What is business acumen?
Business acumen is keen, fundamental, street smart insight into how your business operates and how it makes money and sustains profitable growth, now and in the future.
Developing business acumen helps us cut through the complexity, get a bird’s eye view of a business and understand our specialized roles within it.
Kevin Cope’s new book, SEEING THE BIG PICTURE: Business Acumen to Build Your Credibility, Career, and Company (Greenleaf Book Group Press, March 2012) enables everyone, business leaders and employees alike to build more profitable companies. A must read if you seek success at your business.
This is a must-have reference book for all entrepreneurs – a meaningful and helpful educational material which eventually becomes a valuable resource – to be referred to now and many times over. You’ll find valuable insights throughout the book in well cited examples on how the now successful companies have used opportunities and efficient vision to their competitive advantage.
The basics or the foundation of building a company are always the same, more or less – the success factors however depend on how you use your business acumen to ensure sustainable growth. Are you among the knowledgeable, diligent and insightful few who are aware of the key strategies to create a sustainable organization – by seeing the bigger picture?
“Cash is the fuel that drives a business. Without cash, a business can’t pay its bills, can’t pay its employees, can’t buy the goods it needs to produce the products or services it sells…. Companies that have strong cash positions, good profit margins, and asset strength have the foundation to support growth both in the short-term and long-term.”
The book enlightens us through a series of examples on how fortune 500 companies and other organizations with amazing progressive culture have taken the leaps to success, building a sustainable brand and customer loyalty. Your business acumen truly enables you to have an edge above the “also-ran” and “launched-but-never-really-took-off” few. And not only entrepreneurs; any CEO, manager or employee can use this know-how to help build a financially strong and culturally sound workplace.
If you and your company understand the importance of the 5 Key Drivers – cash, profit, assets, growth, and people – you know that you have a strong foothold even in a stormy recession. This book can help everyone, from the factory floor to the executive suite, grasp the big picture: how these five drivers interact to build great companies. In SEEING THE BIG PICTURE, Cope not only explains how these drivers operate, but how they work together and are impacted by everyone in the organization.
“The balance sheet is a financial snapshot taken at the end of a month, quarter, or fiscal year. Everything you do to impact cash, profits, and assets influences your balance sheet.”
Part 2 of the book is dedicated to simplifying the financial statements through the 5 drivers. I’ve never been enlightened better on seeing the big picture of the financials before than I did through this book. Covering the basics and details of a company’s financials – this book proves to be an essential learning tool which you perhaps missed out at school – this sure is an MBA in less than 180 pages!
“Remember, growth is the key.” – Kevin Cope in Seeing the Big Picture
How are you growing?
Kevin Cope is President and CEO of Acumen Learning. He is a trusted resource and confidant to business leaders from around the world and a sought-after keynote speaker. For over twenty-five years, Kevin has promoted the idea that the brightest minds in business understand the essence of how a company makes money, and they use this knowledge to drive their decisions. These people have business acumen, and you’ll find them everywhere from the factory floor to the corner office.
In 2002, Kevin founded Acumen Learning, a training company that teaches his five key drivers model to some of the world’s most respected and successful organizations. Kevin’s specialty is teaching employees how to speak the language of business as fluently as they speak the language of their department or function. Kevin believes that people who exercise their business acumen are able to see the big picture, and maker better, smarter, and faster business decisions that drive sustainable and profitable growth.
