Love it (or, more likely, hate it) office politics is a fact of life. It’s there and it’s never going away, even though it’s almost universally accepted as being a bad thing. We tell teach other “don’t play the game—you’ll get burned!” and that’s probably sound advice. But there’s a difference between playing politics, and being aware of politics. Everyone knows what playing politics is about. It’s actively trying to move one’s own agenda forward at all costs, not necessarily

We’ve all been there a few times. You’re in a situation where you have to give a sales pitch. Maybe you’re trying to sell something to a client. Maybe you’re trying to convince your VP to give you the green light for a project. Or maybe you’re trying to land a job. Whatever the reason, the task at hand is the same: you need to persuade someone… and you have a shortcoming. It could be a small kind of shortcoming, or a big, deal-breaker kind of shortcoming. But it’s there, omin

The digital age has made it simpler than ever to find sales leads. But that doesn’t mean selling has gotten any easier. Having access to millions of prospects is one thing. Actually turning those prospects into clients is another. Some people spam leads. Others target them to a machine-like level of precision. The sweet spot—as always—is somewhere in the middle. Modern internet wisdom tells marketers to target leads down to the molecular level. After all, since the digital wo

One upon a time, many years ago, I bought some stock in a big tech company. Every year, that company would send me their annual report. It was seemingly hundreds of pages long, mostly filled with small type text. I made a point of looking through that report every time I received it. By “looking through it”, I mean flipping through the pages really fast and then throwing it into the recycling bin. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in the company’s performance, strategies and

If you’re not happy with your job, you can change jobs. That can be as easy as sending your CV off to a recruiter. But what happens if you’re not happy with your career? Changing careers can be a major challenge. The reason is that once you’ve done something for a while, you get pigeonholed into that thing. Fortunately, there’s one constant no matter how challenging the proposed move: people. People are the ones categorizing you and they’re the ones you have to convince. So h