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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
Self Centeredness, Arrogance, And Disdain
I’m compelled to write. It’s lunch, my habit as I eat my lunch is to scroll my LI feed. Fortunately, I have a strong stomach, so reading the feed seldom creates indigestion. But in the space of 5 minutes I saw two important posts. In different ways, calling out bad behaviors. The first was a well intended person. He described sitting on a plane overhearing someone talking about how much she disliked sales people. This person was offended, needing to write a chest thumping piece about the greatness of sales people. He highlighted our hustle, grind, relentlessness, discipline, focus, resilience. […]
Thanks AI, I’ll Keep Maintaining My Calendar……
We’ve seen the 100s of articles, the 100s of prompts, the 100s of cheat sheets focused on saving our time. Theoretically, I don’t have to manage my calendar, to-do lists, follow ups, anything. I don’t have to worry about the responses to queries, or the follow ups to the meetings. All that time spent on these and other tasks is automated, freeing up time to be “more productive.” For those who know me, I’m obsessed with my personal productivity. I’m always an early adopter to tools that help make me more productive. But there’s actually very little of these AI […]
Meeting Commitments
On Friday, I realized I had failed at something—miserably. A few weeks ago, I met with a great team. We had an exciting project, we agreed on the action plan and next steps. This action plan was highly dependent on some things I committed to. Two and a half weeks passed. The person leading the project reached out, “Dave, we’d like a follow up meetings, but we are missing some stuff…….” I was ashamed. I missed meeting a commitment. As a result it slowed us down. I dropped everything, quickly completed my work. But we’ve lost a little time, and […]
“I Can Do It Better Than Them…..”
Marcus Cauchi has been writing a provocative series of posts on mistaken sales management behaviors. The posts and discussion are fantastic, make sure you read them. He asked for my thinking on the issue. We see all sorts of bad management behaviors. Some of it seems to be driven by a compulsion to “help” our people succeed. Much of it is driven by a lack of trust managers have in their people. Almost all if it is driven by the mindset, “We have to make our numbers.” Too many managers have a “Superperson” complex. They were, possibly, great sellers and […]
The Hidden Cost Of False Efficiency
My friend and mentor, Lahat Tzvi, wrote one of the most fascinating posts on AI I’ve read. Be sure to read it! In it, he coined the phrase, “The Hidden Cost Of False Efficiency.” It’s such an important concept–and at the root of many of the challenges we face in growing our businesses. I’ve written too often and whined too much about our continued inability to focus on effectiveness, outcomes, and continual improvement. I don’t want to reiterate those issues here. Our obsession with efficiency has tremendous costs, not just financial. We are only starting to recognize these, but I’m […]
The “Lost Generation”
I’ve been writing a series of posts on business fundamentals. Nothing new, but a refocus on the importance of the basics any of us learned in our Business Fundamentals 101 courses. The concept of revenue growth has been around for millennia. I suspect after Eve sold Adam the first apple, she went back with a bag of apples, focused on scaling revenue. At the same time, we learned another business fundamental: To build a sustainable business, you have to make more money than you spend. A concept otherwise known as “profit.” And there are numerous other fundamentals to understanding the […]