Unless you just crawled out of the primordial ooze, you’ve heard a lot about how you must optimize your business to make millennials happy. Coddling, free time and pet-happy policies are mentioned often. In working with many companies that question what to do about this and observing what does and doesn’t work, I concluded the […]
Get On Board! Taking The Right Step Onto The Train Years ago, I worked with a large company in which the CEO hired a new senior executive right before a large annual meeting, which was to be his first real introduction to the company. Apparently, little thought was given to how this executive would integrate […]
My friend Dave and I have something in common: We’ll both die at least twice. Each of us had medical occurrences that caused breath and blood to stop flowing — his very recently, mine when I was a young man. I’d like to keep it to two; the first occurrence wasn’t so fun. Unlike physical […]
“ … organizational culture represents the collective values, beliefs, and principles of organizational members and is a product of such factors as history, product, market, technology, and strategy, type of employees, management style, and national culture. Culture includes the organization’s vision, values, norms, systems, symbols, language, assumptions, beliefs, and habits.” —excerpt from Wikipedia’s definition of […]
Don’t take cultural change lightly My wife and I recently read articles about Pope Francis publicly tongue-lashing his curia for the extreme office politics it practiced. One of us compared it with the mafia, but I won’t say which because one of us is a practicing Catholic. My wife didn’t ask me, “If the curia […]
I was shaving blind the other day in a hotel room after forgetting to replenish my travel-size shaving cream. I made do with some hair conditioner, which has the appropriate friction coefficient, but because it is virtually colorless, you can’t see which parts of your face you have shaved and which you have missed, you […]
Fun is a crucial part of business “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” —George Bernard Shaw I’m testing the theory that if I don’t act my age, I won’t grow old. When I look in the mirror, it appears that my theory is bunk, but damn […]
Get it on the calendar by Todd Ordal My wife is an artist and works primarily in clay. The pieces are very creative, many bordering on bizarre. (When our children were young, they thought they had the coolest mom ever when she had a piece depicting a hyena devouring a zebra removed from a show!) Her […]
Top four language barriers Todd Ordal I recently read that only 6 percent of teenagers check email daily. For those of us who are middle age and in business, it’s still a primary communication tool. I always wondered why my kids (in their 20s and 30s) respond to texts immediately but rarely reply to email. […]
Can collaboration in decision making go too far? Todd Ordal Most enlightened leaders understand that talented people won’t work in environments where their every move is choreographed and their decisions are second-guessed. They also know that with every pair of hands they hire, a brain usually comes along and they can leverage their team members’ […]