Seeing The Big Picture®
A Note to Chief Learning Officers
A Note to Chief Learning Officers
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The 5 Business Drivers®
At its heart, “business acumen” means knowing how your company makes money and making better decisions around the money making process, no matter your role.
Cash
On Hand Generation
A company that doesn’t know how it makes money isn’t likely to make more. So how does your business make money? The answer to this question isn’t always simple, and the deeper we dig, the more complex the picture may get. Are we talking about cash or profit? Do we mean relative to last year, or relative to competitors? Are we making more money than we owe? Where is the money coming from and where is it going? Are we making money more slowly than we used to, and if so, why? To find answers and understand trade-offs, savvy leaders focus on five critical business drivers: Cash, Profit, Assets, Growth, and People. While each driver is unique and based on a specific set of key metrics, you cannot affect one without influencing the performance of another. We measure our performance with respect to the first four drivers on the financial statements: the income statement (profit/ growth), the balance sheet (assets/cash), and the cash flow statement (cash). But understanding your company’s financials is only the beginning. Next, you need to apply that understanding.
® Growth Top Line Bottom Line
People Employees Customers
Assets Strength Utilization
Profit Revenues Expenses
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Kevin Cope is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal and New York Times Bestseller Seeing the Big Picture, which is the basis for Acumen Learning’s courses.
Acumen Learning
As a Chief Learning Officer, you are in a unique position to bridge the gap between functions. You can grow the business in a way nobody else can. You may have noticed that “people” don’t appear on the financials. That’s because people are the canvas beneath a Van Gogh masterpiece; as you focus on the bright swirls of color you forget the canvas, but without it there is no Starry Night. There’s nothing to hang on the wall of the Louvre without a canvas, and there’s no financial success without people. Developing your business acumen and the business acumen of your talent pipeline will improve every aspect of your business. To fulfill your company’s mission, your charge is to develop great leaders, outperformers, at every level of your organization. Business acumen won’t automatically make you, or anyone else, a great leader, but without it you will never become one.
Kevin Cope President & CEO Acumen Learning
Table of Contents
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Table of Contents Who We Are About Us 6 What We Do Building Business Acumen® Training Course Examples Business IQ® for Sales Professionals Understanding Your Quarterly Earnings eLearning Keynotes
10 13 17 21 22 23
How We Do It Our Approach Customization Process Follow Through Corporate Audiences Next Steps
26 27 29 30 35
Who We Are
Who We Are
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About Us
Company Profile
At a time when the growth of soft skills training was off the charts, Kevin Cope and Stephen M.R. Covey had a different idea: to create the world’s leading business acumen training company.
Established: Average feedback score: Longest client relationship: Active clients for 5+ years: Fortune 50 clients: Countries served:
They saw a crucial field of study that had been overrun by professors and internal finance teams who complicated the subject and by vendors who thought the subject needed to be dumbed down in order for it to be understood. They knew that companies needed a better alternative, and they started by establishing the core values and culture of the company that would be the solution. Acumen Learning emerged as the most complete solution, capable of teaching any professional, from any industry, about the business of their business. And we do it in a way that is both clear enough to reach the individual contributor and sophisticated enough to challenge the experienced executive. In a nutshell, we teach business acumen better than anyone else in the world. #1 Wall Street Journal New York Times Bestseller An MBA in under 180 pages, Seeing the Big Picture captures the basic principles of our training. It simplifies the complexities of business and shows you how a deep understanding of your company can help build the credibility and career you want.
Clients Include
2002 4.8 / 5 13 years 19 19 37
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Acumen Learning
Top 2 Levers of Engagement 1. Connection between work and organizational strategy. 2. Importance of job to organizational success.
Why business acumen Many people spend more than a hundred thousand dollars on an MBA without learning to pull the pieces of the puzzle together. Many others, no matter their education or business experience, feel shut out from opportunities to influence company results.
7 out of 10 workers a re either not engaged or are actively disengaged.
In fact, research published in Harvard Business Review found that 95% of employees are unaware of or do not understand their company’s strategy. Our own research has found that the vast majority of employees, ninety percent, don’t understand important business metrics.
$720 Million is invested annually in engagement improvement in the U.S.
95% of a company’s employees don’t understand its strategy.
90% of a company’s employees don’t understand its key business metrics. $450 – $550 Billion The cost per year of disengaged employees in the U.S.
Research shows that companies with engaged workforces have higher earnings per share (EPS).
Sources in order of reference: Corporate Leadership Council, Deloitte, Gallup, HBR, Acumen Learning, Gallup, and Gallup.
