While sales is and will always be a human endeavor and as much art as science -- intuition and acumen obviously play an important role -- the introduction of predictive analytics into the sales process is a game-changer on par with Wall Street's embrace in recent years of quants, the math geniuses now considered indispensable to investment banks and hedge funds in forecasting market behavior.
Business acumen and skill are not reliably hereditary.
James Kassaga Arinaitwe, global fellow, Acumen, Bangalore, India, @JamesArinaitwe Stop neglecting science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM): Providing tertiary education in technical fields can be significantly more costly than social sciences, forcing cash-strapped public education institutions to reduce expansion in this area.
They don't require tremendous diagnostic acumen or technical skill.
Smith developed some of his business acumen in his gap year after studying political science at Carleton University in Ottawa, when he apparently set himself up as a black-market currency trader in Budapest at the time of the fall of Soviet communism.
Succeeding in science for our generation requires not only brains but business acumen, good people skills, and vision.
Armed with degrees in physics, journalism, and political science, combined with strong organizational skills, an interest in technology, and political acumen, Mahajan rose quickly within the BJP from its inception in 1980.
Her latest book, "Absence of Mind," reviewed in this week's magazine, is a collection of lectures on science and religion that "makes canny use of Robinson's genre-bending acumen, sleekly harmonizing the forms of philosophical disquisition, caustic polemic, and becalming sermon".
With such business acumen, Pell is well-credentialled to offer a view on climate science and climate change.
The Obama campaign's acumen around analytics became the subject of a popular book on the new science of campaigns, while Romney's 2012 campaign was widely derided for the clumsy rollout of its Orca app for campaign workers.
