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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
“Don’t Follow Your Passion!”
Marc Andreessen recently offered career advice to young people. “Don’t follow your passion. Your passion is likely dumb and useless. Make it your hobby, not your work. Instead, find the hottest, most vibrant part of the economy and figure out how to contribute. Make yourself valuable, and increase that value every day.” At first glance, it seems sensible. We’ve all seen people do exactly what he describes, and many of them have built solid careers. But it is almost certainly not how Andreessen actually built his. He was a computer geek obsessed with networks, protocols, and the emerging shape of […]
Choosing The Easier Work And Calling It “Management”
Every day, I see new tools being announced. These tools, apparently, turn things upside down. We can see reports that were previously unimaginable. Examples of new reports and dashboards fill my inbox or social media feeds. AI is giving us the capability to keep our pipelines and forecasts updated with the latest changes in real time, giving us far more insight into performance. We now have the ability to have the most current pipeline and forecast on demand. And managers seem to be jumping all over this capability. They are captivated by the thought that of daily or even hourly […]
Fixing The “Noise” Does Not Fix The Problem
We’ve seen it before. The scenarios are different, but what lies beneath them is always the same. A crisis hits. A big customer leaves. A quarter gets missed. Key people quit. Something breaks. Leaders spring into action. The first reaction is always the same. “We have to fix the problem!” And the fix focuses on the one thing in front of us. The customer is leaving, so we offer a steeper discount. Key people are quitting, so we change the comp plan. We missed the quarter, so we double the pipeline goal. We react instead of think. The challenge is […]
Form Triumphs Over Substance
I wrote a piece six and a half years ago with this title. I have been thinking about it again, and I want to come back to it, because the problem I was describing then has gotten worse in ways I did not anticipate. The piece opened with a line from one of my favorite books John Gardner’s Excellence, Can We Be Equal And Excellent Too? One line in the book has been something I keep going back to: “Do not let form triumph over substance.” In 2020, I was writing about sales leaders and organizations who were doing all […]
We Don’t Start With AI!
Companies are spending more on AI than ever before, even as the cost of AI itself has fallen. The price of running an AI query dropped 80 to 90% over the last two years. Total enterprise AI bills are skyrocketing anyway. Average enterprise AI spend rose from $1.2 million in 2024 to $7 million in 2026. The cost of running AI in production now consumes 85% of the AI budget at companies operating at scale. Agentic workflows, the ones being marketed as transformation, consume 5 to 30 times more compute per task than the chatbot pilots that came before them. […]
The Bait, the Book, and the Real Answer
I just published “Old-Timers Are Right About What We Are Seeing. We’re Wrong About Why.” A friend sent me a note in response. He framed it as a CEO’s question, but I knew exactly what he was doing. He was testing me. His note read: “Dave, this is brilliant. You have summarized the change and the challenge. Let’s say I am a CEO of a company that fully sees what you have said play out in my company and I want to DO something today to change it. What specifically do I do—hold meetings, change metrics, hire change experts? What […]
