For bestselling author Tim Sanders, the biggest problem with the game of sales today is that it has become less like playing Pong, and more like a round of Halo. Selling in the 21st century is incredibly challenging. Sales professionals face multiple decision makers, layers of product complexity, and cloud based competitors. For Tim, the key to being a true sales driven organisation, is to build on the innovation that deal-focused teamwork can unlock. In his words, a quality sale is a thousand problems solved. Catching up in Las Vegas, we discussed why creative brainstorming doesn’t work, the essential habit of conscious collaboration, and why leaders need to think like designers when it comes to creating emotional experiences for customers, partners and employees.

What does it take to create a great culture? If anyone knows, it is Robert Richman. He wrote the book on it, The Culture Blueprint, and after embedding himself at Zappos, co-founded Zappos Insights, the program that helps leaders learn the secrets behind the online shoe company’s game-changing employee culture. Over breakfast at the Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood, we talked about the system dynamics of what connects people, why great cultures are noisy, how Zappos is able to constantly re-invent itself, creating a startup mentality inside big companies, the power of re-imagining meetings, and why culture is like an operating system.