When we hear the term “business acumen” we often think about business savviness and baseline understanding, which leads to strategies and processes for successful business outcomes, a key characteristic for business leadership.
With business acumen also comes business continuity and resilience, which is defined as “the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company or organization.”
But in addition to prevention and recovery, business continuity is an important focus for an organization to become resistant to failure by having the ability to withstand changes in an ever-changing environment. The bottom line is business resilience is the capability for organizations to either endure environmental changes with minor adjustments or adapt to a new way of working and thinking that better suits the new environmental conditions.
Normally, both business acumen and resilience are acquired and achieved over many years of experience. Learning curves, processes and strategies come with firsthand experience – and are not always easy to attain. It takes time, even years, with much blood, sweat, and tears to attain and conquer those disciplines.
I personally believe at this point in my career, and fortunately with much success in business, I can state I have an exceptional handle on business acumen, continuity, and overwhelming resilience for the ups and down of business. These skill sets did not come without many, many failures – though luckily I’ve had more success than not over 30-plus years in a complex business.
My name is Dr. Christina Rahm. I am a lifelong entrepreneur, a mother of four, a wife, a scientist, a patent innovator, and formulator with many founder and CEO titles under my belt. I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and have worked in a plethora of corporate roles with pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Janssen/Johnson & Johnson, and Bristol-Myers Squibb, to name a few. In a nutshell, I have been around for a while on both the corporate side of business, as well as my many personal business ventures and startups that have evolved into multiple mergers and acquisitions that have transferred into profitable organizations.
With that said, I have always wanted to make a difference in this world by helping people, by supporting individuals and communities through my background in science and humanitarian work. I feel I have a servant’s heart – though having a servant and humanitarian heart make for a perfect storm when it comes to business and business competition. The business world has many hovering sharks trying to often disable the momentum, not to mention the litigious society where we are surrounded by lawsuits filed daily for simply engaging in good faith efforts to compete.
I am thankful for the many years behind me as I have learned, gained, and lost. Fortunately, though, because of my steadfast resilience, I have many years ahead of me to continue to learn, teach, create, and launch businesses that I hope will support and have influence on people’s lives. There is no other option for me but to be consistent and resilient.
Finally, I am thrilled to collaborate, to share much of my history, business journeys and insights with you through this new opportunity with ELYSIAN magazine. Publisher Karen Floyd reached out, introduced herself and wanted an interview for one of my newest ventures, The Root Brands, of which I am a founder, chief scientific officer, and chairman of the board.
As we quickly got acquainted, she requested I write for ELYSIAN’s newsletter to share my business insights. I am excited for this opportunity and look forward to sharing that expertise with the many female entrepreneurs, executives, and businesspeople who can hopefully learn from my stories, accolades, business difficulties, and flat-out failures.
As we all know, success can only be found through the ups, downs, difficulties and disappointments of failure. It is a process.
As we have all heard, it is all about the journey. I am excited to have the opportunity to share this journey with you.