Looking at the Tom Peter’s site today I was interested in his musings about business academics who had the potential to win a Nobel Prize. The issue he points to is that there is a Nobel Prize for economics, but not one for business management. He goes on to say:

“Make no mistake: Management is an art . . . not a science. (Frankly, it’s not all that clear to many, even those in the field, that economics is a science)”

I find it interesting as to how broadly the metaphor of “art” versus “science” can be applied to just about any profession. In sales automation done right I specifically use the metaphor as it applies to sales. If you are a natural salesperson it infers that you rely on the “art” of selling, in the same way as if you were a natural politician, or a natural criminal lawyer. The “art” of mastering something mostly depends on talents you were born with—sure, they can be honed and polished with some training (using the science?). Mastering a science however is based on learning an established rule book about a subject, such that you can use this knowledge to spring board into new ideas that add to the rule book. The ability to innovate within the realm of a science probably depends on the natural ability of the individual (art?).

These ideas are used in SADR to illustrate how good salespeople can intuitively rely on different degrees of the art and science of their selling experience. If salespeople understand how their interaction with the customer is generally dominated by art or science, depending on their comfort zone, they can learn to “tune” the balance to achieve the optimum results. This concept is one of the driving theses in OPM sales methodology.

This agreement gets full marks from me, and is a step forward in providing an optimized mobile platform for salespeople to conduct business. RIM gave us universal, easy access to information in the form of e-mail. Palm gave us the ability to run complex business applications from a very small footprint. The ideas in sales automation done right have already been running on the Palm platform for three years, and they work well. When they run on the Treo with RIM software, they show the promise of working even better.

Palm is also bringing out a Treo that will run on the Microsoft operating system. If you were to ask Steve Jobs today if his highly protective stance on licensing out the Apple operating system decades ago was the best thing to do – he would say NO.

Palm has got it right.