Traditional business education is often part of the problem – forcing students into tracks, or specialties. Sure, you have a lot of leaders who earned business degrees, but their career paths (or emphasis of study in school) landed them in HR, or marketing, or technology, or finance…which too often cultivates a myopic view of the company. You end up with individuals who understand their own roles well, but who struggle to connect their work to what really matters to the business as a whole. So how can an executive expect her employees to set the right priorities and implement the right initiatives when most of those employees are unclear as to what the strategy even is? She can’t… and the results are workforces that are unaligned and disengaged. Here’s the good news; as a training and development leader you’re in a unique position to step up and solve your executive’s problem. And the solution isn’t more engagement training – the solution is training in business acumen.
VERIZON CASE STUDY Verizon is a leader in delivering broadband and other wireline and wireless communication innovations to mass market, business, government and wholesale customers.
The situation
The solution
Why it worked
›› Wanted to integrate their wireline and wireless training initiatives into a consistent company-wide program.
Verizon partnered with Acumen Learning to:
›› Helped drive better financial decisions at multiple levels of the organization.
›› Needed to align learning and development with the company’s “One Verizon” strategy. ›› Had a goal of creating a multi-tiered curriculum that would progressively advance leaders based upon their experience and role.
›› Increase the scope of their business acumen offerings to address the needs of additional business units. ›› Customize and deliver a new advanced financial acumen course for senior leadership. ›› Integrate Verizon’s proprietary shareholder value model as part of their training initiative.
›› Aligned corporate culture with Verizon’s executive focus on driving shareholder value. ›› Made the course as relevant as the morning’s headlines.
What We Do
What We Do
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Building Business Acumen® Training
300% ROI
It’s like getting an MBA in your company Whether your objective is to grow talent, achieve real measurable results (the kind that show up on the financials), instigate organizational change, or align employees — we have a proven track record that includes work at 19 of the Fortune 50, programs delivered to over one hundred thousand professionals from every major industry, and recognition as one of the finest training companies in the world*.
A leader in the aerospace and defense industry hired MetrixGlobal to measure the impact of their Building Business Acumen training programs.
The course Highly customized training programs that are about your company, your strategy, your financials, and your goals. Engaging and hands-on learning experiences that will inspire participants to have an immediate and lasting impact on their business throughout their career. A practical approach of actionable learning that can be put to the test immediately – rather than theoretical academic methods that lack real-world substance. Standout facilitators who bring their very best thinking about your company’s current state of affairs. Taught in a way that doesn’t cheapen the experience with games or generic simulations that are dated with each new earnings release or company announcement.
*2012 ISA Training Company of the Year Training Industry Watch List: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
MetrixGlobal reported that participants applied what they learned in class, resulting in: › improved performance, › increased engagement, and › higher productivity.
Further, they found that these benefits produced more than a 300% return on investment for the company. Full Report: http://goo.gl/lI2Knn
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Humana Graduate Feedback “I had a good understanding of the financials going into the course, but this was really the first time I thought about what I can do to effect change.”
Acumen Learning
As a world leading authority on business acumen, we will bring our best thinking to our partnership with you. We’ve helped organizations implement transformative learning and development initiatives, such as: ›› Improving the speed of informed decision-making. ›› Grooming high-potential employees for career opportunities and retention. ›› Developing sustainable financial acumen as a component of succession planning. ›› Driving a culture of owner/entrepreneur thinking at all levels of the business. ›› Managing change due to a merger or acquisition, growth, or shifts in executive strategy. ›› Aligning department initiatives (HR, finance, engineering, sales, etc.) with business imperatives. An investment in custom business acumen training will yield huge dividends on an individual and organizational level. We’ll work with you to co-create a course that’s integrated with your people and corporate strategy and continue to work with you to implement follow-up activities to maximize the return on your investment. We turn things around quickly; our program design and delivery timetable can be measured in weeks, not months. We work in close consultation with you to conduct a needs analysis to identify organizational gaps and build a thought-provoking curriculum that builds a sense of business confidence that lasts a lifetime.
