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Why Does Business Acumen Matter?

12/5/2012

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"Education is not the answer to the question.  Education is the means to the answer of all questions."  Bill Allin

Business Acumen is the Missing Piece

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Early in my career I learned that business acumen is the missing piece for many employees.  When you consider that most often, we train our employees  in job skills/procedures when they are newly hired, and we may train them in supervisory skills/processes when they get promoted.

Later on, we may train them in the typical "development" topics, like time management, leadership, communication, team work, business writing, presentations and more.  All of this is good work, don't get me wrong.  These topics have shown to be tremendously valuable to employees, teams, and businesses.  Yet, I have found that the missing piece in all of this is business acumen.  

Business acumen provides the "why."  Why learn these skills?  Why go to all the trouble to develop my work skills, leadership skills, human relations skills?  Oh, yeah, we're a for-profit enterprise and we all are here to do good work for our stakeholders so they pay us.  What's our business?  Where do we get the profit?  What drives cash flow?  Who has an interest in our success?  

Answers to these questions drive the "why" and fill in the missing piece.

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    "The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the unanimous views of all parts of my mind."  Malcolm McMahon

    Author

    Dan Topf, CPT is Sr. Vice President at MDI, Inc.

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    Business Learning by Dan: Primers for Trainers

    PDF versions of short articles on how to integrate business acumen into all training and development:

    The Income Statement
    Cash Flow
    Price and Volume
    The Circulation of Capital
    The Cost of Capital
    Market Differentiation

    Industry-specific:
    Financial Services -- Life Insurance/Annuities
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