Back in 2008, I attended a 2 days training, the lead speaker is the one who transform BCA from nearly its bankruptcy in 1999, into the biggest bank in Indonesia. He is now hired as a special advisor to Bank Mandiri’s Board of Directors. His credentials are massive, his achievements are undisputed, but he is so low profile and humble that he keeps contacting his dear students like myself up until this moment, just to talk about things from personal life to professional life. I am lucky to have a life teacher like him.
And throughout the exciting training, the thing that I remembered most is the session of “The Importance of Having Business Acumen”. What is business acumen? Why is it so important to have? Why should every knowledge worker like us the consultants must adapt to this requirement? In the book “Flawed Advice and the Management Trap” by Chris Argyris, consultants are often criticized for overuse of buzzwords or fancy titles, and a failure to develop plans that are executable by the client. A number of similar critical books about management consulting argue that the mismatch between management consulting advice and the ability of business executives to actually create the change suggested results in substantial damages to existing businesses.
What was all that means? It means that most clients are hardly understand consultants’ deliverable due to its complexity and sophistication, and once the consultants are gone, the deliverables will be useless. In the mean time, we can do much better if we have business acumen skill. Business acumen is a logical thinking, a common sense you may say, to measure whether one solution will be impacted to client’s daily business process. It is an alarm to notify whether our deliverable is too corny or too cocky, is it making any sense in client’s perspective or just ours? It’s a tactical tool to balance between your intelligence and client’s expectation.
Have we ever gone through our slides by standing in client’s shoes? How our slides should be not just understandable, but also useful and applicable? We are hired by our clients for our brains, that is no doubt. But yet again, intelligence means also the ability to transfer your tacit (inside your head) knowledge into explicit (written) knowledge, so that the client can absorb your knowledge into know-how (the ability to implement), so then they can execute the solution independently. Business acumen skill will be your guidance in determining whether the slides are making any business sense or just blabber nonsense.
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