What We Do
Objectives and outlines We’ve developed a modular approach to teaching business and finance. This allows you to pick and choose different areas of focus. During your customization process we’ll jointly decide which learning modules will best meet your learning requirements. For example, a two-day course for senior financial analysts might include an in-depth discussion on weighted average cost of capital and return on investment tools, whereas a course designed for front-line employees might center more on the business and financial framework of your company and stay focused on basic principles, like cost management. As you review our course outlines and objectives, keep in mind that they are starting points. Even if your course ends up mirroring a typical outline at a high level, in its details your course will be unique to your business and tailored to meet your specific objectives. We’re not interested in turning participants into accounting geniuses, but we are very interested in building their business confidence. Especially when the stakes are high and when the right decisions, made at the right time, will strengthen your company in the long run. In short, each of our course agendas is thoughtfully formulated to turn participants into outperformers. Every Building Business Acumen course will be framed around these high level learning objectives: ›› Use the 5 Business Drivers to understand how companies make money. ›› Develop a working knowledge of financial statements. ›› Consistently make the right strategic bets. ›› Align individual and team decisions (micro) to executive initiatives (macro).
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Acumen Learning
2-Day Course Example Day One Morning: 8 – 12
Day Two Morning: 8 – 12
The 5 Business Drivers ›› Cash ›› Profit ›› Assets ›› Growth ›› People
Simplifying the Financials ›› Income Statement ›› Balance Sheet ›› Statement of Cash Flows ›› Annual and other periodic reports ›› Navigating the Financials Activity
Depending on experience, participants may be introduced to the 5 Business Drivers through a street vendor business simulation.
Day Two Afternoon: 1 – 5
Day One Afternoon: 1 – 5 Leaders as Teachers ›› 5 Business Drivers Reteach Case Studies ›› World-Class Companies & Strategies Functional Analysis & Impact Understand different roles / functions, disciplines, and their interrelationships. Executive Alignment & Messaging Read your latest executive communication and analyze it through the lens of the 5 Business Drivers.
In-Depth Financial Analysis Analyze the financials of competitors, suppliers, benchmark, and/or prospects. Innovation Management & Informed Decision Making Manage processes based on varied business maturities, structures, challenges, expectations, and customer insights. External Acumen ›› External Factors ›› Price-Earnings Ratio ›› What Makes a Stock Price Rise or Fall? Move To Action ›› Develop an Action Plan ›› Pair up with an Accountability Partner
What We Do
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1-Day Course Example
6-Hour Virtual Example
Morning: 8 – 12
Section 1: 3hrs
The 5 Business Drivers ›› Cash ›› Profit ›› Assets ›› Growth ›› People
The 5 Business Drivers ›› Cash ›› Profit ›› Assets ›› Growth ›› People
Depending on experience, participants may be introduced to the 5 Business Drivers through a street vendor business simulation.
Section 2: 3hrs
Afternoon: 1 – 5 Leaders as Teachers ›› 5 Business Drivers Reteach Simplifying the Financials ›› Income Statement ›› Balance Sheet ›› Statement of Cash Flows ›› Navigating the Financials Activity Move To Action ›› Develop an Action Plan ›› Pair up with an Accountability Partner
Leaders as Teachers ›› 5 Business Drivers Reteach Simplifying the Financials ›› Income Statement Move To Action ›› Develop an Action Plan ›› Pair up with an Accountability Partner
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Acumen Learning
4-Day Mini MBA Example Day One Morning: 8 – 12
Day Two Morning: 8 – 12
Driver: Cash Accounts Payable & Receivable | Cash Conversion Cycle | Free Cash Flow | WACC
Big Picture Breakdown & In-Depth Analysis ›› Income Statement ›› Balance Sheet ›› Statement of Cash Flows
Driver: Profit Top Line | COGS | SG&A | EBIT | EBITDA | Bottom Line
Day Two Afternoon: 1 – 5
Driver: Assets Asset Strength & Utilization | Liquidity | Debt Ratings | RoA | RoE | RoI | RoIC
Functional Analysis & Impact Understand different roles / functions, disciplines, and their interrelationships.
Day One Afternoon: 1 – 5
Executive Alignment & Messaging Read your latest executive communication and analyze it through the lens of the 5 Business Drivers.
