Thursday, March 11, 2010

The Art of Being Lazy

My celebrity status must be growing because I was invited to attend tha UPSA meeting (http://www.upsa.co.za/) as an ambassador for APMP (http://www.apmp.org.za/). Here I am with keynote speaker Alan Versteeg from Huthwaite Africa, and UPSA chairperson Tony Cross.

They were having a quiet word about the future of sales training before Alan did his song and dance routine. It’s lucky he had heaps of stories and analogies to share because the technology failed him for a while. I loved the title of his presentation because I myself am known to be lazy from time to time, about dusting cobwebs and feeding the cat, for example.

Alan shared some brilliant video snippets that made it clear to me that the world is changing in complexity and velocity. One of the gems I took away from his session was R = SNA, which stands for the Results you achieve depending on the Skills you have, the Number of times you use these skills and how you Allocate your efforts. His analogy was that if you want to lose weight, all you need to do is to eat less of the wrong things, eat more of the right things, and exercise. I guess he was hinting that I should eat fewer newts.

Well, the audience loved Alan Versteeg. Naturally they enjoyed me and my human Sandy Pullinger, chair person of APMP and MD of nFold (http://www.nfold.com/). But they lapped up in big chunks Douglas Kruger’s examples of how to use stories to present an idea in a more powerful way than facts. I can see why he won the SA Public Speaking championship 5 times. Watch him in action at http://www.douglaskruger.co.za/.