sales

Isn’t technology wonderful? I can sit in my office all day (when I’m not speaking to an audience) and communicate to my heart’s content with the entire world via my blog, e-mail, twitter and Skype. My wife doesn’t understand this – she doesn’t understand that I would rather do it this way than use the more traditional method of picking up the phone and calling someone.

Of course I have a valid reason – I spend most of my time in front of audiences where I can’t answer the phone so I want to make people used to communicating with me in other ways. But what’s your excuse?

Having recently facilitated the toughest meeting of my 15 year consulting career, I did some serious reflection on the whole meeting culture and the reasons we spend so much time in them. Heck, some of the companies I've worked with book meetings to discuss the next meeting!

One of the great South African Olympic achievementsat the Athens Games in '04, swimming gold medals aside, was the Silver medal in the men’s 800m by South Africa’s Mbulaeni Mulaudzi. This result is made remarkable by Mulaudzi’s early season and pre-Olympic form – or total lack thereof. In his last race in the “Golden League” prior to the ‘Games, he came stone last! What did he, and other performers do in order to get out of the “slump”.