Driver: Growth Organic vs. Inorganic Growth | Guidance Driver: People Companies Who Get People & Profit Right Leaders as Teachers ›› 5 Business Drivers Reteach Case Studies ›› World-Class Companies & Strategies
Resources & Research Learn where to go and what to look for. Competitor Assignments for Day Three
What We Do
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Day Three Morning: 8 – 12
Day Four Morning: 8 – 12
Competitor Analysis
Industry Analysis ›› Suppliers ›› Customers ›› Prospects ›› Partners ›› Benchmarks
Competitor Reports Day Three Afternoon: 1 – 5 Innovation Management & Informed Decision Making Manage processes based on varied business maturities, structures, challenges, expectations, and customer insights. External Acumen ›› External Factors ›› Price-Earnings Ratio ›› What Makes a Stock Price Rise or Fall? Industry Assignments for Day Four
Industry Reports Day Four Afternoon: 1 – 5 RoI Analysis ›› Evaluate the Value of an Investment ›› Compare Investments and Recognize Trade-offs Move To Action ›› Develop an Action Plan ›› Pair up with an Accountability Partner Big Picture Wrap Up ›› Build Your Credibility, Career & Company
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GE Graduate Feedback “Over my 15 years at GE I have enjoyed many training seminars. However, this business acumen lecture was as good, if not better, than any I’ve had an opportunity to attend.” Dan Bryne Director, Commercial Channels Business Development at GE Healthcare
Acumen Learning
Sales Transformation: Business IQ® for Sales Professionals Today’s customers want a business partner – not a pitch – someone who can help them see the path forward. They want standouts who are more consultative, more savvy when it comes to business, and more engaged in the success and prosperity of their clients. In other words, your best salespeople are good businesspeople. Business IQ for Sales Professionals will pull from the learning modules used in our 1-, 2-, or 4-day courses, but instead of diving into your company’s operations and financials, participants will gain a business oriented understanding of their clients. For example, instead of exploring your company’s P&L, we may delve into a client’s P&L and pinpoint line items and strategic challenges that your solutions may directly or indirectly impact. In-depth client analysis Our sales training has a particular focus on business and industry analysis. Participants will understand how to quickly size up a business opportunity and will know how to analyze the client from a business and financial perspective prior to making any sales call. They’ll acquire insights into strategy, decision-making processes, and the financial levers that motivate purchases, which will enable them to inject the right solution into the buying cycle. Sales representatives will learn how to look at their deals through the lens of decision makers in different functional roles, and will be able to advise decision makers on the impact their purchases will have on their own KPIs and strategic priorities.
What We Do
We know your customers Our consultants have worked directly with over 200 different companies and have conducted research on all of their top competitors. This gives them an unparalleled perspective into a wide range of industries. What are the main strategies for driving growth in retail? How are hospitals navigating new industry regulations? Who’s leading in the energy sector? We know the answers to these questions and more, and we’ll give your sales teams the tools they need to become similarly sophisticated. Traditional sales training = traditional salespeople When clients start to open up and share information, it’s usually information about their business. Too frequently, key metrics and strategic challenges sound more like Latin to salespeople than English. To avoid looking like the only person in the room who’s not tracking, salespeople with low business acumen turn the conversation to something that’s more comfortable to talk about: their solution’s features and benefits, or worse: golf. When you lose the sale, you’re left wondering why your investment in sales training can’t seem to break free of industrial-era tactics. Too often companies emphasize soft skills, like communication and negotiation—skills that focus on how to talk to customers— but neglect harder skills. In some ways business acumen is the hardest skill, but it’s essential, because it tells you when to talk to customers, why to talk to customers, and what to talk to customers about, when the bottom line matters. These days, being a sales professional is not just about closing deals; it’s about opening profitable long-term relationships. This means knowing and selling the big picture of your business and your customer’s business and why a long-term relationship between you is more profitable than any individual transaction.
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Boston Scientific Graduate Feedback “Thank you very much for the outstanding business acumen course. I put some of the lessons learned to work the very next day…
I had a scheduled meeting to discuss a potential bulk purchase deal, and I opened the conversation describing the three levers of profit that I learned in class: raise price, sell more, and reduce costs.
I explained that in the hospital’s situation, “sell more” translated into increased patient volume, that cost reductions were coming to an end soon, and that hospitals everywhere were going to have to look deeper into pricing strategies and new revenue streams. They agreed. Honestly, without your course, this never would have happened. I would have simply presented a bulk purchase offer in a transactional matter, and departed. Thanks again!” Sincerely,
Pete Dunn Business Partner – Coronary Boston Scientific
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Acumen Learning
Trusted advisor Two simple words, trust and advisor, have combined to become the yardstick by which client-vendor relationships are measured. Selling customers on your business involves trust: trust that you’ll do the right thing, trust that you know your business and theirs, trust that you will help them succeed and grow shareholder value, trust that committing to your business in the long-term is more profitable than committing to the competition. And smart sales executives are recognizing that their sales representatives cannot reach the status of a trusted advisor if they can’t assess a client’s business challenges and articulate an intelligent solution. No training path will get salespeople to the status of a trusted advisor faster than Business IQ for Sales Professionals. You’ll develop salespeople who turn those once uncomfortable business discussions into meaningful conversations, who know what to listen for and what to ask to uncover the business drivers behind a purchase, and who know how to interact with clients to help them through complex purchasing decisions. In short, you’ll develop a sales force that talks about the right things, at the right time, with the right people. Business IQ course objectives ›› Use the 5 Business Drivers to understand what motivates purchasing decisions. ›› Learn how to diagnose business challenges and opportunities prior to a sales call. ›› Align solutions with specific business needs and help clients make effective business decisions. ›› Listen and communicate with increased business confidence.
