10 July Exploiting Success (...starve...feed...)

[Paul Terlemezian]

Problems tend to get our attention. It's been said that people will pay more and pay faster to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. Salespeople are taught to find the client's pain and address it. This makes sense and is not likely to change. It may however be a trap if we invest too heavily to address pain without focusing on results.

 

Drucker asserts that we should study successes before problems and make sure that we are allocating sufficient resources to exploit (i.e. feed) them. This may result in starving the problems.

 

We oftern see a focus on reducing travel and training expenses during periods of economic challenge. If in fact we could identify training that was creating positive results then perhaps we would shift our expenditures to those training activities.

 

This would then create more success and more opportunity for investmemt.