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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
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. Earlier […]
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 […]
Old-Timers Are Right About What We’re Seeing. We’re Wrong About Why.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the same conversation, with a number of old-timers in business and sales. People who’ve been doing this for thirty-forty years. The conversation always arrives at the same conclusion. People don’t seem to care anymore. They don’t have the drive. They don’t have the joy. It’s just a job, where for us it was a passion, a calling, something we threw ourselves into. What happened? Something has shifted, and the people noticing it aren’t imagining it. But the diagnosis many of us are reaching for, “kids today don’t have what we had,” may misread […]
Managing The Number, Missing The Cause
Win rate drops. Pipeline coverage falls below target. Activity numbers slip. The standard managerial response is some version of “we need to improve win our rates” or “we need more pipeline” or “we need more calls this week.” The number becomes the problem to be solved. In one on ones or team meetings, the discussion is about the numbers and how to get them back up. Coaching, if it’s done, is just pressure around the metrics on their dashboards. None of this is leadership, it is reactive management. Despite our obsession with dashboards and metrics, the most important thing about […]
What You Can’t Count, You Have To See
Every leader who takes the behaviors of excellence seriously eventually asks: how do we measure them? How do we score curiosity, continuous learning, caring, customer centricity, the ability to deal with change and ambiguity, accountability, discipline, purpose? How do we turn these into something we can track and manage? The question, itself, is the problem. The moment you try to score these behaviors, they collapse. People perform to the metric, the metric becomes the goal, and the behavior, itself, is lost. This is the activity-metric trap we’ve already injected into our sales processes, our pipeline reviews, our coaching programs, and […]
“We Don’t Pay You To Think…..”
Judgment is the capacity we need most and are developing least. Every organization says it wants people who can think, who can navigate ambiguity, who can make the right call when the situation doesn’t fit the playbook. Yet, too many organizations create management systems designed to make judgment unnecessary. They have built processes to standardize decisions, rules to remove subjectivity, dashboards to replace observation, playbooks to substitute for thought, and now we are turning to AI in the hope that it will relieve us of the need to think altogether. We tell ourselves this is about scaling, consistency, and efficiency. […]