Bits And Pieces, June 18, 2017

First, Happy Father’s Day to all of you who are fathers!  Hope you are taking time away from work and social media to spend time with your families.

Many of you know I’m just finishing the follow up book to Sales Manager Survival Guide  (SMSG).  Where SMSG focused on helping Front Line Sales Managers maximize individual and team performance.  Sales Executive Survival  Guide (SESG) will focus on the top Sales Leadership.  It will help you look at the sales function, it’s fit within the enterprise, and how to drive organizational excellence.

In SESG, we will be looking at how the various components of the sales organization work with each other and with other parts of the organization.  I will be extending the Sales Management Ecosystem introduced in SMSG and drilling down into developing models and frameworks to understand overall performance and to drive performance improvement in the organization.

Key themes will be:

• Understanding and managing complexity.  I think it’s the single biggest organizational issue sales and business executives will face in the coming years.
• Systems and design thinking.
• Complex organizational problem solving
• Leveraging methods like manufacturing and development techniques to analyze and understand performance.

I know many of you have been chomping at the bit to get early drafts of the book.  I’ll have to ask you to be patient just a bit longer.  But there is some reading I think is really important to get you thinking of some of the tools and concepts I’ll be addressing in SESG.

A couple are pretty old, but they remain classics in the are among the best I’ve read in the area of systems thinking and problem solving, plus huge fun to read because of the authors’ writing styles.  You can still find them in Amazon (though you may have to get used copies)

• Management In Small Doses, Russell L. Ackoff
• The Art Of Problem Solving:  Accompanied By Ackoff’s Fables, Russell L. Ackoff
• The Systems Approach, C West Churchman
• The Toyota Way, Jeffrey Liker
• The Lean Startup, Eric Ries

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written a series looking at applying manufacturing thinking/principles to sales.  I’ll look at this in much greater detail in SESG, but for those of you who missed them, here are the links:

• What Sales Can Learn From Lean Manufacturing
• What Sales Can Learn From Lean Manufacturing, Part 2
• What Sales Can Learn From Lean Manufacturing, Part 3
• What Sales Can Learn From Lean Manufacturing, Part 4
• What Sales Can Learn From Lean Manufacturing, Part 5

Finally, for those who haven’t gotten the Sales Management Ecosystem from the SMSG web site, email me for a copy at dabrock@excellenc.com

Thanks, have a great remainder of your weekend!