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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
If All Else Is Equal, Price Wins!
Duuuugh! What a great observation on the obvious—“If all else is equal, price wins!” You must be asking, “Dave, is that what your clients pay you for?”Actually, they do. I am constantly surprised at how complicated people can make around the concept of creating value—for your customers, partners, stakeholders, others. Millions of dollars are spent on consultants every year, hundreds of pages in books, magazines, and journals. Everyone is looking for the silver bullet in maintaining their pricing or margins for customers, how to minimize discounting, and other similar issues.It is so simple—-if the customer cannot perceive any difference between […]
Both Sides Of The Story
We’ve all heard it, there are always two sides to every issue or story. It’s a natural tendency to look at things from our own perspective and self interest. Sometimes it causes us to make mistakes. We really need to look at things from each person’s point of view. It makes us more effective. I could go on and write a lot of stuff about this, but I just saw Mike Hyatt’s blog on the issue. He has addressed it very well, so let me direct you to his blog. http://www.michaelhyatt.com/fromwhereisit/2007/09/both-sides-of-t.html
Focus Until It Hurts! Then Focus More!
Most of the organizations I encounter have one common challenge—-focusing. In the past week, I have been involved in projects with 4 companies—2 Fortune 50 companies, a large company, and a very early stage start up. All had exactly the same problem: They had not identified and committed to executing the 1-2 things critical to accomplishing their goals. As a result, each was failing to achieve their goals. Consistently, failure to focus is the biggest issue I see confronting organizations and people. This got me to thinking, why is it so tough? Some thoughts: Focus is boring: It is so […]
No "A’s For Effort"
Kids are headed back to school—-it’s caused me to reflect on comments we hear from teachers, parents, and friend—“A for Effort.” That term has slipped into our vocabularies and we apply it to all sorts of business and personal situations. I suppose it’s an attempt to justify failure to achieve results. It seems much of what is done, even rewarded today focuses on effort, not results or accountability. People are very busy, work incredibly long hours, load their agendas up with meetings, lots of activity, and overlay that with constant interruptions of Blackberry’s, mobile phones and emails. Somehow “busyness” has […]
Social Networking, Form Triumphs Over Substance
I’ve been curious about the phenomenon of adding friends, passing on introductions, etc. The two networks I actively participate in are LinkedIn and Facebook. Recently, though LinkedIn, I have received invitations from several old, long lost colleagues. I have anxiously responded, accepting their invitations. With every response, I send an email, expressing my delight at re-connecting and suggesting a personal dialog–email, voice to voice or otherwise. In most cases, I am disappointed. These contacts don’t respond, I’m added to their list, but never hear from them. What’s the purpose? I guess they are shooting for quantity over quality. My physical […]
Multi-tasking Is Dead
Just a quick post, I was reading Michael Hyatt’s Blog: From Where I Sit, and saw this great quote from Tmothy Ferriss. It expresses what I have been clumsy at expressing in past blogs. It does it in one sentence. “Multi-tasking is dead. It never worked and it never will. Intelligent people love to sing its praises because it gives them permission to avoid the much more challenging alternative: focusing on one thing.” I’m reading his Tim’s book right now, The 4 Hour Work Week. I’ve just started it, appears to be well written, but I am a little skeptical. […]