Access to Opportunities

Why Professional Acumen is important to Growth toward Success

Globally, for all of humanity, why is expressing Professional Acumen important?  Everyone must have a healthy brain, and also the practiced experience to consistently express Professional Acumen; but why?
Consistently expressing Professional Acumen:

  • promotes shared respect within social groups
    • family, workplace, political groups, friends…
  • builds self-respect and self-esteem (these are different)
    • makes a person more useful as a team member
  • develops the skills needed to predict consequences
    • allows a person to see impending risks
      • if a person cannot see the risks, they repeatedly make the same mistakes and have recurring failures
    • allows a person to choose a better path to success
  • provides the ability to see gaps in a process towards a goal
    • provides the practiced experience in teaching one’s self what needs to be done to fill those gaps, with one’s own efforts, and/or by a team member
  • ….
    • the list of benefits goes on and on
  • Being part of a team that is able to Consistently express Professional Acumen allows a person to with reasonable accuracy to Predict the Future, and choose pathways that Creates the Future Desired

All Opportunities have risks and values. Professional Acumen allows us to choose which opportunities:

  • are in our best interests to pursue
  • to avoid because they create risks for other goals we have, or
  • to defer until we have the resources and skills to assure expected outcomes

Professional Acumen allows us to better anticipate gaps needing to be filled, to assure outcomes, to earn trust, to earn respect. When chosen well, those outcomes create additional access to resources and related additional opportunities; more than before. Growth. Significantly reducing the impact and likeliness to occur of diverse risks, diversely protecting our future from harm. Trending towards success.
Success REQUIRES keeping what we earn. So we have more resources (skills, funds, trust, self-esteem…) to engage more significant opportunities with others who themselves have developed resources.  Those who have demonstrated they are worthy of offering the opportunity to earn respect.

Developing a Reputation

A broadly trusted person takes significant risks to offer a significant opportunity to an untrustworthy person, or to a person without experience.  A “related” good reputation in the skills needed to engage the opportunity.
Offering significant opportunities to unqualified persons is most often bad judgement; a significant risk that is likely to fail or do harm.
Reputation should be based on evidence and not hearsay. Professional References, References from Trusted Associates of those people we want to engage, Verifiable Performance Reports from meaningful sources, a Portfolio with examples of work…
Each person needs to build an Evidence Based Reputation.
Getting verifiable training, verifiable experience, verifiable attribution of meaningful respect.
Very often those promoted in administration are less knowledgeable, have no passion for the company mission, and instead curry favor socially.  These promotions harm the company.  Respect requires logical skills, social acumen, and emotional predictability. These corruptly promoted managers harm themselves because they trap themselves into largely useless positions where they are micromanaged; dispensable.  They have not developed the skills they need to be able to work competently elsewhere.  They must take a significant demotion to find employment elsewhere, because their foundation for promotion was social.  As a result their self-respect and self-esteem suffers; often crippling them emotionally.  They become Arrogant.
We struggle to take on more challenging opportunities, and we therefore need a more developed and significant reputation.

Protecting Reputation by Managing Risks

Risk management REQUIRES “learning from others, or learning from unfortunate experiences” to be able to see risks and create support to minimize those risks in the future:

  • Identify (perspectives needed to see the risks)
  • Validate(reasonable evidence the risks are significant and not just imagined)
  • Characterize (similar to other kinds of risks & related resolutions)
  • Quantify (likeliness to occur & level of impact)
  • Organize (create processes for implementation)
  • Correlate (relate risks to effective solutions)
  • Prioritize (based on creating needed resources), and
  • Manage Risks (take action, implement, create solutions that can be sustained)