CAREERBUILDER CASE STUDY CareerBuilder operates the largest online job site in the U.S., but they’re more than just a job board. They are a global leader in human capital solutions. Through constant innovation, proprietary technology, and customer care delivered at every touch point, CareerBuilder matches the right talent with the right opportunity.
The situation
The solution
Why it worked
›› Needed to diversify revenue streams beyond their job board.
CareerBuilder partnered with Acumen Learning to:
›› Participants conducted client and industry research and presented how they would incorporate their findings into their call plans.
›› Required salespeople who could sell higher margin services upstream. ›› Viewed as an Internet tech company, CareerBuilder had no problem recruiting a talented young sales force, but recognized a need for business acumen.
›› Customize and deliver a course that focused on the development of a 360 degree view of a CareerBuilder prospect. ›› Teach salespeople how to speak the language of business, command attention, and garner executive level support.
›› Gave rise to a businessperson first, salesperson second mentality. ›› Combined Acumen Learning thought leadership with CareerBuilder’s existing sales methodologies.
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Acumen Learning
Seeing the Big Picture® Understanding Your Quarterly Earnings Quarter after quarter and year after year company executives release earnings and share valuable insights into the operations of the company. What competitive and economic factors are impacting performance and how will the company react to these factors? How do these factors impact consumer and business buying decisions? How well is the company positioned to stimulate customer demand for products and services? Are inventories at appropriate levels, given cash management priorities and the company’s tolerance for risk? How dependent is the company on distributors, carriers, and other third parties? Here’s the problem: most employees don’t listen to earnings announcements. Worse, many who do have a hard time connecting this 10,000 foot view of the company to the pile of work they have to get done tomorrow. And yet, your company’s productivity and profitability can be traced to the work your employees do day-in and day-out, and all that work should be aligned to the information that’s shared when earnings are released. Pivotal follow-up Seeing the Big Picture Quarterly Calls are the ultimate follow up. In about an hour, our consultants will break down the numbers, cut through the clutter, and help build alignment and increase engagement. There’s no better way to reconnect and recommit participants to what they learned in class. Quarterly Calls are also a great standalone solution where traditional classroom training may not work. On each call we’ll do a quick review of our 5 Business Drivers and share insights into your company’s risks and opportunities.
What We Do
Seeing the Big Picture® eLearning On your LMS Our eLearning solution is designed as an electronic follow-up to our best selling book, Seeing the Big Picture. It continues the business case found in the book and has been designed to deepen a participant’s understanding of business and finance. With nearly two hours of video content and over 75 learning modules, the solution teaches users to build their business acumen and read financial statements. Designed in two parts, our eLearning can be deployed as either a pre- or post-course solution or as a standalone tool for those times when traditional classroom training isn’t an option. Built using Articulate Storyline, our eLearning modules can be easily integrated with your company’s SCORM- or AICCcompliant learning management system. Open Enrollment We’ve partnered with Udemy to bring our best thinking about business to Udemy’s educational marketplace. In a matter of minutes any business professional, from a small business owner to a job seeker, can sign up for our online Udemy course, designed to build business confidence and advance careers. To learn more about our open enrollment course visit: www.seeingthebigpicture.com
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Kevin Cope Kevin Cope is not only a successful executive and keynote speaker, he’s also the author of Seeing the Big Picture, a #1 Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller.
Kevin has delivered keynotes and breakout sessions for some of the most respected and profitable companies in the world, including GE, KPMG, Wal-Mart, and Microsoft. Additionally, Kevin is a top-rated speaker at national conventions, SHRM and ASTD, and he’s been a featured guest and a contributor for popular media outlets such as NPR, Business Insanity Talk Radio, Chief Executive Magazine, HRWest, and Industry Week. Kevin’s ideas and message will resonate with anyone who runs or works for a business.
