raise the sensitivity to the decisions you make on a day to day basis and how you prioritize your work. And then there are the other things.

Just you can study. There are more things online, whether it’s my online courses or my in person courses, or things in in LinkedIn learning or Coursera or any of these other places where you can learn, you can read. There’s tons of stuff. But it’s almost like you’ve got to ignite the flame of of of of of desire, if you will.

Okay.

What audience is this training training most impactful for?

We we use the term in business acumen Institute, emerging leaders and managers regardless of function, regardless of industry.

Which means it’s not we’re not dealing with people who are like, oh, I’m in the high potential leadership ranks of the company, and I’ve already been targeted. I’m going through all this leadership training. We work a little bit more deeply inside of the organization.

Alright? And so when when somebody reaches out to us, it could be like a learning and development person or and then an operating department or or somebody is working at working in a program office or something like that. Alright? So that’s, so where it works.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I wanna pitch this to my boss for learning development.

Do you have something I can send my boss?

Well, of course, you can contact me.

There is a, a workshop description on the business acumen Institute website, business hyphen acumen dot com, which shows the course outline there, even the canvas. I I made a video to explain the canvas, which is similar to what you heard me talk about before. Okay.

So that said, what, anything in the chat window over here.

Okay. Tate put something in the chat window and I’m currently a project manager. I actually mentioned project management.

As I as I mentioned earlier, the p the project management Institute was really quite interesting in terms of their talent triangle and making sure that business acumen was critical to them, which is why they called it out. They call it micro and macro, understanding of the business I so micro macro means to me zoom in and zooming out. What PMI doesn’t have is a product, is a business admin canvas. And I think the the canvas itself is profoundly important based on the number of constructs.

And if you actually took that self assessment, you’d actually see how each of the clusters were were we basically pose a statement. You say I’m such and such. The rating scales are relevant. And then when you’re done, you’ll get this report, on your scores.

So what’s in the report?

The question is stated, the answer is provided, and then there are some helpful hints. Usually two or three per items. So I think there are about ninety helpful hints. In that self assessment report. You’ll also see where do you sit within relation to the thousands of people around the world who have actually taken the, the assessment.

Okay.

Anybody else before we before we scoot away?

Alright. Well, thumbs up either in the Q and A or in the chat. Was this a worthwhile program?

And I and I hope, you feel it is because not a lot of people abandon ship, so that’s usually a good sign.

Well, I’m happy to help, and I hope that this was a, a program that provided just a little bit more context around this topic that keeps getting talked about across the corporate landscape.

And I hope I get a chance to see you guys at some point in the near future.