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Recent Articles from Todd Ordal
Measuring success
I was on a trip to a prospective client who wanted help crafting strategy and better articulating objectives. The CEO had a great deal of passion for the business, his customers and his employees, but his measures of success were ethereal, more about feel than metrics. If he heard good stories fro...
Courageous vs. heroic leaders
Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! Is it Superman? No, it’s just another heroic CEO. Resembling Jimmy Olsen in his early career, our hero is somehow transformed by his newly refurbished office on mahogany row into a superh...
Top six rules for dealing with uncertainty
“Toddy-boy, you’re just going to have to deal with the ambiguity!” Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko’s, said that to me after significantly changing our growth targets. I’d just spent weeks working with my team on capital plans, new store locations, staffing plans, etc., for the coming year. I wanted...
Band of Brothers…
Perhaps you saw this miniseries, one of the best things I’ve seen on television, depicting real soldiers in WWII. It dawned on me that the most engaged, committed teams I’ve been part of or worked with had much in common with the Band of Brothers soldiers. I’m not delusional. Nothing we do in busi...
Prepare for bends in the road
There is naturally fear in making predictions about the future because you are virtually guaranteed being wrong about at least part of your prediction. Most leaders in businesses are more comfortable waiting for current reality to change and then trying to react to it. Depending upon your industr...
Driving without your headlights
Many businesses try to navigate the road ahead by looking in the rear view mirror, and some haven’t turned on the lights! The fact that you cannot see around all the corners doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. You’ll never see all the competitive threats, substitute products or environmental changes...
The power of friction
Although at first it might seem desirable to create a business environment without friction, it’s a big mistake. Without friction, issues go unresolved because feathers might get ruffled, people avoid hard decisions because someone might lose, folks don’t give honest feedback, and the block of woo...
Beyond the entrepreneur: Building business intelligence
Large, successful organizations can be great educational environments for the advancing leader to build business intelligence, particularly if there’s a formal program for leadership development. However, they can also be a dark alley, forcing people to stay between the lines and become a function...
The rate of change balance
If you sell beer like a good friend of mine, you recognize that you need a good menu of craft beers to supplement the Budweiser or Coors. If you sell books like a favorite client of mine, you may wonder and plan for how to sell your content in the new world order (if you haven’t already turned the...
Profiting from play
I was fortunate to spend 20 years helping grow Kinko’s. In our “formative” years, we had lots of fun. Perhaps too much fun. However, many of us were willing to work obscene hours partly because we had so much fun with our co-workers. We had an annual event called “The Picnic” where we flew thousan...
The beauty of a routine
Routinized work has gotten a bad reputation. I readily admit I couldn’t spend all day on an assembly line and be happy. Even a trip to a guru on a mountaintop wouldn’t persuade me. I worked in a warehouse in college doing manual labor (the same task, night after night) and made good money but hate...
Making pigs fly
A friend expressed frustration with his company the other day. When I queried him about his frustration, he summed it up by saying that they had started to focus on “metrics over mission.” In this particular example, concern for improving the lives of their customers is starting to take a back sea...
