Tim Ohai thinks change management is a scam. He's got receipts — he used to be the guy they put on stage to sell it.

His argument is simple and it stings: change management is written from the organization's point of view, never the individual's. So I stopped him and asked him to swap in two different words. Sales enablement. He didn't hesitate. Same thing. We're just going to shove it onto people and hope they like it.

That's the conversation. Three disciplines, one mistake — we keep building for the org and delivering to a human being who never got asked.

Tim wrote Sales Chaos in 2011, before most of the industry had settled on what to call any of this. He's since walked away from the enablement label entirely for strategic execution, which he'll tell you is the thing nobody was ever formally taught. He asks rooms full of leaders who was trained to execute strategy. Crickets. Every time.

We get into why 95% of AI initiatives produce nothing measurable and why that's not the AI's fault. Why most pipeline reviews inspect the deal instead of the customer. And the UK team that nearly doubled its win rate off one conversation their reps didn't want to have — because a GM refused to move on to the next idea for three straight quarters.

The line that stuck with me: if I don't have clarity and I don't have empowerment, coaching is just a nice hug.

Tim's at timohai.com, and he's very active on LinkedIn.

A deal stalls. The buyer goes quiet. And the industry has one answer: more. More sequences, more touches, more tooling. Then somebody says the rep needs to want it more.

The rep is almost never the problem.

In this episode, Lee reads Chapter One of The Second Meeting, the first book in the Acelera Sales Fables. Before the reading, he tells the origin story. Alex Mercer started as Stacy, a brief appearance in a nonfiction manuscript. Following her career from bank teller to VP of Sales selling fintech took more room than a few sentences, so she jumped ship and took a novel with her.

He also talks about Max, the cavachon who spent fifteen years teaching him presence and is still teaching him two years after his passing, and about what presence looks like on a Tuesday: in a room with ten people, on a video call, at a checkout counter, on the phone with your mother.

Have the conversation with Alex: https://thesecondmeeting.com Buy the book, or a stack for the team:https://books.acelera.group Lee on Amazon: https://amazon.com/author/leelevitt Work with Lee: https://acelera.group

Together We Win, the nonfiction book Stacy walked out of, is out on Amazon now.

Cory Dunham failed the same calculus class twice — for the same reason both times. He wouldn't ask for help.

That story sits at the center of this conversation. Cory is an executive coach, keynote speaker, business strategist, and private pilot who's spent 40 years in business learning that the voice telling you not to raise your hand is not you. It's a recording from years ago, and it only shows up when it doesn't serve you.

We get into what that costs a salesperson. If you walk into a meeting carrying "I'm not worthy to be here," you cannot simultaneously help a customer transform their results. Those two things are in direct conflict.

Cory's traffic metaphor is the one that stays with you: when you keep switching who you are — pumping the brakes on your authentic self — the people behind you honk, pull back, or run into you. None of that builds a relationship.

We also dig into what real listening actually is. Cory thought it was shutting his mouth. Then he became a pilot, where you repeat back the controller's instruction word for word or somebody gets hurt. Different stakes than a sales call. Same discipline.

Plus: the four-step path to earning the helm, why The Four Agreements is the book I'd hand every salesperson, ADHD and hyperfocus, improv as listening practice, and what the word "sell" originally meant before we ruined it.

Connect with Cory:

LinkedIn — Cory Dunham

Email — cory@corydunham.com

Podcast — unapologeticleadershippodcast.com