Seems like an unreasonable amount of work?  We do this every day, every time we walk up an escalator and choose whether or not to hold the moving hand rail. We drive a car and are evaluating the tons of steel in constant motion around us. The more practice we have, the more control we have over risks we have identified.
Working usefully within a group broadly decreases un-managed and poorly managed risks. This is the foundation for ETHICS.
Driving Classes teach us to recognize risks, and to hone our driving skills to reduce the likelihood of unseen risks causing diverse kinds of accidents.  Yet in parking lots, we willingly back out of our spaces and “hope” someone else isn’t backing out at the same time. The person in your blind spot, where you are also in their blind spot, moving at 2 mph being more of a risk than the car driving 10 mph who can see you. We by far trust other people, more than we trust luck (uncontrolled risks). The greatest risks come from not being able to see; not being able to anticipate.
Professional Acumen allows us to act on needed priorities without self-deception. Deception is a tool to deceive, ourselves and others.  To achieve a short term goal ……… most often with long term undesired consequences.
Example:
The convenience store robbery, or joy riding in a stolen car, are examples of crippling lack of common sense. The desired result is to obtain money and/or respect of buddies.
The thought being that succeeding in a high risk effort earns respect. Like the race car driver, football player, or other glorified entertainment specialist.
Glorified means:  represented in such a way as to appear more elevated or special
However, entertainment specialists effectively manage risks to ensure outcomes build additional opportunities without creating additional “unmanaged risks”. A football player effectively blocking a receiver is no accident; they taught themselves practiced skills to avoid luck, to avoid un-managed risks. Entertainment specialists are not Lucky, they actively manage their life, and the opportunities that will be offered to them. They earn respect by minimizing the need for luck.
The thief learns to express Arrogance, the loathing of others.  They express this in their voice inflections and body language. For people skilled in Self-Respect, they avoid engaging in opportunities with Arrogant people. Unless the Arrogant person is involved in corruption, and the person skilled in Self-Respect must engage them for the benefit of the organization purposes they represent.

Arrogance is the opposite of Self-Respect

Arrogant people do not know how to share respect, and they tend to be incompetent; so they are tolerated. Unless Arrogant people are taught the skills of earning respect (Professional Acumen), they will consistently harm the organizations growth.
If the intent is to build self-respect, a person needs to learn how to usefully express self-respect. This is learned by finding out what a large group desires and teaching one’s self knowledge and skills in support of those group desires. Incremental efforts lead to incremental accomplishments, and incremental building of trust. Accurate and insightful expression of the risks and having developed the skills to minimize those risks (our actual capacity to contribute to group desires) earns us trust. Willful deceptive interactions block building additional trust (Demonstrated Unreliability, evidence).
Therefore, if self-respect is desired, any effort that contradicts developing evidence of earned trust, is a waste of time.  Any willful deception is an act to confuse evidence; deception of others or self-deception.
Deception is the foundation of waste, fraud, and abuse.  An act to avoid teaching one’s self to support a useful effort is the foundation of Arrogance. Deception and Arrogance are the foundations of Corruption. Corruption broadly kills passion and building growth opportunities.
Significant Low-risk opportunities are only shared with broadly trusted associates.  Trusted in their expression of logic/skills, trusted socially, and trusted emotionally; persons capable of “shared respect”; Professional Acumen.

Corruption kills Broad Growth

Corruption promotes sharing high risk opportunities that usually fail

  • Most often set up to fail; like a robbery. Likely going to be caught, damage the participants reputation, and mark them as both incompetent and untrustworthy among people that have control over significant opportunities to allocate.

or insignificant opportunities

  • Akin to Slavery.  Just enough reward to placate the participant, but no significant opportunity to grow; like working under corrupt administration where loyalty to an administrator is more important than competence.  In a corrupt administration (Administrative Mafia), a segment of management abuses company resources to benefit themselves instead of the company mission.  They work less, without passion to support the company mission, and cripple the structure needed to build passion among subordinates.  Overall company growth suffers.

Theft is known to cause an active act by others to stop them, and to label them socially. To label them as being unworthy of trust, and unworthy of respect. Unworthy of being offered opportunities where being worthy of respect labels a person to be trusted with a significant opportunity.  Worse, these mindless acts unreasonably impacts other goals, the thought process requires loathing others to unjustly take from them so sharing respect is not learned, and significant opportunities are not offered, and the actual outcomes are insignificant, and cannot be sustained. The convenience store robbery most often supports self destructive activities that prevent them from gaining the self-respect and self-esteem they seek.
Often, a person who is WEAK in expressing Professional Acumen, will ignore reason, make no attempt to identify gaps in reasoning, make no attempt mitigate or avoid the risks they do see, and accept high risks for failure because they cannot reason a pathway involving less risks.
Accepting high risks while expecting unreasonable benefits is a gambler’s mentality. Probability always catches up in the end.  If the odds are not in your favor, ultimately you lose.  Professional Acumen allows for changing the system in play to shift the odds in your favor. Cheating luck by ethically rigging the system.
Casinos have unethically rigged the games so they most often win. Professional Acumen would either cite that they are paying for the joy and they do not expect to win, or they would invest in any number of other things that have better outcomes.  Arbitrarily choosing a different stock to invest in on the stock market each week has a greater return on investment than gambling at casinos.  Also investing time into training related to future goals, similarly provides a greater return on investment.

