You Can't Learn Street Smarts

This is the art of business acumen: linking an insightful assessment of the external business landscape with the keen awareness of how money can be made — and then executing the strategy to deliver the desired results.

--Ram Charan

The latest and last edition of The Sopranos arrived this week and so did the spring 2006 Strategy + Business from Booze Allen Hamilton. This happy juxtaposition of events led me to see strategy in a somewhat altered light.

Take the article titled, "Sharpening Your Business Acumen," by Ram Charan.

Booze Allen Hamilton describes this as "A six-step guide for incorporating external trends into your internal strategies." In some quarters that might be read as: "How to learn street smarts." Step 1, for example, is to ask yourself "What is happening in the world today?" Tony (in a sarcastically pedantic mood) might have said, "What you need to develop here is some situational awareness." Or take Step 6 -- asking "What do we do next?" Tony might have said, "Okay, so can you guys get real for a second?"

I don't know why some people have street smarts and others don't, but I don't think it's something you learn after, oh, say the age of 10. It involves a predisposition to take risks aggressively without being careless, and an innate ability to see patterns where others don't. I think the fact that these "steps" are posed as questions instead of explicit guidelines tacitly acknowledges that point. And, by the way, I don't think real leaders "iterate" -- they learn from their mistakes and move on -- translation: forgetta about it.