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Making A Difference – Thoughts, Observations and Opinions
This is Dave Brock’s Blog.
It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic. My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
Latest Posts
“…..More Than A Job….”
I’m reading General Stanley McChrystal’s book, On Character. A sentence stood out, “During my career, the Army was more than a job—it was a life choice.” Coincidentally, I read another fascinating article from Alex McCann, The death of the corporate job. They are approaching the same issue, but coming at it from opposite directions. They are both focused in finding meaning in what we do. For McChrystal a large part of it was in his “corporate job.” For McCann, it’s outside that corporate job. The corporate job is just a platform enabling people to find meaning in other places. It […]
It Isn’t Just Buying That’s Hard…
There’s been huge amounts of very good research on the how hard buying is. We’ve learned about regret, FOMO, FOMU, abandoned buying efforts. I’ve contributed thousands of words in articles focusing on the difficulty buyers have in buying. But let’s look at this differently. It isn’t just buying that’s hard, all project/change work is hard. Just look within your own organizations and the major change projects, particularly those cross functional initiatives. The majority of these projects fail! It has little to do with buying, it’s more about the difficulty we/organizations have in these change initiatives. Research report after research report […]
The AI Industrial Revolution
We are enamored with AI. Everyone is experimenting, everyone is declaring they are “AI first.” AI is being integrated into as many workflows as possible. It’s writing our emails, cranking out thousands of emails faster than any individual could. It’s cleaning our inboxes, updating our CRMs, managing our calendars, doing our call prep. Agentic AI now completely takes over entire workflows, answering customer emails, handling calls, doing outreach. Not only are these agents cheaper, they don’t need coffee or bathroom breaks, vacations, and they don’t slack off or complain. Most or our focus on AI today is about one of […]
Metrics Don’t Solve The Problem!
I was tempted to title this, “Metrics, metrics, everywhere, but not a solution in sight,” as a twist on the famous line in Coleridge’s “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner.” We are drowning in data. We live in a world where tools, including AI, can provide endless analyses and insights into the data. We establish endless metrics that help us track trends and performance. We inflict endless, sometimes contradictory metrics on our people, mostly overwhelming and confusing them. We live by the numbers–or worse, by the metrics–thinking they are the answers to all our problems and challenges. But they aren’t! […]
“They Were Making The Final Decision….Then Crickets….”
It’s only Wednesday and already, I’ve had conversations with 5 different teams on the same issue. They had strong deals, great interest from the customers, pricing had been worked out. They were waiting for the final decision, some already spending their expected commissions. And then things went quiet. Their customers stopped responding. These forecasted deals suddenly slipped away. As they walked through things, they talked about how interested the customers were, how they could see the impact of implementing the solutions. They had preliminary pricing discussions, no significant objections from customers. They even started discussing roll-out and implementation. They thought […]
Resurrecting “MBWA”
When was the last time when you stepped out from behind your screens and reports to actually talk to and engage the people doing the work? In the late 70’s Tome Peters and Bob Waterman started talking about the concept of Management By Walking Around . In was a cornerstone of In Search Of Excellence (1982). At the time, they believed leaders were losing touch with what was really happening in their companies. They sat in their offices, participated in meetings with their direct reports, but were seldom engaged with their people. In some organizations, it went so far as […]