Official website of Dave Berkus
- The Power of Owning Your Mistakes 09/11/2025Your team is watching. Not just your successes, but how you handle the moments when things go sideways. When the quarterly projections miss by 20%. When the product launch stumbles. When your strategic bet doesn’t pay off. Here’s what separates exceptional leaders from the rest: they don’t hide behind excuses or deflect blame downward. The […]
- Dealing with bullies in your workplace 09/04/2025I have stories and very likely so do you. I’ll tell a few at the end of this article. But first: The pit in your stomach every Monday morning. The way your shoulders tense when you see their name in your inbox. The sick feeling when they walk into the conference room. Workplace bullying isn’t […]
- The Pricing Paradox: Why Most Companies Surrender Their Competitive Advantage 08/28/2025After 50 years in business and countless board meetings, I’ve watched too many companies hand over their competitive edge the moment a competitor undercuts their price. Here’s the brutal truth: If your only defense against competition is lowering prices, you don’t have a strategy—you have a problem. The Mystery-Margin Connection The most successful companies I’ve […]
- Two words you’ve got to use! 08/21/2025One of the most valuable tools in an executive’s arsenal is the use of the question chain in planning meetings or to analyze scenarios that might result from an action. The powerful words are “What if…” followed by an ever-deeper question that follows the possible results of an action, or a decision based upon the […]
- Head up! Don’t be left behind. 08/14/2025Markets and competitors change. Are you being left behind? Over the years, I have often heard complaints from CEO friends that they have become so swamped by the demands of their growing businesses that they feel themselves further and further from the center of their industry, no longer at the forefront of information and competitive […]
- “The Every Three-Million Dollar Crisis” 08/07/2025Here is a phenomenon I discovered over time when dealing with many small start-ups in their early revenue period. A very predictable series of rotating crises seemed to befall almost every one of these young companies. These became so predictable that I could accurately label them as occurring about every $3 million in gross profit […]
- Defend you pricing against the competition! 07/31/2025This week, we continue our series on marketing and positioning. There can be nothing more important in your business planning that selecting the proper pricing niche, making your story clear using that niche, and the defending your position against the competition. So, here comes the lesson and your challenge. The five major niches There […]
- “Where there’s mystery, there’s margin.” 07/24/2025Here’s a phrase I created in the early 1980’s to describe what I clearly saw as the last chance to make high margins on the sale of computer hardware to businesses. In the day of the mainframe and then the minicomputer, margins for manufacturers exceeded 35% and dealers were granted a 35% margin as well. […]
- Three magic questions to increase your sales: 07/17/2025Why buy IT? Why buy MINE? Why buy NOW? What a powerful set of three questions. These are so succinct, so well defined, so precise that everyone in sales and everyone involved in marketing must be able to answer these three questions without pause, and convincingly. Turning these into statements instead of questions provides […]
- Faster is sometimes more valuable than better. 07/10/2025And doing both well usually wins the day. This is one of those arguable insights, where both sides win. Dell is a great example of emphasis upon fast, creating a customized computer in 48 hours or less, bringing in assemblies and components just-in-time to make the assembly line. However, if Dell quality were poor and […]
