One of the easiest and most passé things a leader can say to their team is “I wish you all could act like a start-up company.”  The implication of that statement is that the team should be agile, innovative, entrepreneurial, nimble, resilient, disruptive, and every other cool buzz word that you can think of.  Besides being somewhat insulting, teams in large organizations typically push back on this approach by saying that they “don’t have the right resources”, “they will get blamed for making mistakes”, “they aren’t compensated well enough”, “the systems are old”, and “customers don’t really like change anyway.”

For many of the readers of this blog, you are probably wondering “What is Rob Brodo up to this time?”  What do these three things; Business Acumen, Networks, and Getting Things Done have in common and why are they the title of this blog?

The harsh realities of selling in today's complex markets means you must change the game

“My Sales Manager was so upset. I literally thought she was going to fire me on the spot.  I had to make that call that we were going to lose the deal with a potential customer we had been targeting for months because our prices were too high.  I really did everything possible to position value, make the economic case, build the relationship, and do everything else they teach us in Sales Training school but it wasn’t going to be good enough because the customer had a specific budget that he could not go over. He wanted us to get the business but unless we lowered the proposal price by more than 34%, he was going to give it to our largest competitor.  It’s just brutal.”

5 Critical Tips to Single-job Success

There are many people who believe we are just a few years away from self-driven cars.  They point to the technology, the changing social norms, changing economic situations, and of course the impact on energy as driving factors of the driverless car.  I personally have my doubts because I think driving is equal to freedom and the notion of some faceless entity controlling the cars on the road and where we are going feels unaligned with people’s independent spirit.  But we will see over the next ten years or so…

In the meantime, there is an emerging similar concept that is beginning to take a foothold in many business organizations; self-driven performance management dialogues.  In our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business world when too many managers are overloaded and under resourced, talent development often takes a backseat to everything else.  This week, while conducting a Fundamentals of Business Leadership business simulation workshop, I had the chance to emcee a conversation between a company executive and the emerging leaders participating in the learning.  The topic of the module was on taking self-ownership of the performance dialogue and I thought it was one of the best sessions I’ve been a part of in recent memory.