Jeremy Pollard

A practical architect of winning work

Jeremy Pollard built a focused Scoop.it body of work around the craft of winning business. From a Shipley Asia Pacific perspective, he followed business development as a process discipline: part strategy, part writing, part negotiation, part psychology, and part organisational habit.

The business-development systems thinker

Pollard’s bio named the core concern clearly: helping executive management de-risk business development and build revenue consistency. His Scoop.it work reflected that mandate by gathering material on proposals, capture strategy, negotiation, writing and leadership into one applied playbook.

The pre-RFT strategist

He seemed most interested in the moments before the obvious contest begins. The archive paid close attention to pre-positioning, shaping requirements, stakeholder engagement and the quiet work that makes a proposal more likely to win before it is submitted.

The plain-spoken persuasion coach

His editorial personality was practical and opinionated. He liked useful tactics, but he pushed back against jargon, shallow content and unethical influence, returning often to clarity, proof and trust.

What defined this curation

Process before heroics

Across 331 analysed posts, the work framed business development as a repeatable system. Capture planning, proposal management, client positioning and customer proof were treated as connected practices rather than isolated moments of sales effort.

A wide reading field

The selections drew from management journals, business media, psychology, technology, negotiation research and communication advice. The pattern was consistent: borrow useful evidence from many fields, then apply it to winning work.

A coach in the margins

Pollard’s notes were usually substantive and coaching-oriented. He used the material to argue, translate and advise, often through a Shipley lens and often with an eye on practical behaviour change.

Persuasion with a conscience

The archive balanced ambition with restraint. It valued persuasion and competitive advantage, but repeatedly returned to ethics, trust, listening and the dangers of weak claims or manipulative influence.

Deep dives

Winning work as an operating discipline

Pollard’s central move was to translate broad management thinking into a bid-and-capture discipline. Leadership, purpose and client perception were not treated as soft background; they became tools for shaping the way an organisation positioned itself before a formal competition began.

The topic also showed a craftsman’s respect for language. Posts on grammar, writing and stage presence sat beside articles on win strategy because, in this worldview, unclear writing was not a cosmetic flaw. It was a business risk.

Productivity appeared as part of the same operating system. Timeboxing, focus and speed were framed as habits that helped teams move from intent to execution when deadlines, proposals and client demands compressed the work.

Influence before the negotiation room

In the negotiation topic, Pollard treated influence as something that started long before terms were on the table. A post about global consensus-building could sit naturally beside business-development advice because the underlying question was the same: how do parties move toward agreement without pretending interests are identical?

The selection repeatedly returned to emotion, anger, listening and self-control. This gave the topic a practical edge: negotiation was not just leverage and tactics, but preparation for the human moments when a deal can drift, harden or open.

His editorial voice was notably wary of manipulation. Influence, persuasion and negotiation were presented as skills that should improve understanding and position, not as tricks for forcing compliance.

Proof made memorable

Best Story Wins gave Pollard’s proposal philosophy its narrative spine. Stories mattered because they helped buyers remember, compare and trust; they turned past performance into something more persuasive than a claim.

The topic was also impatient with empty business language. Jargon was treated as an obstacle to trust, especially in B2B settings where complex ideas already demand clarity.

A recurring tension ran through the topic: logic and emotion were not rivals. The strongest business stories carried evidence, context and feeling together, making proof easier to understand and harder to forget.