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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
Profiles In Courage
When I was in junior high, we read the Pulitzer Prize winning book by former President, John F. Kennedy. This was in the late ’60’s. The book offered short stories of acts of bravery by 8 Senators, going back through history. There’s some controversy surrounding the book, but at that age it was fascinating to read. And, at the time, outside our classrooms were protests about the Vietnam War. Yesterday, I was astounded to see a completely different demonstration of Profiles In Courage. Perhaps millions of people gathered in their towns to protest the acts of our government. I happened […]
Judgment…..
I haven’t written much about Judgment, nor do I see many others writing about it. Ironically, Judgment is probably one of the most important capabilities for leaders and business professionals. It’s importance is magnified as we look at the escalating disruption, change, and complexity each of us, our teams, our organizations, our customers, and our partners face. It’s a skill to help us make decisions when there are no cut and dry answers, where we may have incomplete information, where there may be massive uncertainty. There is no roadmap to making and executing the best decisions. It’s the constant application […]
Someone Else Is Creating Your To-Do List!
No, I’m not going to talk about the latest/greatest way we can leverage AI to manage our calendars. What I’m focusing on is how little control most people are exercising over their own to-do lists. Sadly, perhaps unconsciously, we have ceded control of our to-do lists to our inboxes, text messages, calls, and social channels. As much as we try to leverage effective time management and time blocking techniques, others are controlling our to-do lists. We have so many conflicting demands on our time, too often we don’t have the time to do the things most important to us. Recently, […]
AI Can Do A Lot, But Do We Want It To Do All It Can Do?
My friend, Charlie Green, and I exchange ideas on new AI tools. This weekend, he shared a tool that summarizes all the newsletters he subscribes to. Both he and I tend to subscribe to a lot of things. Inevitably, it gets overwhelming. I can’t read everything I subscribe to. Tools like the one Charlie referenced help us deal with that overwhelm. Everyday, I get inundated with the lists of all the things that AI can do. Recently a guru posted a list of current use cases for AI. To be fair, he didn’t claim it to be all inclusive, but […]
I Made A Mistake…
Four of the most powerful but least used words in business or human relationships are, “I made a mistake.” There are another three powerful words, “I was wrong.” They are tough words to say, but think of the impact they have in moving things forward, in building relationships/trust. In everything we do in selling (and business) there is always the possibility of making a mistake. Perhaps we ask our customers the wrong questions, failing to discover their real business drivers. Perhaps we have developed a strategy we thought would win, but later realize we were doing the wrong things. Perhaps […]
It’s About Time!
It’s a recurring theme, rather crisis. In the past, I’ve tended to dismiss this as an issue. There have been so many outstanding books. There are endless tools/technologies to help us. Endless hints/tips, expert advice. I didn’t realize how constant this challenge is. But the issue persists! It’s an issue with everyone, from individual contributors to top leaders. It crosses all performance categories–low performers are impacted by this, but may not care that much. High performers struggle with this, as to all others. And the problem seems to be getting worse. It’s about time! That’s it, it’s about how we […]