CHAPTER AT A GLANCE

These days if you want your career to motor, you need to be commercially aware. It isn't enough to be good at your job - and, by the way, I'm assuming you are, otherwise you're not even at first base. But that isn't enough. You need to be more. You need to be commercially aware. But what does that mean?

To my mind, commercial awareness has three aspects to it:

• first, it's about people - the people you come across in business, how you get these people to be your clients and how you get the work done that they give you - this is about understanding your clients as people
• second, it's about the businesses these people work in, what their strategies are, how they are organised and the issues they face - this is about understanding your clients as organisations
• third, it's about money, which is both the point of business and what makes it happen - this is about understanding your clients as generators of profit, how money helps them expand and keep score

The only purpose of knowing any of this is so that you can engage with your clients, begin to understand their commercial objectives and the issues they face (as organisations and individuals) and see how whatever it is you supply - whether it's a product or service - helps them achieve their commercial aims and goals. And if you do that and start to identify with your clients, they will love you because you will have their best interests at heart.

So, in short, commercial awareness is about understanding your clients, identifying with them, and helping them achieve their commercial objectives - their strategy. It's about understanding their culture and using their language. This requires an interest in, and liking for, business and what it's about. You don't have to be obsessive about it. But since we spend so much time at work (Mondays to Fridays with only a few weeks off a year), it make sense to be at least a bit interested. And this applies to everyone: these days we all have clients, whether you're the senior partner of a law firm or a bloke in the mailroom, whether your clients are external ('real' clients who pay good money for the work you do) or internal clients (other parts of your organisation). So that is how this book is organised.

First we look at clients as people, how you can relate to them, how to market and sell to them, how to conduct a pitch, how to price and how to negotiate. Then we look at getting your clients' work done: teamworking, delegation, feedback, appraisal, time management, communication and project management. Then we move on to clients as organisations, their strategy (the direction a business is going in), how a business is organised in terms of the different functions and, finally, the big issues they face as the world around us changes. Then in the final part of the book we look at money - at clients as money-making operations that need money to exist, expand and keep the score.

We look at the importance of cashflow, the types of money businesses need, how businesses grow, balance sheets, profit and loss accounts, returns on investment, how they become public companies, take each other over and tap the capital markets. We look at how the financial markets work, at interest rates, inflation, risk management and insurance, and - bringing us bang up to date - the recession and how sub-prime lending caused it.