“To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources – not to deprive that person but to leave him better off in the end.”

Daniel Pink, auther of “Drive” and “To Sell is Human” Read More

Selling has a bad name, especially in Europe. And here’s an American trying to tell us we are all selling, all the time. Sounds yuck? Fortunately it’s a lot more subtle than that. In fact he’s really saying that true selling is not about foot-in-the-door persistence but about listening, empathy, and seeking to serve others. You knew that already didn’t you? So you can skip the first section, where he redefines selling and illustrates how we are all natural sales people. Read More

Time is money but few organisations treat it that way. A junior person who can’t sign off a $1000 invoice can schedule a regular meeting which costs twenty times that in management salaries, with no approval process at all. So says a well-researched piece in this month’s issue of Harvard Business Review (Reprint R1405D). A team from Bain used information from the online calendars of executives across more than a dozen large corporations to show how casually time is treated. Read More