By Neil Rackham Review by Jennifer Dawson under Melanie’s direction There’s a scene in the critically acclaimed but very nasty 1992 movie Glengarry Glen Ross that sticks in my head. Alec Baldwin, who plays a bad-ass consultant “from downtown” charged with increasing sales in a Chicago-based real estate office, introduces himself to his incredulous sales team with a profanity-peppered monologue. At one point he flips over a blackboard, revealing several chalked words, their first letter highlighted. Against an ominous backdrop of lightning flashes, Baldwin reviews the words. “A-B-C,” he rants. “A, Always, B, Be, C, Closing. Always be closing.” ABC. Always Be Closing. According to Neil Rackham, a psychologist whose substantial research on the sales process has revolutionized sales training around the world, ABC has been a widely repeated sales mantra since the 1920s. But Rackham is a bit of an iconoclast. In his book Spin Selling—which was first published in 1988 and is still earning devoted followers around the world–Rackham asserts that ABC doesn’t work, at least for large sales with higher price tags and longer sales cycles. SPIN stands for Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff. Each word describes a kind of question that a salesperson should ask a prospect in order to strengthen the relationship and increase the perceived value of the product or service that is being sold. Rackham’s model is founded on questions: intelligent, considered in advance, and designed to help the customer see problems as needing to be solved and the salesperson as a problem solver. Traditional sales training emphasizes “show and tell.” Salespeople guess at the needs of the customer and focus their pitch on relaying the features and benefits of what is being sold in order to close the deal. Rackham’s model is fundamentally different. Instead of “show and tell” we have “ask and listen.” Instead of the salesperson providing all the answers, we have the customer filling in the blanks. Instead of high pressure tactics we have solutions to problems. Instead of a one-time meeting and quick buck, we...
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Written by Jen Dawson under Melanie’s direction This is not a new book. Published in hardcover in 2000, the four pages of glowing reviews found inside the front cover, gathered from corporate heavy-hitters like Fed-Ex and anonymous readers from across North America, give a sense that the book has been around long enough to gain quite a following. The concept of self-deception is also not new. “Know Thyself” was inscribed over the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi. More recently, the psychoanalytic theory of Freud and co. could be described as the study of the many ways humans lie to themselves. In fact, the concepts explored in Leadership and Self-Deception are the Arbinger Institute’s take on the psychoanalytic concept of ‘resistance’ as applied to the world of business. The book is engagingly written, following the popular business book format of the likeable but imperfect main character who learns a life-altering lesson from a selection of gentle and inspiring gurus. At 168 pages, it’s a quick read. The concepts are clearly presented, the dialogue believable, and the take-away lesson profound. We journey along with Tom Callum, a fictional new employee at a highly successful company where the secret weapon–being “out of the box” in relations with others–has revolutionized the way business is done. Over the course of two days, Tom learns that all people, including his mentors, have a tendency to see others as objects rather than people. It all starts when we deny an initial impulse to do something for another person. This act of denial is labelled self-betrayal. In order to continue seeing ourselves as good people, even though we didn’t follow through on our own impulse to help another, we have to rationalize our inaction. The other person’s character and behaviour is vilified, while our own deeds and needs are elevated in our perception. Both are distortions of reality. At the fictional company where the book is set, this place of distorted reality is given the label “being in the box”. Simple...
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To large organizations, the basic premise in Deep Change could be radical and even threatening. In fact, Quinn himself uses the term “heretical” to describe his approach. As early as the first chapter, he makes it clear that deep change involves risk, potential for suffering, getting lost, re-inventing one’s self and breaking the rules. “Excellence never lies within the boxes drawn in the past”, the reader is advised. “To be excellent, the leaders have to step outside the safety net of the company’s regulations.” Towards the end of the book, Quinn states that true leaders “are willing to accept the necessary risk because it is the right thing to do. They care enough to risk dying for the organization, which would kill them for caring.” Death, here, is metaphorical. But it is certainly a bold metaphor for a business book. Quinn is an academic, and his book does not spoon-feed the reader. There is no overarching, cute ‘hook’: an animal fable, fictitious company, or cozy relationship between curious/challenged business owner and affable/wise mentor. He is not afraid to talk theory or present his information as a diagram or chart. His writing is not witty. His anecdotes are matter-of-fact. Something I found particularly valuable was his careful description of the differences between three organizational paradigms: the ‘technical’, or individual paradigm; the ‘transactional’, or managerial paradigm; and the ‘transformational’ or leadership paradigm. I also appreciated that Quinn spends a considerable amount of time describing the role of middle managers as transformational leaders, thus emphasizing that transformation is not the sole purview of the CEO but can be accomplished by anyone, regardless of their place in the pecking order. Following each chapter, Quinn poses at least one full page of questions to the reader, divided into two categories: ‘personal steps to change’ and ‘organizational steps to change’. I found it difficult to respond meaningfully to many of the questions and, as a result, my ability to learn from the book was compromised. Why didn’t this format work...
