According to the Northern Colorado Business Report, there are now 1.2 compliance officers for every loan officer in Colorado banks. (I was tempted to put three exclamation points behind that sentence, but if its content doesn’t blow your mind, they wouldn’t help.) Imagine the cost of health care if every doctor had to have 1.2 […]
By Todd Ordal A cynic says time is short. I don’t buy that. It is, however, predictable and constant. Perhaps when you were younger, you worked somewhere where you just “put in your eight hours.” You were likely not engaged and frankly not providing much value to the organization. Hopefully that phase of your work life […]
I’ve been obsessed with the Tour de France for years. Thanks to recording devices, I’ve only missed a couple of televised stages since Greg LeMond’s dramatic win on the Champs-Élysées in 1989 on the final stage. While driving across Utah once with my wife and kids on vacation, I had a friend call me every […]
Clients often ask me to help them diagnose and solve organizational dysfunction. In my observations, here are the top 12 reasons for dysfunction: No healthy conflict. Most people worry about too much conflict, but my experience is that there’s too little “healthy” conflict. If executives cannot speak their mind and disagree — about issues, not people […]
You likely have multiple “bosses.” These might include your spouse, a religious leader, the neighborhood homeowners’ association, the IRS, building inspectors or perhaps a fire chief if you’re a volunteer firefighter. I’d argue that, to a point, shedding bosses is as healthy as shedding pounds (keep the spouse). Nowhere is this more important than at […]
Investments in “growth” don’t always pay off in the year the investment occurs “For the farmer the calendar year is indeed much more than a convenient measurement; his production cycle actually runs from harvest to harvest. But to apply the farmer’s unit of economic life to an industrial economy, except as a conventional measurement, cannot […]
A recent Denver Business Journal article about the rapid growth of two Colorado-based companies — Snooze and Larkburger — caught my attention the other day. Not just because Snooze has great breakfast with a cool atmosphere and not because I’m envious of Larkburger for locating in ski areas. It’s because of their methods of expansion — not […]
Dramatic culture change requires a high level of confidence, thick skin and dramatic action One of the more difficult challenges CEOs can entertain is changing their organization’s culture. Doing this over an extended period takes perseverance and is like trying to maintain an exercise program when surrounded by people with chocolate cake and spare forks. […]
A friend just closed a deal — a “carve out” from a company in the U.K. He purchased a portion of the company and turned it into a new enterprise; his new financial partner is a private equity firm. The purchase documentation contains language I found humorous but delightfully simple. (The British have a smart […]
What role does benchmarking play in your strategy? I “grew up” in a multiunit retail environment where benchmarking worked wonders as a tool to spread great ideas and fix broken stores, districts and areas. But whether you are focused internally or externally, benchmarking has a dark side. As a problem-solving tool, we examined stores that […]