Acumen Learning
Seeing the Big Picture® Keynotes You’re pulling together an event – you have a message to share and important goals to be reached – and you’re convinced that the best way to get the ball rolling is to get people together where they can influence one another. If you’re going to accomplish your goals, your audience needs to be on the same page, ready to learn, and ready to carry out your agenda long after your event is over. This is the job of a keynote speaker, but an effective keynote speaker is hard to come by. Really, business acumen? We’re not astronauts, former Olympians, or Hollywood stars; so if you’re looking for a typical keynote for a typical event…we’re not going to work. However, if you’re hosting a business or career event and you want to move the needle – get people to take your event seriously – want people to walk away saying, “Wow, that was a great investment of time and money,” call us. Our primary goal is your primary goal. We’ll speak to the objectives of your event and help your audience see the big picture of why they’re there and how your agenda links to their future success. We’re your agenda advocate… we’re not there to push our program, we’re there to push yours, and we’ll tie it to the bedrock principles of business acumen.
What We Do
Aren’t keynotes supposed to be motivating and interesting? Yes, yes, absolutely yes! To some people, there’s nothing about business acumen that sounds remotely motivating or interesting. And that’s probably why we do so well - we take a tough and sometimes uncomfortable topic and turn it into an experience that surprises those people. Businesspeople want to become more effective and more valuable. We all instinctively seek out greater engagement – a way to feel that the work we do is worthwhile and makes a difference. If you want to be in a better position – a job you like more with better pay, better long-term opportunities, and greater security, for example – you need business acumen. Business acumen, in a nutshell, is the path to success in the job you have, and in the career path that takes you where you want to go. Our guarantee If you’re an event planner or committee chair, you might get push back from those looking for an entertainer, but what really counts isn’t the reactions you get when you’re exploring options – it’s the feedback you get from attendees when your event is all over. So if we’re a good fit, and we’ll tell you up front if we are, our guarantee is a great keynote that will deliver better results than any celebrity-turned-motivational-speaker or full-time droner of canned keynotes for any occasion. Our keynotes aren’t going to have the fervor of a revival, but we’re not going to lull people to sleep either. What we will do is inspire and teach people to take action, over and over again, long after your event has ended. And isn’t that what you’re really looking for?
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Sample Speech Topics Seeing the Big Picture Business acumen to build your credibility, career, and company.
Engagement: The $500 Billion Problem and Why You’re the Solution Real strategies for improving employee engagement that drive towards results. World Class for a Reason What the best companies do better than anyone else.
Your Best Salespeople Are Businesspeople Everybody needs to think differently about sales.
How We Do It
How We Do It
Our Approach No games and no lectures Instead of dumbing down your business and spending valuable time teaching people how to play a board game or run a computer simulation, we teach your people substantive things – a deeper understanding of how their company makes money and the skills needed to play a more meaningful role in that money-making process throughout their careers. You’ll find that our competitors will emphasize their vehicle over your destination. An off-the-shelf simulation or game won’t produce a measurable behavioral impact. And if you do decide to open up the coffers to develop a simulation, remember that with every innovation or strategic change your company makes, your expensive simulation becomes more out-of-date. A boring lecture that goes over most people’s heads won’t cut it, either. What does work is our blended approach of Socratic discussion, intuitive models, and hands-on activities that make business and finance interesting, relevant, immediately actionable, and, dare we say, fun. Every course we teach is customized – because every business acumen course should be about getting to the core of your business challenges and developing employees who can uncover and create opportunities, prioritize performance metrics, think creatively about solutions, and make faster decisions that drive measurable results for your business. We’ll take your people way beyond mere financial literacy – we’ll help them connect their jobs to corporate strategy, now and in the future.
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Acumen Learning
Customization Model
Customization Process
Our customization process includes five steps, shown here in a circular model to represent the dynamic and continuous methodology that ensures your course is as relevant as the morning’s headlines.
If we’re going to teach the skills, knowledge, and abilities needed to execute your tactical and strategic initiatives, we can’t just pull a solution out of a can. Our training programs are seamlessly integrated, tailored to your specific needs, scalable, and measurable. Our customization process is designed to uncover your most pressing business issues, priorities, and current realties. All told, your consultant team will typically spend 4-6 days customizing your initial pilot course. Our customization process includes five steps that we’ll continually revisit throughout our partnership to refine our approach and ensure that your business problems are being solved and your expectations are being exceeded. 1. Business Case Every client partnership begins with identifying the core business challenge or problem that we’ve been hired to solve. This ensures that our training is strategic and focused. 2. Research & Interviews The next step is an in-depth study of your company and industry. We listen to earnings calls, scour articles, dig into the numbers, and look for the telltale signs of what’s driving innovation and competitive advantage, what pressures are holding companies back, and what executives are seeing on the horizon. This step includes a series of interviews with internal stakeholders, including a senior finance leader, to develop an understanding of your business from different perspectives in order to assure alignment with financial and executive priorities.
