The PartnerShip Book Club
02/14/2013 — Scott Frederick
After a brief hiatus, the PartnerShip employee "Book Club" started up again a few weeks ago. The PartnerShip Book Club is organized and facilitated by Tina Straw, director of business development and organizational learning for PartnerShip. To kick off the New Year, she selected To Sell is Human by Dan Pink - a book in which she was a part of the limited "release team" before it was made public.
As Tina put it, "This book will appeal to ALL readers in the company, because as Pink explains, no matter what we do during the day, we're all selling on some level or another." In introducing the book, Tina goes on to say that (as quoted in the book) "It is unlike any book about sales you have read (or ignored) before. That's because selling in all its dimensions—whether pushing Fords on a car lot or pitching ideas in a meeting—has changed more in the last ten years than it did over the previous hundred. Most of what we think we understand about selling is constructed atop a foundation of assumptions that has crumbled."
We had about twenty employee participants who read the book and then met yesterday to discuss their collective observations. It was a lively discussion and, while the reviews were mixed, everyone agreed that the book contains many interesting examples and plenty of useful anecdotes. In particular, everyone liked chapter 7 where Mr. Pink gave some useful exercises for companies to more successfully develop their "pitch"; such as the one word pitch, the rhyming pitch, the Twitter pitch, and the Pixar pitch. The team discussed how the PartnerShip story could be expressed using these various techniques.
To end the discussion, the team agreed that there was a little something for just about everyone in To Sell is Human, and that many of Mr. Pink's exercises could be incorporated into our ongoing employee training sessions.