Business Skills

Core business skills benefit employees at all levels. The Harvard ManageMentor resources below will help build a solid foundation to aid in your personal development. Use these resources to learn new skills, expand on existing skills or refresh concepts you may not have had cause to use in some time.

Harvard ManageMentor Topics

Budgeting

Understand what budgets are and why they matter. Develop operating budgets reflecting your group’s near-term goals and operations, and create capital budgets for longer-term critical investments you want to make for your group. Use sensitivity analysis to explore “what-if” scenarios and to test the assumptions in your budgets. Deploy variance analysis to understand budget shortfalls and to make course corrections. Grasp “the big picture” of budgeting—by learning how forward-looking organizations are integrating budgeting with strategy and planning processes to ensure their competitive strategies are executed as planned and deliver the expected results.

Business Case Development

Understand the difference between a business case and a business plan. Learn the process for creating a strong business case: defining the opportunity, exploring options, analyzing alternatives, assessing risks, creating an implementation plan, and presenting your case to stakeholders. Includes tips for productive brainstorming sessions and effective presentations.

Customer Focus

In today’s business climate, it’s not enough to offer excellent products or services. Competitive advantage lies in how an organization continuously creates value for its customers. Understand how to use customer knowledge to deliver additional value and ultimately boost profitability. Learn how to build a customer-focused organization, in which everyone plays a role in serving the needs of actual and potential customers. Take away tips for increasing innovation throughout the organization and boosting employee satisfaction.

Feedback Essentials

Harness the power of feedback. Learn how to give fair, effective feedback. Explore the common reasons people fear feedback and ways to make your team more receptive to it. Finally, discover ways you can seek and use feedback to improve your performance.

Marketing Essentials

Help your team learn the basics of marketing so they better serve customers inside and outside your company. Discover the forces that influence buying, how to conduct customer research, and how to create an effective marketing strategy. Includes tools to create a marketing plan.