Acumen in Action
(Formerly Building Value and Driving Profits)
COURSE OUTLINE
- Learning from successful organizations
- Developing your business strategy
- Introduction to the business simulation
- Applying the techniques
- Know what to measure and how to measure it
- Identify the measures to be planned and monitored
- Set measures that cascade through the organization
- Achieve a balanced scorecard
- Developing your competitive advantages
- Model how your company or business unit value chain works
- Focus on competitive advantage
- Measure value creation
- Build a customer-centric organization
- Understand and focus on what customers value
- Learn customer segmentation basics
- Analyzing the financial results
- Use financial information to make more effective decisions
- Analyze effective management of working capital
- Learn value added financial and operational measures
- Business unit alignment with the organization
- Examine measures of productivity
- Develop measures of financial contributions
- Explore measures by customer, product, service, or business unit
- Make multi-faceted business decisions
- Align multiple functional areas effectively
- Link operational decisions and financial results
- Drive initiatives throughout your organization
What characteristics differentiate successful organizations from those that are not as successful, or those that fail? How have some organizations adapted to continued success while other “great” organizations fell on hard times? What can we learn from this?
One of your challenges will be to develop corporate strategy from which you align your organization’s various business units and performance measures. Ensure that you are building your organization around what your customer values. You receive continual feedback from your management team, the market, and your shareholders.
During the business simulation, you and your teammates will be responsible for managing multiple functional areas of a fictional $100 million company over a period of several years in an increasingly complex business environment. You make decisions about product, pricing, promotion and sales force, new product rollouts, production, labor vs. capital investment, and capital structure.
Each decision-making round delves deeper into the understanding and application of the techniques.
Use business acumen to truly acquire a instinctive business behavior…
- Clearly understand why your customers choose to do business with you
- Ensure your pricing is consistent with your business strategy and customer expectations
- Limit risk exposures and achieve optimum returns with appropriate financial structuring
- Evaluate your organization in light of your industry and competitors
- Recognize the interrelated chain of events between decisions and organizational results
- Sharpen your business acumen—understand how your company makes a profit so you can make decisions back at the office that are on strategy and have a collaborative, organizational focus
Why we choose Capstone®
Capstone, the world’s best-selling business simulation, accelerates your learning because hands-on practice is proven to be one of the most powerful ways people learn. In our small classroom setting, your retention is boosted further by drawing from multiple successful teaching techniques—reading, writing, group discussion, team interaction, hands-on practice and case studies—plus immediate and interactive analysis of the cause-and-effect results.
Throughout the simulation, you’ll focus on decision making. This lets you experience strategy, tactics and policy within different business areas, including production, accounting, marketing, finance, quality control, human resources and management.
If you practice a hobby and train for a sport, how do you prepare for business?
Consider these four compelling reasons to attend “Acumen in Action”:
- Hands-on learning. Simulations exist because people learn best by doing. Hands-on learning is the most powerful educational tool you can use, second only to risky on-the-job training. In this course, you’ll face real-life business situations and must react to customers and competition. Just as at your organization, this dynamic business scenario changes every virtual year as the marketplace evolves and competition builds.
- Shared knowledge and experiences. You and your teammates will work with a business coach who critiques your team’s performance, offers suggestions and challenges your basic assumptions. You’ll also absorb valuable insights and perspectives from your team members, who are often from dissimilar industries and functional positions.
- Teamwork. Like cross-functional teams at your own organization, you’ll work closely with your team throughout the course, making decisions together and relying on each other. This collaborative approach gives you all practice viewing obstacles from a higher-level organizational angle, not solely a departmental one. Also, this team environment provides support in helping you through functional areas or topics potentially unfamiliar to you.
- Real-world application. First, learn through expert, instructor-led briefings with discussions of best practices at successful organizations. Then, as a group, you and your teammates will compare and contrast what happened in each team’s simulation with what has similarly happened to well-know corporations…and learn how to avoid the same mistakes back at your workplace.
Schedule
Evening before course — 5:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. Optional dinner for those arriving early
Days 1 and 2 — 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Session
Day 3 — 8:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. Session
The University of Wisconsin–Madison, as a member of the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA), authorizes this course for 2.0 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) or 20 hours.
gsrenaski@exed.wisc.edu