The business world has never been more competitive.

According to a recent survey of CEOs and marketing executives, over seventy-five percent of the new products and services introduced are not successful from a return on investment (ROI) perspective.

In addition, executives at two-thirds of the companies surveyed indicated it is significantly more difficult to introduce a new product or service today than it was a decade ago.

If a company is to have long-term success in this highly competitive environment every individual contributor, manager and executive must acquire or significantly increase their business skills.

The time when professionals can just be “specialists” or “managers” is gone; everyone also must be a “business person” with the associated analysis and decision making skills because every professional in a company makes business decisions and even minor decisions can have major consequences in today's environment.

In support of this requirement for success, Tom Peters, author of Liberation Management quotes Ralph Stayer, CEO of Johnsonville Corporation and Roger Smith, President of Silicon Valley Bank: “we are indeed trying to business everyone: to turn all employees into real whole business persons...”

Consequently, if everyone understands the “rules” of the business “game” and the financial statements that are used to keep “score,” they can improve their analysis and decision making skills and thereby increase their contribution toward preempting the competition.

An analogy is that offensive football players could not play up to their potential if they did not understand both offensive and defensive schemes and techniques, and vice versa.