In a word, humankind has used technology to come to grips with the world for millennia now. Today we are entering a new dimension. Technology is now bearing down on us, quite literally. Anyone who has looked into the future of medicine knows that technical implants and IT will have an instrumental role to play. Biotechnology is yet another chapter in the future story of medicine and is causing us to question our very understanding of what is human. But medicine is just one staging area for the technological revolution that will far overshadow the Industrial Revolution.

The financial sector is another area where technology is bearing down on us. IT has a key part to play. This fact, too, gives rise to a question. Are we handling technology correctly? What standards guide our thinking and action? Read more →

It is all the more important that we appropriately realize the significance of sales to company success and understand it as a process. Like all other processes associated with other corporate functions, sales needs to be structured and designed in a professional, goal-oriented manner. We work and live today in a decade of sales. Successful selling is the best way for companies that have generated benefits to give them to their customers.

It is no good just to talk about customer benefits. You have to make sure that customers, both male and female, actually receive them. That is the only way to generate growth. We have decades behind us in which other corporate functions were the focal point of interest and corresponding paradigms shaped the issue of IT use. Read more →

Sales constitute an essential corporate function, the success of which depends on transparency and flexibility. The right mindset is essential in this context, too. Previous experience shows that sales and the personnel in sales tend to respond negatively to transparency requirements. That has nothing to do with IT applications per se. It is more an expression of a mindset of fear. People are afraid of being monitored, people are afraid of a management that prefers seeing a half-empty glass rather than a half-full one when it comes to opportunities.

This very attitude is obsolete, however, for management and for sales. The fact is that greater transparency in sales is not a threat but rather a big opportunity for everyone involved. The more information is available about sales and about opportunities, the more effectively expertise can be transferred among the individual functional units in the company. Greater transparency in sales allows better support from Marketing, for example. That is important. People who do not find out about something affecting them always have to react after the fact instead of acting proactively as it happens. Read more →