Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Learning Conversations
Recently, I was reading a particularly vile conversation thread. Inevitably it was about something happening in the political world. It started with someone taking a position about a certain issue in the news. There were about 80 comments in the thread by the time I got to it. As you might expect, the comments represented various people staking out positions, reacting positively and negatively to the original premise and to each other. The reactions did nothing to illuminate or expand the conversation. They simply were a death spiral of “I’m right, you’re wrong, you are a clueless jerk, you are […]
Great Selling Is Like Great Music
Over the weekend, my wife and I had the opportunity to go to a couple of concerts. One was with a great symphony orchestra, the other was with a college freshman orchestra. Both were playing classics, but the difference in the experience was profound. (By the way, both were far more capable than I, I struggle at Chopsticks on the piano.). With the symphony orchestra, there was a richness or depth to the pieces they played. Each instrument, each player, complimented the other. While some instruments stood out, it was by design, to create a great experience with the other […]
Sensemaking: Selling To Customers In The “Simple Quadrant”
This post is the fourth in my series on Sensemaking. For links to the other posts in the series, go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. In this post, I’ll do a deep dive into how we sell into organizations operating in the Simple Quadrant. As a recap, the Cynefin model is displayed below: The Simple Quadrant, is characterized by “known-knowns.” With a name like “simple,” people can mis-characterize businesses, thinking of them as simplistic or easy. They might be anything but that. For example, many manufacturing processes are very challenging and difficult. But they […]
Sensemaking: A Framework For Making Sense
Preface: This is the third article in my series on sensemaking, for links to all the others in this series, please go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. It turns out that sensemaking is not just a “cool buzzword,” that we can apply to helping our customers solve problems, dealing with complexity, or anything else. There’s actually been a lot of study and rigor around the concepts of sensemaking and some models that allow us to apply sensemaking in a rigorous and structured manner. Over the past year, I’ve studied a lot of these models. […]
Sensemaking, The Foundations
This is the second article in my series on Sensemaking. For links to all the other articles, go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. It’s impossible to begin to think about sensemaking unless we have a foundation. That is, a context in which we are seeking to make sense of things. It’s this context that provides the basis for all our sensemaking activities. While my normal inclination is to start with the customer in defining the context, that’s pretty meaningless. All you have to do is ask, “Who’s the customer?” So we have to start […]
Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us
As we look at the world that surrounds us, we are confronted within increasing levels of turbulence and disruption. Whether it’s our personal lives, our communities, our societies, our jobs, our companies, our customers, our markets, our nations. Every day we are confronted with things which we struggle to understand, manage, or take action. We used to think of it as massive change, and change is part of the challenge, but somehow it’s much more than that. We are pummelled with information and data from increasing numbers of sources, and in ever increasing volumes. Some of it is real, much […]