How We Do It
3. Integration & Design Building on the insights gained during the research and interview stage, we work with learning and development leaders to adapt a course outline and integrate our world class content and thought leadership to your situation and needs. We develop participant-centric learning experiences tailored to the targeted audience and the types of business problems they are called upon to solve. So whether it’s a group of salespeople struggling to close more profitable deals or high potentials who need to tie more value to their projects, the audience’s unique challenges will be tackled head on. 4. Delivery The same consultant team that has come to know the ins and outs of your business will facilitate your training. This ensures that your learning experience contains a combination of a fresh outside perspective and an in-depth understanding of your company. 5. Measurement & Optimization To get the most from the delivery phase, we tweak our course based on real-time information. In other words, we never stop customizing. We track your stock, read your press releases, review your earnings, and follow your industry – so that what’s being learned is relevant and up to date. We’ll support your efforts in measuring impact and building an internal success story that maps directly to your business case.
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Follow Through We’re a process, not an event Too often when the class is over, so is the learning. But we all know that most of the real learning happens back at the office, where participants roll up their sleeves and put their new skills to the test. We have carefully formulated our follow-up process to ensure that what is learned in the classroom is not forgotten in the workplace. Our follow-through has been designed to trigger an ongoing bias to act, a spirit of entrepreneurial thinking, a passion for your business, and a business-minded culture that values high performance. ›› Classroom Accountability Partners ›› Manager Review & Debrief ›› The 15 Minute Challenge ›› Navigating the Financials Team Activity ›› Executive Alignment Team Activity ›› Action Plan ›› 7, 30 & 90 Day Facilitator Follow-Up ›› Monthly Team Building Activities ›› Personal Copies of the National Bestseller: Seeing the Big Picture ›› Building Business Acumen Participant Guide ›› Seeing the Big Picture: Quarterly Calls | page 21 ›› Seeing the Big Picture: eLearning | page 22
How We Do It
Corporate Audiences
Even people who can read a financial statement, ironically, may miss the “big picture.” And business acumen is, fundamentally, about the big picture. While some professionals understand numbers, most of them have a hard time connecting the numbers to the projects, decisions, departments, external factors, and innovations that are the real story behind the numbers. Business acumen is the key to any successful learning and development initiative. Without it, individuals can never fully master more conventional business skills like leadership or negotiation. Acquiring business acumen gives the individual a much needed foundation and is critical to the effective practice of any profession, from the front line to the corner office.
Foundational Training
LEADING ORGANIZATIONS LEADING LEADERS LEADING OTHERS
CONVENTIONAL TRAINING
Meeting your critical training challenges at every career stage When we began this endeavor over 12 years ago, it was to meet a severe need to develop business acumen among rank and file front line employees. What we quickly discovered, however, was that business acumen was a gap for most professionals, including some finance specialists and people in senior leadership positions.
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LEADING SELF BUILDING BUSINESS ACUMEN
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Acumen Learning
Professionals and emerging managers Business acumen is often the missing link in learning and development strategies. Even business schools can miss the big picture – they may teach many aspects of business (e.g. accounting, marketing, human resources), but leave these skills specialized and segmented. The result is workers who understand their function, but who are disconnected from the total business. In short, your employees don’t know whether their decisions are good, bad, or indifferent when it comes to the long-term success of the company. Potential Candidates: ›› Front line employees ›› New hires and on-boarding ›› Subject matter experts ›› Professionals with budget or P&L responsibilities ›› Leaders who are in, or are about to take on, their first management role ›› Employees who interface with customers High potentials (HIPOS) More than ever, economic hurdles and marketplace realities demand organizational leadership that is enterprising, innovative, and agile – but that will only take your organization so far. Your future leaders and rising stars need to be respected for their business savvy before the executive tier of your organization will let them loose and trust them with your company’s most important projects and initiatives. Potential Candidates: ›› The Top 3-5% of your talent ›› HIPOS who are being groomed for top leadership roles ›› HIPOS who are taking on responsibilities of increasing importance
How We Do It
Senior leadership We do business in an uncertain and changing world. Senior leadership teams need to not only see the long-term unstoppable trends, but also recognize the short-term volatile trends that may not be as obvious. Senior leaders need to develop an agile culture in which early warning signs are detected and creating innovations and efficiencies to capitalize on uncertainty is a priority. Potential Candidates: ›› Senior leaders and strategists whose work involves enterprise or unit-wide interests ›› Executive leaders from varying disciplines ›› Board of Directors Business diversity and women in leadership Diversity in the workplace is about recognizing the business value generated by diverse perspectives, varied strategies for approaching challenges, and the ability see different opportunities.
