Meeting the challenges of building Business Acumen
Building business acumen is not a simple task. The best way to really understand how a business works is to run one for a few years. The best way to understand how each function works in a large company is to work for a year or more in each of those functions. While companies like Unilever have for many years rotated people through different functions as a way of developing rounded business people, few companies are likely to start doing this, and even if they did, it would take many years for the strategy to bear fruit. And business acumen depends not simply on having the knowledge, but on having the visceral understanding and ―environmental‖ sensitivity that normally comes only from experience, and which keeps us safe from partially good ideas which could turn dangerous if not well thought through.
Driving business acumen through extended learning