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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
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. […]
How Much Time Is AI Saving You?
This question was posed in a LinkedIn survey. It was a fascinating post, questioning whether AI is really saving time. Yet we are inundated with announcements: jobs are being eliminated because AI does more work in less time. My feeds are filled with “success stories.” People using AI for emails for both prospecting and responding. Others promote AI that does all the research, all the reporting, manages calendars. The stories talk about hours freed up, work eliminated. Interestingly, most of the discussion is about time saved, headcount eliminated, and spending reduced. Very little is focuses on changed outcomes: revenue increases, […]
Confident, Decisive, And Wrong!
Every leader I know has more information than they can handle. Dashboards, pipeline reviews, forecast calls, win/loss reports, it never stops. We have more tools and AI to provide more analysis and new insights into this flood of information. Despite this, for the decisions that matter most, those about strategy, people, customers, and execution, it seems these are going the wrong direction, constantly eroding performance. Win rates continue to decline. Fewer people hit their goals. Too often, the wrong people get blamed. We double down on initiatives despite results showing us they are failing. We celebrate hitting the numbers while […]
