Quacks, Business Coaches, and useful advice

photo © 2008 Alec Vuijlsteke | more info (via: Wylio)I recently came across this post about the phenomenon of Life Coaching and I’m in the rare case of disagreeing with the specifics while agreeing with the general theory.  The book in question, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long by David Rock I have actually read and find to be well sourced, valid and useful.

That being said, I would recommend a sixth tell tale sign that the speaker just wants your money or attention, to wit the use of the Apple MacIntosh as an illustration of their theory.  I’ve heard this a couple of times, usually as it relates to the importance of focus, design, R&D, Marketing, knowing your customer etc.  Far too many companies are successful with the opposite of all of those attributes but they never get mentioned by the speaker.

Addendum: On the whole I favor coaching in general, self-awareness is essential to success and coaches usually provide that.   It is the systems that are suspect.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Tags: Books

 

Written By Steve French

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 10th, 2010 at 1:23 pmand is filed under Misc, Sentiment . You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

2 responses to “Quacks, Business Coaches, and useful advice”

1. Are you saying Steve Jobs DIDN’T understand his customer base or how to market to them?

   Am curious to know what companies have been successful that didn’t know who their customers were and/or did not market to them as well as make a commitment to research and design

   Reply

2. No, I’m saying that any use of Apple to illustrate a point is quite suspect.

   Reply

 

 

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