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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
Inspirational Leadership: The Victim of the Balanced Scorecard?
Amy Meyer has an interesting guest article in Art Petty’s On Management Blog. As the title indicates, it speaks to the tendency of managers to hide behind things like Balanced Scorecards, using them as the end, not as a means to understanding problems, diagnosing them, developing improvement plans, and leading the changes required.It’s an interesting and provocative article, I encourage you to read it by linking here.The problem, I think, is not with the tools themselves, but rather with the way some managers implement them or hide behind them. No tool, Balanced Scorecard, or whatever approach can substitute for strong […]
We Don’t Have Time To Do It Right!!!
Why do we seem to make the time to re-do things–several times over–correcting mistakes, but we never find the time to do things right in the first place? I’ve been pre-occupied and frustrated by this issue for several weeks. Two multi-billion dollar organizations I am working with are on similar paths. They are in such a hurry to act that the action itself takes precedence over doing things right. Both organizations have smart, motivated, well intended people. Both face major challenges in executing even the simplest strategies. It troubles me that such smart people are caught in a trap of […]
How To Form Selling Partnerships That Really Work
The July/August issue of Selling Power magazine has several interesting articles on partnering and collaboration in sales. I’m quoted extensively in the lead article. Good reading—if I say so myself.
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 […]
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 […]