There are six steps to complex sales and long-term commercial relationships: 1) get to know all four buying influences (economic, user, technical, coach), 2) informational gaps are red flags, objectives to address. ‘Leverage from strength’ describes using advantages to remove flags, 3) buyers are receptive when in growth or trouble mode, but not ‘even keel’ or overconfident mode, 4) results are objective; wins are subjective; buyers need both, 5) matching your company’s characteristics with candidate characteristics identifies ideal customers and so reduces wasted prospecting, 6) the sales funnel (prospect, qualify, cover the bases, close) is a forecast tool. Action plans help improve current position (moving prospects down the funnel) and are to be done every 2-4 weeks for key accounts.
Month: November 2023
1. Isaacson, Benjamn Franklin (2005)
The most pragmatic of the founding fathers, Franklin’s business skill as a printer and postmaster enabled him to retire at 42. An inveterate community organizer, he advanced from lending libraries to politics. The Philadelphian was not immediately a supporter of independence from Britain, but always an opponent of the Penn family. Franklin had a modestly successful diplomatic career, crowned by French intervention in the Revolutionary War in 1781. Given to egalitarian/bourgeois identification and values, Franklin purveyed homespun morals and humor and enjoyed practical experimentation. He was not a family man, frequently having affairs and trysts. He was image conscious and used studied silence to good effect.
2. Weissman, Presenting to Win (2005)
Consider the audience’s point of view: knowledge level, background, ability to keep up. Navigate for them. Deliver them to ‘point b’. What’s in it for your audience? Graphics: less is more. Useful structural models (chapter 6) and flowchart (p. 183).
3. MacCambridge, America’s Game (2005)
A magisterial study of how pro football surpassed college gridiron and then baseball to become America’s leading sport. Key to the league’s success was its collegial business administration. For example, TV revenues are pooled and shared, so that competitive merit is the distinguishing characteristic. In earlier postwar years, visiting teams received a share of the gate. The chronology includes closeup views of the Rams, Browns, Colts, Cowboys, Chiefs, and Raiders. Technology and savvy use of electronic media played a key role, as did the accidental commissioner Pete Rozelle. TV, including Monday Night Football, also was a key driver — the NFL supplanted boxing and mastered the medium long before baseball grasped the possibilities. Football gained from the shifting cultural mores of the 1960s, but did not escape labor problems of the 1980s and 90s. The draft remains a key source of talent and public interest, although the rival AFL used superabundance of talent (athletes) to its advantage. The NFL now is an economic and social phenomenon as much as it is a sporting contest.
4. Gillmor, We Media (2005)
A pedestrian and pedantic account of how interactivity is changing the craft of journalism. For newcomers, perhaps, the review of technologies (email lists, wikis, blogs, RSS) is useful. Clubby kudos to tech industry pals and transparent protestations of modesty (‘the audience is smarter than me’), as well as de rigeur fourth-estate antagonisms limit the possibility of any real insights. Lessig is more persuasive on the issue of copyright. Not useful as historical account or roadmap for development.
22. Ellmers, Narrow Passage (23 November 2023)
The 1980’s ‘culture wars’, abating at Cold War’s end, resurfaced in the late 2010s, latterly the more bitter for the revelation of a Hegelian-Nietzschean split between leftists favoring technocracy (progressives) and latter-day Existentialism (postmoderns). Both strands of thought had already been identified as dead ends by Heidegger and Strauss, whose call for a return to classical rationalism is the main topic. Political thought is not academic but practical, and modern society is rational. When Western academics and government officials lose faith in reason, society is in crisis.
The Philosophes had sought to make reason universal; but the unbridled pursuit of philosophy in government damages the city’s ends (its latter-day myths and gods). What has been lost, as per Strauss’ ‘three waves of modernity’, is the conception of nature and man’s place in it. Inability to test authority by use of reason portends loss of agency, freedom. When social scientists speak of angst, unknowingly they refer to essentially political emptiness, reduced either to soulless technocracy or nihilism. (Foucault, who plays an unlikely role herein, observed power never disappears but takes on new forms, ever-changing because it is not bounded by reason.)
History, properly the imaginative reconstruction of places and events, was often seen by 19th-century intellectuals as a mechanistic process. Historicism failed (and continues to fail) because history is neither rational nor ending; but the view assigns man an uncontrollable place in an inexorable sweep, while isolating him within time. Science, which came on scene with Bacon and Descartes, promises mastery of nature but separates facts from values, and so can’t produce a view of the good. Only the pursuit of political thought free of philosophy of history and historicist determination can liberate the 21st century from nihilism and technocracy (the latter seeming the larger task).
Strauss’ unique contribution is an awareness of the moral-political equilibrium (tension) of philosophy. To become political, to establish conditions for virtuous life, human matters must be elevated to reason; otherwise, all is but a contest of will to power.