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Coca-Cola Women in Leadership “Smart organizations – and those that succeed over the next decade and beyond – will understand that the 21st century is the ‘Women’s Century.’ Women’s economic empowerment and entrepreneurial growth will drive the world’s economy. It’s not a matter of ‘if’ – but rather a matter of ‘to what heights.’ Everyone’s success will be contingent upon women’s success.”1 Muhtar Kent, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, The Coca-Cola Company
Making diversity a business imperative creates a culture that respects differences and values people (both colleagues and customers) who have different personal perspectives. Business acumen training for diverse leaders intertwines these unique perspectives with business fundamentals to create long-term business value. Potential Candidates: ›› Leadership councils based on gender, race, or ethnicity ›› Generational focus on college grads, Millennials, Baby Boomers, or career changers ›› Former military servicemen and women
1. Kent, Muhtar (2010). This Century Goes to the Women. The Huffington Post.
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CPE Credits for CPAs Continuing Professional Education (CPE) is required for CPAs to maintain their professional competence and provide quality professional services.
Acumen Learning’s Building Business Acumen® Group Live and Group Internet Based courses have been accredited by the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA). Participants will earn 7 CPE credits for every day of training completed.
Acumen Learning
Department integration Most business leaders have built their careers in a single area of the company, such as information technology, finance, or operations. These areas, generally known as business functions, are sometimes called chimneys or silos. That’s because most people take their first job at a corporation in one business function and move up within that function as they get promoted, like up through a chimney or silo. Such narrow career tracks tend to create narrow thinking within departments and divisions – which then struggle to be seen as anything other than an overhead cost. The key to integrated business functions is to develop integrators. Integrators are people who see the big picture, tear down silos, and make decisions based on inputs from a wider swath of experts from around the organization, people with the wherewithal to integrate all the parts of a business into a knockout customer experience. Potential Candidates: Professionals in: ›› Sales | page 17 ›› Legal ›› Finance ›› Human Resources ›› Business Development ›› Engineering & Technology ›› Marketing & Communications ›› Production & Product Management
WELLPOINT WellPoint is one of the largest health benefits companies in the United States. Through its network nationwide, the company delivers a number of leading health benefit solutions to more than 65 million people. As of 2013, one in nine Americans receives coverage through WellPoint’s affiliated plans.
The situation
The solution
Why it worked
›› Needed to address the skills gaps of their leaders.
WellPoint partnered with Acumen Learning to develop associates who are: ›› Clear about how WellPoint makes money.
›› Used a talent analytics system to measure program success, which reported a 6% improvement productivity.
›› Aligned with, and focused on, WellPoint’s important business drivers.
›› Saw a measurable increase in manager effectiveness scores from course alumni.
›› Articulate when discussing business strategy and performance metrics.
›› Scheduled quarterly follow-up calls to help make a greater connection between learning objectives and actual business results.
›› Identified multiple training requests as a need for a new competency focused on understanding the company’s operations. ›› Charged with building alignment around a new executive strategy. ›› Wanted to establish learning and development as a valued business partner.
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Acumen Learning
Rolls Royce Graduate Feedback
Next Steps
“Understanding how I can have an impact on the key business drivers was invaluable. Your company knowledge made a tremendous contribution to this course – I actually thought you were a Rolls Royce executive.”
The job of developing business leaders is never really finished. If business acumen isn’t part of the curriculum, the job never really got started – organizations that build their training initiatives on top of a business-savvy culture have an invaluable edge. So whether you need to get your initiative started, or have already started but need better results – our team will be happy to answer your questions and help you determine which format and program work best for you and your organization.
Acumen Learning 801-224-5444 @acumenlearning www.acumenlearning.com www.acumenlearning.com/subscribe
The definitive source for customized business acumen training.
© Copyright Acumen Learning 2015 Acumen Learning 240 North Orem Blvd Orem, UT 84057 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America June 2015 All Rights Reserved Acumen Learning, the Acumen Learning logo and 5 Drivers Business model are trademarks or registered trademarks of Acumen Learning in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other Acumen Learning trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol (® or ™), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by Acumen Learning at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.
