Toughest Call with Chaz Thorne

Making others see the need for change when they either can't or won't is a significant obstacle for many executives. In this episode of Toughest Call, Luc Mongeau, President and CEO of eSolutions Furniture, talks about a tough call he made in a previous leadership role: tackling a massive strategic shift that few others saw the need for.  Weeks into his position as President of Mars Canada, Luc recognized several early indicators that the company was slipping into decline. But others didn't see the situation the same way and were resistant to change. What Luc shares in this episode is a masterclass on how to lead significant organizational change.

How can organizational leaders prevent mission drift? In this episode of Toughest Call, Rob Angel, Creator of Pictionary, talks about how staying on mission resulted in him and his partners turning down a lucrative licensing deal. Rob originally dreamed up what would become one of the best-selling board games of all time four decades ago. The demand on the small business they created to publish the game in 1985 grew rapidly. Rob was tired of eating ramen noodles and assembling games by hand in his tiny apartment in Seattle, so they started to explore licensing to a larger games company. And after their first candidate didn't work out, they found themselves presented with an even larger opportunity.  But along with the big bucks came a big sacrifice. What Rob ultimately faced with this extremely lucrative deal was something many organizational leaders confront: How do I ensure that I'm staying true to our mission?

In this episode of Toughest Call, Izabella Roth, CEO of Infinity Healthcare Ltd., talks about how she boldly stepped into the creation of a new company at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.  Izabella shares the many changes she embraced in her business-building journey that took her from the days of panicking about making payroll to presently expanding Infinity into new markets.

What does it take to bring about an organization's strategic realignment? In this episode of Toughest Call, Scott Skinner, CEO of Clean Foundation, talks about how he and his team strategically repositioned their organization to heighten its impact. Scott takes us through how he initially positioned this strategic pivot for success, and then kept it on course, during execution.

How do we assess whether a partner is a good fit beyond a typical, surface-level analysis? In this episode of Toughest Call, Dr. Dianne Tyers talks about her decision to end a business partnership that would have a significant impact on her company’s revenue for several years. Though she was an entrepreneur at the time she made this tough call, Dianne is now Dean of the Faculty of Open Learning and Career Development at Dalhousie University. She shares what she learned about the importance of ensuring you share the values of an individual or organization before you enter into a partnership.

In this episode of Toughest Call, Mark Bowden, world-renowned body language expert and communications coach, walks us through the process he uses with leaders to guide them to present ideas effectively. We're doing a role-play: Toughest Call host Chaz Thorne is playing the role of CEO of a fictional company called Terrific Toboggan Co. With a fresh new one page strategic plan in hand, Chaz has come to Mark seeking advice on communicating the new plan to his wider team.

The “North Star” approach to impactful leadership follows the same path that elite athletes take to perform at a world-class level. In this episode of the Toughest Call podcast, Alan Stein Jr., keynote speaker and performance coach with over a decade of working with the NBA’s highest-performing athletes, shares how he used the North Star approach to pivot out of personal and professional burnout. Additionally, he talks about how he used his North Star to match the skills he acquired as an elite basketball trainer to identify a problem he could solve for corporations as a keynote speaker.

A challenging decision organizational leaders can face is when to grow, and by how much. In this episode of the Toughest Call, Suzie Yorke, Founder of Love Good Fats, talks about her decision to “go big” in launching her products across the United States with a major retailer. Additionally, she talks about the expansion process that took place while making the leap from an emerging brand in the natural goods channel to a CPG brand working with big retailers.

In this episode of Toughest Call, Rishad Tobaccowala, futurist, and author of “Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data” talks about how he prepared for an exit from an already successful career to something completely different.

In this episode, I’m talking with Lori Nikkel about her decision to hasten the pace of a national expansion to meet the growing demand for food during the pandemic.   Lori is the CEO of Second Harvest, a charity that recovers fresh, unsold food to protect the environment and provide immediate hunger relief.   How many times in your career have you been told something you wanted to attempt was “impossible”? Though this may turn out to be true, it’s also a position often taken by the overly risk-averse to stifle innovation and maintain the status quo.   Lori talks about how she leaned on the power of talented and passionate collaborators both within her organization and without to dive into this massive initiative. In the minds of her and her partners, failure was simply not an option as it would mean thousands of food insecure Canadians would go hungry.   If you’d like to learn more about Lori and Second Harvest, you can check out their website at secondharvest.ca.   And if you’d like some assistance with your own tough calls, we’ve compiled a collection of free tools just for you.   Go to toughestcall.com to check them out.   If you’re not yet a subscriber to Toughest Call, please add us wherever you listen to your podcasts.