Water Under the Bridge

Here it is, in its entirety. The Director’s cut if you will. Unrated, unvarnished, unreal, and all true. Times have changed, but in certain parts of the world, it has stood still. Breathe, relax into reading this post, center your Chi, breathe, it’s only a blog, it’s only blog, it’s only…. It is the early afternoon in a fall day in October, we are somewhere on the east coast of North America. The afternoon, Day 5 for me, in a sales kick off summit that resembles a “how not to” seminar on presenting, coordinating, feeding, housing, and motivating a new sales team. A conference room set up in the employee cafeteria and actually not bad. Lunch was served prior to an afternoon of learning the company elevator pitch. Odd how the elevator-pitch (which is 60 seconds long) was a two hour session presented by yours truly, but that is the next post. Lunch was a unique combination of pizza and French fries. That is right, pizza and French fries. So I get to present to a group of carbo-infused, ha...

This actually happened. It is all true I am not making it up or embellishing. Hell, I couldn’t. I could not have dreamed, conjured, projected, created or visualized what happened to me last week. In fact it resembled the movie The Hills Have Eyes II , the obvious delusion of madmen (no woman would let this happen) with conscientious connection to the reality of others. In fact it has taken me a full week to be able to talk about. Like seeing Winged Migration really high in the middle of an afternoon with a bunch of retirees and never coming clean (literally and figuratively) about where you were. Our story opens on a Sunday at Terminal C, San Jose International (cough) Airport. It is 6:10AM and one of about 6 flights leaving between San Jose and Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago, Phoenix, LA etc is queuing up to leave. It is the Sunday before the Canadian Thanksgiving (as it is wrongly referred to) which is the next day, Monday. So everyone, me included is trying to get to someplace i...

This is a beautiful thing for your competition to be doing in the market. This mostly applies to start ups who are exploiting a gap in platform player’s offering where the gap is most likely going to be closed but not anytime (2-3 years) soon. And in fact it may technically infeasible (de-feasible?) to do so with their current organization, architecture and IP. During a sales training on competitive positioning in a complex selling situation for a emerging start up in the enterprise software space two issues stood out; one is sales is not that complex if you are talking to the right person(s), second if your product is a superior solution how do you demonstrate this fact to the potential customer? After an hour or so of the usual our product does X better than theirs, and customers pick us because of X,Y, and Z it occurred to me. A number of platform players continue down the path of Incompetent Technical Persistence because they have to. What does Incompetent Technical Persistence mea...