Sometimes, concepts of Business Acumen can seem really straightforward, and other times they can seem very complex. Inventory management is one of those concepts that seems fairly easy to grasp but in practicality, it is a complex and critical science that can make or break a business.

I’ve been facilitating an awesome high-potential leader program for a client who manufactures large and expensive B2B equipment. They design and sell superior, high-quality products to their customers and one of the issues that has bubbled up for some great learning is inventory management. Part of the learning journey involves a customized business simulationand they have learned a lot about operations including inventory management.

Some of the key learnings have centered around:

• How much inventory should we have?
• How do we optimize our supply chain?
• What do our customers care about?
• Are there benchmarks for our industry?

All of these are very important questions and there are some foundational answers.

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Business is hard.

Shareholder expectations border on the impossible.

The next generation of employees has changed the paradigm of work.

These are just three of an infinite number of challenges faced by today’s business leaders. But if there is one thing we all know to be a universal truth is that by building skills and developing talent you can solve every challenge that comes your way.

So why aren’t businesses looking to spend more time on effective training that will lead to the skills that will solve the challenges they face? The answer, unfortunately, resides in some cauldron of ingredients that include smaller budgets, less time available, and a reluctance to go to more crappy, non-effective training that they have purchased and are remorseful for.

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The business simulation Teams were more excited and prepared than I have experienced in quite some time. Today was Board of Directors Presentations Day, and the Empowering Leaders who have spent the last month further developing their Business Acumen and Business Leadership skills as part of a virtual and immersive simulation-centric experience.

The presentations were excellent and I truly appreciated the great job of keeping the presentations strategic and at the enterprise level; all skills they are going to need as they move to the next level. The team that performed the best in the simulation shared some insights in their wrap-up that I thought were worth sharing with our subscriber base.

When summarizing their key learnings, they shared that by choosing and sticking to their strategy they all felt aligned with their aspirational purpose, and they were able to have more clarity, more confidence, and ultimately more cash flow.

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It’s hard to ignore The Wall Street Journal article with the headline about more big layoffs in 2024. What’s also hard to ignore are the mixed messages about the job market and what they mean to your business in the short-  and long-term.

As we all know by now, the job market data indicates a very robust job market with unemployment remaining surprisingly low. I blogged a few weeks ago on the December data that caught a lot of people off guard and has many worried that there are not enough good people to fill all the job openings.

But at the same time, Google, Amazon, Citigroup, Ebay, Macy’s, Microsoft, Salesforce, Sports Illustrated, and Xerox are just a few of the big companies laying off hundreds of thousands of employees. So what gives? Are things good? Are they bad? And what does the ultimate decider to the answer to that question – Wall Street – think?

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It has been very interesting to watch the mindset trends of learners going through foundational business acumen simulations that are focused on building individual and company business savvy over the past six months.

In many of Advantexe’s core business acumen simulations, learners are presented with a portfolio of products and services that mimic real-world situations. At the most basic level, many companies have mature products, growth products, and new products. One of the most important decisions when you are playing to win is how you will manage the portfolio in terms of investments, resources, and time to optimize performance (revenue, profit, cash flow, and shareholder value).

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