Keith Rosen Quotes

If you do not have a defined process that moves your people forward so the can achieve greater results, then what is it you are managing?

1. Did you conduct one-to-one meetings with each salesperson on your team? 2. Did you ask each of them how they like to be managed? Are they coachable? 3. Did you inquire about their prior experience with their past manager? Was it positive or negative? 4. Did you set the expectations of your relationship with them? Did you ask them what they needed and expected from their manager? What changes do they want to see? 5. Did you inform them about how you like to manage and your style of management? This would open up the space for a discussion regarding how you may manage differently from your predecessor. 6. Did you let them know you just completed a coaching course that would enable you to support them even further and maximize their talents? 7. Did you explain to them the difference between coaching and traditional management? 8. Did you enroll them in the benefits of coaching? That is, what would be in it for them? 9. Did you let them know about your intentions, goals, expectations, and aspirations for each of them and for the team as a whole? 10. How have you gone about learning the ins and outs of the company?Are you familiar with the internal workings, culture, leadership team, and subtleties that make the company unique? Have you considered that your team may be the best source of knowledge and intelligence for this? Did you communicate your willingness and desire to learn from them as well, so that the learning and development process can be mutually reciprocated?

I ask managers, "What exactly is it you manage?" Although they say manage people, the truth is that managers today spend most of their time managing processes, projects, data, problems and information. If you don't have a defined process that moves your people forward so they can achieve GREATER RESULTS, then what is it you are managing? You're managing the status quo.

The traditional scenario to facilitate change is typically a stressed-out manager who lays the same stress on his salespeople that his boss dumped on him. “Work harder; get focused; our jobs can be on the line; just bring in some more business.” This hollow approach seldom drives change.

Amplifying these tensions is the extensive espionage that Israel engages in against the United States. According to the GAO, the Jewish state “conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the United States of any ally.”95 Stealing economic secrets gives Israeli firms important advantages over American businesses in the global marketplace and thus imposes additional costs on U.S. citizens. More worrying, however, are Israel’s continued efforts to steal America’s military secrets. This problem is highlighted by the infamous case of Jonathan Pollard, an American intelligence analyst who gave Israel large quantities of highly classified material between 1984 and 1985. After Pollard was caught, the Israelis refused to tell the United States what Pollard gave them.96 The Pollard case is but the most visible tip of a larger iceberg. Israeli agents tried to steal spy-camera technology from a U.S. firm in 1986, and an arbitration panel later accused Israel of “perfidious,” “unlawful,” and “surreptitious” conduct and ordered it to pay the firm, Recon/Optical Inc., some $3 million in damages. Israeli spies also gained access to confidential U.S. information about a Pentagon electronic intelligence program and tried unsuccessfully to recruit Noel Koch, a senior counterterrorism official in the Defense Department. The Wall Street Journal quoted John Davitt, former head of the Justice Department’s internal security section, saying that “those of us who worked in the espionage area regarded Israel as being the second most active foreign intelligence service in the United States.”97 A new controversy erupted in 2004 when a key Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, was arrested on charges of passing classified information regarding U.S. policy toward Iran to an Israeli diplomat, allegedly with the assistance of two senior AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. Franklin eventually accepted a plea bargain and was sentenced to twelve years in prison for his role in the affair, and Rosen and Weissman are scheduled to go on trial in the fall of 2007.98