"Everybody's In Sales Now!" Says Dan Pink

I just started reading Daniel Pink’s new book To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Pink’s basic point is that, while research shows that 1 out of 9 Americans today works in sales, so do the other 8! In other words, even people who don’t sell products or services still spend a significant part of their workday engaging in what Pink calls “non-sales selling” – serving clients or customers, or persuading, teaching, instructing, coaching, or otherwise “moving” other people in a certain direction.

As I embark on my journey through the book, I’m eagerly anticipating Chapter 8, titled “Improvise,” which focuses on my fellow Applied Improvisation Network member Cathy Salit and her work involving the ways in which improv theater skills can be applied to the act of moving others. I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about that chapter (and the entire book) after I read it. Right off, though, I encountered a point in the second chapter that echoes one of my earliest articles in this blog.

In that article, I described the Scientific Management theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose basic premise I summed up as follows:

Thinkers think. Planners plan. Workers work.

In other words, according to Taylor, the role of management is to define the “one best way” to perform any task through rigorous measurement, analysis, and planning. The role of the worker is then to perform the task exactly as designed – no questions asked, no suggestions accepted.

However, as I noted in my article, since Taylor’s heyday in the early 20^th Century:

“ … the spread of complexity, education, and entitlement have resulted in a world where organizations should expect – and, in fact, need – every member to be Thinker, Planner, and Worker (or, let’s say, ‘Doer’) rolled into one.”

Pink also notes that one of the hallmarks of present-day life is the melding of multiple roles within a single individual. Pink cites two primary forces driving this trend. First, he cites statistics that demonstrate the explosive growth of small, entrepreneurial enterprises in the past few years, a trend that is only expected to continue.  This trend has had a huge impact on the very notion of the definition of “work” and “job”:

“What people actually do in tiny operations is often fundamentally different from what they do within massive ones. In particular, large organizations tend to rely on specialization. A two-person company doesn’t need a human resources department. A two-thousand-person company can’t survive without one. In bigger companies, selling is often a specialized function – a department, a division, a task that some people do so that others can specialize in something else. But proprietors of small operations don’t have that luxury. They must wear several hats – often at the same time – and one of these hats is the selling cap.”

But this role-melding trend isn’t limited to the one- or two-person shop. The second force that Pink cites is the need for ever-shorter lead times in a world of permanent whitewater, which is requiring even large, established companies to demand what Pink calls elasticity – or a breadth of skills – of its employees. Companies can no longer afford the delay in responding to external circumstances - market conditions, competitors’ actions, customer expectations - that can result from highly segmented role definitions. And as Pink notes:

“When organizations were highly segmented, roles tended to be fixed. If you were an accountant, you did accounting. You didn’t have to worry about much outside your domain because other people specialized in those areas. The same was true when business conditions were stable and predictable. You knew at the beginning of a given quarter, or even a given year, about how much and what kind of accounting you’d need to do. However, in the last decade, the circumstances that gave rise to fixed skills have disappeared…. What an individual does day to day on the job now must stretch across functional boundaries. Designers analyze. Analysts design. Marketers create. Creators market.” [emphasis added]

Or, leaping off my earlier characterization:

Thinkers plan. Planners work. Workers think.

And to add Pink’s conclusion from his observation about “non-sales selling”:

Everybody sells!

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

Immediately the question comes to mind: Does this trend toward all-roles-in-one-person run against the grain of another trend I’ve frequently discussed in this blog – the notion that people should play to their strengths? Certainly, some people who find themselves expected to play these multiple roles will discover that they’re just not very good at some of them. If they try to follow the strengths-based approach and only do those things they are good at, will the trends that Pink cites make that option tougher to employ?

These are questions I’ll return to at a later time. One thing I do suspect, though, is that there is such a thing as “foundational skills” that every person, no matter his or her role, must be able to play at some level if he or she hopes to achieve anything in the world. And the ability to “move” people – to influence, instruct, engage, etc. - to at least some degree is probably one of those foundational skills. Very few of us could afford to (or I imagine would want to) sit in an ivory tower thinking great thoughts that never filter down to others (even a few) in a way that might change their behavior (even a little). As I continue to read Pink’s book, I’ll be eager to see how he addresses this strain of resistance I’m sure many people have to the idea of being in sales (even the non-selling kind).