Lack of Professional Acumen supports Great Harm

People who do not consistently express Professional Acumen are easily incited into pursuing insignificant opportunities; even risking the lives of their family on unjustified expectations.
Not having strong skills in Professional Acumen allows others to manipulate our feelings based upon unreasonable expectations. Politicians, Advertising, Racism, and Corruption, all use human weakness to manipulate perceived value, while obscuring the actual risks taken by involvement.
Globally and Individually, we must AVOID engaging opportunities that are high in risk and/or that provide insignificant return on investment. Poor planning results in poverty, and harming one’s future opportunities.
We NEED to engage in opportunities that are low-risk controlled processes that provide significant returns on investment. Systems of these activities form businesses, retirement planning, reasonable security for the family, future low-risk significant opportunities.

Physical disabilities like alcohol fetal syndrome, genetic disorders, brain injury and other circumstances not within our control, prevents being “able” to consistently express Professional Acumen. Similarly, chemical induced mental obstructions like drug addiction, industrial chemicals, and malnutrition, and other circumstances we can control, obstruct normal brain functions.  In a study, over 54% of all inmates used marijuana within 48 hours of getting caught and put in jail. Marijuana doesn’t necessarily make a person criminal, more likely it makes them unable to see the gaps leading to the consequences of their actions.

See  Loss of a once bright mind

Choosing to Live between Ethics and Anarchy

The following textual graphic shows relationships that provide for being offered low-risk significant opportunities.

Corruption destroys diversity, of both people and eco-systems. Creating conditions supporting plague-like conditions causing extinctions of cultures, business opportunities, and life; destroying the future of our descendants, our legacy. Competing coalitions of corruption debase humanity and eco-systems to benefit a few, minimally providing for its supporting members, at the expense of the vast many, and the vast many not yet born.
Peoples of nations expressing Professional Acumen promotes an underlying principle to not only sustain humanity, but to cause humanity to flourish with purpose.

“To actively promote that which benefits most, to sustain the greatest diversity of life, and diversity of culture; to include future consequences.”

A person who is working with others who harms the outcome of a group effort, incurs disdain from the group. Future opportunities will not be of the same significance as would be offered if consistently contributing to achieving desired outcomes. Access to significant future opportunities depends upon consistently expressing Professional Acumen.
Therefore, learning to teach common sense globally, builds additional resources and opportunities, and related minds capable of usefully participating in their developments. Learning to Teach Professional Acumen contributes to global development of new significant opportunities, providing the world with significant access to opportunities.

Concept: Present Choices destroying Past Opportunities

People of limited broad experience often think it does not matter what choice they make, that their future access to opportunities is not affected by the choices they make now.  Thinking they will make up for their bad choices later.
These short-sighted people say it’s not their concern to think of the future of other people.
However, with certainty, humans will come to be able to manipulate things in the past. Experiments in physics already manipulate the past. So likely a person that harms the future will have their life manipulated to only make insignificant opportunities available to them. By choosing to be destructive, is then an act of destroying your own access to present opportunities.

Implementing Professional Acumen

Developing anything requires some skill in Project Management. Implementing project management depends upon Efficient Learning Skills; that are assisted by Research Tips & Tricks. To be a valuable part of a group to usefully choose information and skills to learn and share with the group, requires Professional Acumen. To prevent others who want to abuse group resources for their own agendas, skills related to Recognizing Corruption are required; and subsequently what to do to prevent Sustained Corruption.
Growth of group power and influence requires developing a powerful mutually sustaining group.  Where member weaknesses are recognized without condescension (Arrogance) nor self-deceit (lack of Self-Respect) and the group together prevents significant harm to the group; all members have weaknesses.  Together the group determines a reasonable set of goals, and each member teaches themselves additional skills to support achieving those goals. Demonstrated success creates a reputation of perceived trust in the group and its members.  A bad reputation of an individual affects the reputation of the group.  So perceived value of the group depends upon training the individual members.
Other persons or groups with control over under-utilized resources, tend to offer access to those resources where there is trust additional under-utilized resources can be developed more than they currently control.  The group must be able to show evidence of being a low-risk significant resource for development.
During development, others outside the group who appear to be worthy of Access to Opportunities to earn respect, are provided an opportunity to teach themselves related to a low-risk low-value project benefiting the group. Failure does not significantly harm the group; depending on many factors the person may be trained or excluded from the group. Success means providing the person a higher risk but more significant opportunity to develop. The person learns to mitigate higher risks, by sharing risks with others in the group (mentoring). As a result, a long string of successes benefits both the group and each individual.
A person without Professional Acumen, cannot usefully participate in development, so they are either used a placeholders to implement some form of control, or they are taught to “consistently” express Professional Acumen so they can learn to become a useful part of developments.