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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
What Did You Sell That For?
In the mid 80’s, as a young manager in IBM, I was meeting with IBM’s then Vice Chairman, Paul Rizzo. The conversation is as important now, as it was then. Paul had just returned from a trip visiting customers, and in our small group was expressing a high degree of frustration and some anger.He recounted driving to the customer with the sales person. The sales person was briefing Paul on the account and proudly stated he had just sold a system to this customer. Paul responded with the question, “What did you sell it for?” The sales person quickly responded, […]
Unforced Errors — A Killer To Effectiveness
I just read a brilliant Post on the Slow Leadership Blog entitled: Why Organizations Make Unforced Errors. Frankly, I can’t state it better than has been already stated, but I will extract a few key points. The concept of forced and unforced errors comes from sports (I know, we tire of sports analogies, but this one is important). Forced errors occur because the opponent is playing better than we are. When I speak, I frequently challenge organizations to OutCompete the competition. By this, I am referring winning through superior skill, offerings, value, or execution. OutCompeting the competition involves performing at […]
Defragging Our Minds
We all (or at least Windows people) know that it’s necessary to defrag our hard disks every once in a while. Fragmented hard drives run much slower—I’ve had some that are so fragmented they barely get work done. You can hear the little sucker whirring away, seems like there is a lot going on, but in the end the system slows down to getting very little done. I’m in my office, frustrated that my computer has slowed down so much, our computer guy told me to defrag the drive. As the computer is doing it’s thing, it struck me that […]
Distracted: The Erosion of Attention And The Coming Dark Age
As a person who constantly rails against the levels of multitasking most of us have fallen victim to, I was intrigued by a new book: Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. I have just had the opportunity to quickly skim it, and think it is an important book to read. It seems well researched, presenting data on the impact of multitasking and our inability to focus. It projects a dire future—I’m not sure I quite buy into that—but will re-read. Technology has provided us wonderful means of staying in touch. It provides us […]
Only The Paraonoid Survive
I’ve always loved this book by Andy Grove of Intel. Just seeing the title on the bookshelf in my office has often caused me to reflect on things, take my blinders off, and build contingencies. I just read an article in Fortune on “(Bill) Gates’ Golden Rules.” One really struck me: Institutionalize Paranoia. Ray Ozzie is quoted, “Bill and Steve created what I guess I’d characterize as a culture of crisis. There’s always someone who’s going to take the company down. It’s mythical, but at any given point in time, there might be two or three big competitive things that […]
The Ultimate Question — Finding Your Sweet Spot
The Harvard Management Update is recycling an interesting article entitled “Find Your Sweet Spot.” It’s a quick read and refresher around Fred Reichheld’s work in “The Ultimate Question.” I am such a fan of this approach to segmenting customers, that I wanted to provide the link to the article. It’s a good reminder to a great practice.