Pink’s concluding chapter, “Serve,” is the all-but-inevitable bookend to his early chapters’ focus on the Digital Age shift of power from sellers and large organizations to customers and smaller organizations and networks.
Pink summarizes: “This is what it means to serve: improving another’s life and, in turn, improving the world. That’s the lifeblood of service and the final secret to moving others.”
The book’s concluding paragraph sums up the unity of life and work that is the essence of service–and effective influence in any setting, from day-to-day business to the highest levels of political leadership:
“Among the things that distinguish our species from others is our combination of idealism and artistry–our desire both to improve the world and to provide that world with something it didn’t know it was missing. Moving others doesn’t require that we neglect those nobler aspects of our nature. Today it demands that we embrace them. It begins and ends by remembering that to sell is human.”
I really enjoyed reading this book this semester. Something I never associated with sales was serving. I thought of it more of a selfish act of trying to bring in money and more profit. The final of the chapter of the book was a great reminder and encouraging.
testacr22
Providing to your customer is serving, great insight!
Until this class I never looked at sales as a form of service. Now I see that it is one of the most crucial parts of the sales process.