Recently I was delivering a sales enablement session that involved myself “real playing” their upcoming challenging conversations with clients. One critical pieces of feedback I gave was that the sellers needed to really raise their game in the area of business acumen. During a break a couple of participants approached me and asked for recommendations on how they learn more about business.

The obvious answer would be for the company to do a course with myself. I teach business acumen in various ways: via computer simulations, boardgames, case studies and in-house company cases. The work I was delivering was through a global consulting company, so this answer wasn’t appropriate!

The second most obvious answer would be go and do a business qualification. When I switched career in my very early twenties, from mountain guide to corporate, I went and did a Professional Diploma in Management and MBA. This was self funded and done with the OU Business School, the leading global provider of distance learning MBAs. In fact I now work there on the Professional Certificate in Management teaching Marketing & Finance.

The three inexpensive and easier ways to learn that I suggested were:

1) Do a MOOC
There are a range of Massive Open Online Courses on most facets of business.
The resources that I share is Moon-List.com. This is an aggregator of MOOC courses and searches globally the main MOOC providers.

2) Read some business books (or listen to audio books)
Books are an easy way of keeping up to date with leading edge business ideas. For travelling sales professionals audiobooks can be a good option.
For those that are maxed out, there are a range of book summary services. I personally subscribe to Get Abstract.

3)Podcasts
These are a great way of keeping up with what is going on in business and like audio books, can be consumed on the move. Here are five that would provide a good grounding in business:

HBR IdeaCast – https://hbr.org/2018/01/podcast-ideacast
Bloomberg: Masters in Business – https://www.bloomberg.com/podcasts/masters_in_business
Innovation Ecosystem – http://innovationecosystem.com/podcast/
Business Wars – https://wondery.com/shows/business-wars/
The Tim Ferris show – https://tim.blog

I hope these ideas help. What would you recommend? Thanks for reading!