Plato’s importance to Strauss is evident. The ancient thought the whole consists of heterogeneous parts which cannot be understood as constitutive; but knowledge of the whole is impossible. His famous analogy of the shadowy cave – an argument for transparent use of reason in government – is reified in Foucault’s portrayal of unaccountable, amorphous sociopolitical elites exercising power (the insight giving rise to an otherwise misleading title). Yet it’s not clear why Plato among Strauss’ many influences is here singled out, just as it’s unclear what ‘narrow passage’ refers to. A bibliography is wonted.
Gibbon’s historiography
In searching for causation, the balance between social forces and individual agency is contingent on the subject. In ‘Edward Gibbon & the Enlightenment’,
Keith Windschuttle observes:
… In opposition to the French [i.e., Montesquieu’s] search for general laws of historical causation, Gibbon argues that explanations need to be appropriate to their subject. In some historical circumstances, such as newly formed or emerging polities, the role of individuals such as founding fathers may be profound; in other circumstances, a system may be so well entrenched that it might survive the worst kind of abuse from apparently powerful political figures. Similarly, once major internal systemic problems have emerged, neither the fortunes nor adversities of politics may be able to stem the tide.
And further, echoing Himmelfarb’s
- Roads to Modernity
:
…The intellectual product and legacy of the English Enlightenment is quite different from that of the French. In Gibbon, the spirit of inquiry and the fruits of research confirm the value of the existing institutions of English society, including its religion. In France, these tools were deployed in opposition to the same institutions. In England, Gibbon emphasized the responsibility of individuals and celebrated the virtue and courage of statesmen and churchmen, where they existed, even though he recorded that the natural passions of humanity were likely to leave such qualities in short supply. In France, the philosophes sought to find general laws of society that would render the actions of individuals irrelevant. The intellectual heritage of the English Enlightenment, as exemplified in Gibbon, clearly goes some of the way to explaining the different political histories of the two countries in the ensuing two centuries. England has enjoyed a stable and peaceful national history marked by a gradual extension of its democracy; France has been periodically racked by revolution, internal collapse, and foreign invasion.
New Criterion, June 1997
5. Ellis, His Excellency (2005)
Washington was a physically dominating figure who was not well educated, but married into elite society. Possessing an outsized ego, he managed his image closely, particularly regarding early military failures. After a successful French and Indian War, he accumulated land and aspired to fulfill the promise of the west, but his debts to British cotton agents transformed him into a revolutionary. Ideology played no real role, although he did wrestle with the question of slavery. As a general in the Revolutionary War, he is proclivity was to attack but he realized survival was the victory, a la Fabius. He grew to recognize the ineffectiveness of the Articles of Confederation during this time, and subsequently agreed to lead the Constitutional Convention and become the first president. He disliked partisan politics, reluctantly agreed to a second term, and all but dismissed Jefferson as a schemer. Hamilton was responsible for much of the administration’s success. Ultimately, says Ellis, Washington never conquered his ego but recognized posterity is the final judge and had the confidence to submit — unlike Napoleon, Lenin, Mao, etc.
6. Starr, Coast of Dreams (2005)
A provincial, largely forgettable treatment of public life in California from 1990-2003. Starr, the state librarian for most of the term, ranges from establishmentarian to postmodern lite, writing as if to please the academy. As an assessment of important events, the book lacks context and reads like too many clipped essays strung together, especially on such matters as political economy or social issues like ‘diversity’. A major theme, the comparison of Los Angeles and San Francisco, is poorly constructed as the southern metropole should be compared to the greater Bay Area. Starr shortchanges the digital revolution, devoting a scant seven pages to the dot coms — focused on the downturn at that — and misses the cloud / collaborative trend that is more important than offshore production as a barometer of innovation. The book’s treatment of second-tier cities (San Diego, Sacramento, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs) is somewhat useful, and it is also helpful on the aerospace collapse, crime in LA, and a few other topics. But the decade’s principal triumphs are seen as large public works (often in the Southland), and much cultural analysis appears to be narrowly written for architects. There is little political narrative, even as the state was moving toward a single-party oligarchy. Starr’s primary question — wither California’s middle-class dream — is inconclusively answered. More rigorous historical treatment awaits.
7. Conquest, Dragons of Expectations (2005)
Unsound or biased readings of history create false expectations of present politics. Conquest, a specialist in Soviet Russia, reviews the Enlightenment, the French and Russian revolutions, and the legacy of Western intellectuals such as Hegel. There is a crucial distinction between the ‘law-liberty’ culture of Britain and America, and the prescriptive traditions of the Continent. Conquest demonstrates the left’s hyper-criticism of tradition and its ready acceptance of the untried. Thus the title.