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By Jen Dawson, in collaboration with Melanie Parish Patrick Lencioni’s book, published in 2007, begins with a fitting quote from Samuel Johnson: “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” The three signs of a miserable job, which are engagingly explored in Lencioni’s tried-and-true fable-format, are not complex, academic or especially original. They are simple and based in common sense. This book is Lencioni’s reminder, a la Samuel Johnson, that managers and employees already have the knowledge and tools to make the jobs around them meaningful and enjoyable. All miserable jobs, Lencioni posits, are the result of three underlying factors: anonymity, or the feeling that no one knows who you are; irrelevance, or the feeling that your work has no beneficial impact; and “immeasurement”, a term he coins to describe why employees so often feel unable to determine, for themselves, whether they are doing well or poorly at work. It is a manager’s responsibility to ensure that the “three signs” are absent from the jobs of their direct reports. Employee accountability ties into the last two “signs” in interesting ways. If an employee has no sense of who benefits from his or her time, energy, insight, and productivity–in Lencioni’s terms, there is “irrelevance” in the job–there is little to motivate the employee to continue working. Employees who know, in specific and measurable terms, that clients, co-workers, or a manager are directly impacted by their work can see that their work has value. Accountability, then, is made real for employees. It also becomes clear that accountability is based in relationships–peer-to-peer, employee-to-customer, employee-to-manager–and not in abstractions like profit or loss. The specific measurement component is also important to a discussion of accountability. Lencioni emphasizes that the measurement must be something that employees can use to gauge their own successes and areas for improvement. At one point in his fable, an employee at the drive-thru is asked to record the number of times he causes a customer to smile. Counting smiles,...
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Review by Jennifer Dawson What do Napster, Alcoholics Anonymous, Wikipedia, the Apaches, Skype, the abolitionist movement in Britain, the Animal Liberation Front, and al Qaeda all have in common? According to Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, authors of The Starfish and The Spider, they are all examples of “starfish” organizations: open, decentralized systems that achieve globe-changing outcomes, all without a front-and-centre call-the-shots leader. A starfish doesn’t have a head. Cut off its leg and it grows another. And sometimes a second starfish grows from the severed limb. This is in stark contrast to the “spider” organization: a coercive, closed, top-down system that dies when its (figurative) head is chopped off. Brafman and Beckstrom propose that, with the advent of the Internet, starfish organizations have incredible capacity to engage individuals on a planet-wide scale, sometimes at a great cost to large, multinational spider companies. They propose a vision for a new, “hybrid” organization that blends the democratic, decentralized, community-minded spirit of the starfish organization with the structure, control and profitability of a...
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By Keith Rosen Review by Jennifer Dawson Management is dead. Keith Rosen admits it’s a bold statement, but it underlies his innovative approach to creating sales champions and is certainly a thought-provoking sentence to slide into the opening chapter of his book. Since Rosen isn’t advocating for flat organizational structures or axing all sales management positions, it might be more accurate to say that management is on life support. The prescriptive, problem-focused, and punitive approach of traditional management, Rosen asserts, is failing today’s salespeople. Enter coaching, which Rosen defines as “the art of creating new possibilities.” Coaching’s collaborative, creative and solution-focused approach, while not a quick cure for managerial ills, promises to breathe new life into any sales department. Rosen spends a significant amount of time outlining the principles of coaching, the qualities of a “masterful coach”, fatal coaching mistakes, and describing traditional managerial approaches and why they don’t work. The key learning from the book, however–and this is where Rosen pens his second memorable phrase–is his assertion that “the question is the answer.” Why questions? In the role of coach, a sales manager engages in meaningful one-on-one conversations with salespeople which correspond to the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the talking is done by the salesperson, and 20 percent by the coach. In order for this to happen, the coach spends most of his or her time asking insightful, solution-focused questions and listening carefully to the answers, which invariably become the basis for further questions. It makes sense, then, that Rosen’s book is packed with examples of illuminating questions (including an appendix full of one-sentence gems). It’s a long book, but chapter 9 (“Facilitating an Effective Coaching Conversation”), chapter 12 (“Develop an Internal Coaching Program”) and the question-loaded Appendix are worth a careful read. It can be difficult to reconcile Rosen’s advice to focus a coaching session on the salesperson’s values, goals, and needs with the fact that the financial viability of a company depends largely on meeting and exceeding externally-dictated sales targets....
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