800-CEO-READ Blog

New Excerpt up - from The Sales Manager's Success Manual

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There's a new chapter up on the Excerpts blog--Chapter 19 of The Sales Manager's Success Manual by Wayne M. Thomas (AMACOM). This book covers fundamental sales management topics including compensation, forecasting, and motivation, along with more advanced topics such as dealing with internal politics, understanding generational issues, managing up, and developing intuition. It also shows how managers must be more productive than ever while relying more on partners and technology with reduced resources in the field. Chapter 19 focuses on the sales-oriented CEO.

There is another important axis on which to view your CEO. One of our experts termed this as "evolved" or "unevolved." A CEO, like any unevolved manager, is limited by a narrow scope of interest. One could argue that the primary focus for Carly Fiorina during her days as HP's head was, well, Carly Fiorina. In her later book, she blamed her woes on the machinations of others. Apparently, she remains unevolved.

Mark Hurd next assumed the reins and was swept into the HP Board scandal early in his tenure. He could have blamed others, but instead ceaselessly uttered mea culpa. Obviously, he demonstrated an emotional maturity that he was a team player who could be counted upon to shoulder his own share of the burden. He did not look for a scapegoat. This demonstrated that Hurd was an evolved player whom his managers could trust. Hurd and Fiorina are archetypes of the CEO behaviors just discussed.

Here's a direct link to the excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/007521.html#more

Posted by Rebecca at December 11, 2007 1:04 PM | TrackBack