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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
On Insularity
We live in overlapping circles on “Insularity.” Our families, friends, communities. Our teammates, functions, organizations, industries. These insular communities provide us different levels of security and comfort. From a professional point of view, they are made up of people doing similar things, facing similar issues/challenges. While we may compete with each other in the markets, we learn from each other, see differing approaches, sometimes seeing new opportunities. And when we face challenges, generally many in our communities are seeing the same thing, so we feel less “alone.” There is a certain amount of comfort in saying, “Everyone else is experiencing […]
Rethinking AI For Innovation, Not Automation
I’ve been on a tear this week, talking about AI. I’m so excited about it’s potential, yet I get so frustrated about too many of the current use cases. We are obsessed with how many tasks can be automated by AI, freeing up our time. Without a doubt, AI can have a huge impact on how we spend our time, offloading meaningless tasks. (As a sidenote, so much of the early results of these efforts, don’t seem to show improvements in results, at least in our GTM strategies.). But I worry this obsession with automating tasks/processes might cause us to […]
It’s Not Your Job!!!
Last week, I had another “argument” with one of the highest performing CROs I’ve been privileged to work with. We’ve worked with each other, in various roles, for about 10 years. Our “arguments” are conversations where we push each other very hard. We are comfortable with them, because we know we are in lockstep on our goals, purpose, and friendship. Sometimes, people who happen to observe them are shocked, “Dave you are pushing her awfully hard!!! or people tell her, “You are being really bad to Dave, you should listen to him, plus you should be kinder to the elderly….” […]
Outsourcing Our Thinking
Foreword/Forewarning: This is a bit longish, my apologies. But hang in there. At the end, I’ve included a special treat. I asked ChatGPT to weigh in on these ideas. She lets loose! It’s hilarious, but painfully on target. Enjoy!! About 14 years ago, I wrote a post, Outsourcing Our Thinking. There, I discussed my concern with seller and manager ability to think critically. I talked about succumbing to “Just do this one thing,” or “Here is the formula/script,” and other techniques being promoted by guru’s of various types. Fast forward, 14 years, it’s gotten so much worse. My feeds are […]
“Make Your Competitors Look Silly,” And Other Nonsense.
Another piece of nonsense by a guru found its way into my feed today. It started with, “The secret to pitching isn’t making yourself look good, it’s making your competitors look silly.” It was followed by one a 21 page carousel outlining how to make your competitors look silly. And, as usual, 100’s of likes and comments, “The secret to success!” It is pure nonsense. Interestingly, the focus of attention from this expert is the competitor and not the customer. I always thought I the focus of our efforts was on our customers! But in the 21 pages of wisdom […]
The New LinkedIn
I’m a very early subscriber to LinkedIn. A friend was one of the early VCs funding LinkedIn. He told me about it and asked me to sign up as a user. In the early days, it seemed to be more of an online CV, but pretty quickly became very interesting for the discussions I found. There were groups with interesting discussions, in my feed there were always diverse article that I could learn from. Often, I learned more from the comments and discussions following the articles. Authors would participate in these discussions, debates would be conducted. I learned so much […]