After 18 months of delivering virtual simulation-based Business Acumen programs to more than 5,000 participants, I was astounded by the results and outcomes coming from the High Potential Leader program just completed with a global audience of a specialty equipment manufacturing company.

What astounded me was the level of efficiency from the team of 4 representing four different functions within the business spread out over 3 different continents. When I talk about “efficiency”, I am referring to the ability of this one team of leaders to finish their learning experience, mainly a business simulation exercise where they were running their own business, in about 75% of the time allocated and with spectacular results. Most teams we work with run out of time because they don’t yet have the discipline to avoid analysis paralysis.

In all my years of conducting similar training programs, I have never seen anything like this. After the program was over, I set up an interview with the team to try to discover what made them so special and unique. What they shared are very valuable lessons of leadership development and business strategy execution.

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 It is the hardest questions that participants ask during a Business Acumen learning journey where we teach strategic thinking and financial management skills. “We just created our winning aspiration and strategy for our simulated company, but how do we know what financial metrics to choose and follow so we know if we are achieving success?”

The first and most obvious response is that it depends on the winning aspiration you are choosing to execute. In business, there are only three different aspirations or value propositions a company can choose and all the research shows that the most successful companies are the ones that choose one value proposition, stick with it, and execute it flawlessly.

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Is it me, or has the number of unsolicited moronic emails and cold calls that we get every day reached a fever pitch? Over the past several months it feels like it is accelerated to a desperate level as too many vendors and “salespeople” are panicking to make something happen, but in fact are just making it worse.

I did an analysis over the past month and was horrified to realize that the longest I have gone in a day without an unsolicited voice mail or email is 34 minutes. And I have my spam filters on both my email and phone turned up to the maximum!

The reality is that these bad vendors are getting both more sophisticated and stupid at the same time. By sophisticated, they are leveraging digital tools and figuring out ways of setting up automated workflows and getting through the spam filters into the inbox. By stupid, I am referring to the dozens of poorly written emails that we are inundated with every day. How is this one for mind-blowing stupidity (I swear this is real and total unedited except for the person’s name):

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Anyone with access to the internet has seen the pictures of the cargo ship that ran aground  and blocked the Suez Canal for almost a week. Another in a seemingly non-stop series of issues that have included a year-long global pandemic, terrible seasonal weather, container shortages, earthquakes, fires, and tsunamis that has caused havoc on the global supply chain.

As we come to the end of the 1st quarter 2021, the global supply chain has taken a beating and business leaders with strong Business Acumen are already looking ahead and planning to create competitive advantage.

At Advantexe, we have the privilege of working with more than 50 global clients across a dozen different industries and we are seeing and hearing about some of the unique challenges that are being faced.

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I shared a secret that I probably shouldn’t have. To commemorate the retirement of one of my most favorite people and one of our best clients ever, I told the story of the “Donna Scale.”

The Donna Scale refers to the way many companies have worked with Donna Torelli who is retiring this week from her role as VP & Executive Director of a great company called Greene Tweed.

I first met Donna in the early 1990’s when we were both early in our careers. I was helping to grow our business simulation business and Donna was willing to give us a chance to help build the business acumen and leadership skills of high potential leaders at Rhone Poulenc Rorer which turned into Aventis, which was eventually bought up by Sanofi. For an incredible 10-year run, we built an amazing curriculum of Business Acumen and Business Leadership programs and working with Donna was an absolute pleasure. Around 1999, we worked together to deliver 5 different types of development programs to different levels of audiences and touched the lives of about 5,000 leaders during that time including many high potentials, some of whom are current CEOs of large companies!

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