In this minipodcast, my friend Robert Wiesheu, who has sold in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for more than 10 years, discusses a little-known corner of the sales world: the use of local agents to break into a new country market. It's a challenging area with lots of traps - listen to Robert's common-sense recommendations. Roberto Verganti's book "Design-Driven Innovation" is one of the best business books of the year. It discusses the methods certain companies use to create products with radically new meanings, offering customers something they never realized they wanted and generating long-term competitive advantage and outsized profits as well. In this podcast, Professor Verganti discusses the ideas behind the book and how it applies to companies like Apple, BMW, Artemide, and Harley-Davidson.
We talked to Todd Mittleman of Honda last spring about Honda's environmentally-focused cars, the Civic GX natural gas vehicle and the FCX Clarity fuel cell vehicle (which, at the time, had not yet been released).
Highlights:I recently finished "Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it From Happening to You" and it is my favorite business book of the year so far. Sydney Finkelstein and his co-authors, Jo Whitehead and Andrew Campbell, systematically dissect why we sometimes make and carry through terrible business decisions--whether it's a poor acquisition decision, an ill-fated product redesign, or even deciding to park our money with Bernie Madoff or Allen Stanford. Even better, they let us know how to create structures that identify possibly faulty decisions in order to avoid them or, at minimum, monitor their outcomes carefully so bad ones can be reversed as quickly as possible.
For this edition of the podcast, I'm delighted to spend some time with my friend Robert Wiesheu, one of the most interesting guys I know and someone who's spent more than a decade selling to customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. As such, he has a great perspective on what it takes to successfully sell even if you don't look or sound like the people you're selling to.The latest podcast features a discussion with Scilla Andreen, co-founder and CEO of Indieflix, about the current state and future prospects of the independent film business.
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