Lori then leaped onto an entirely different track, into federal law enforcement, where she worked as a law enforcement ranger for the National Park Service, investigating crimes, performing search and rescue, and fighting wild land fires. After a couple of years, she went back to the tech sector where she worked her way up to a director position in engineering. One of her mentors gave her career advice to seek out further education, which she did.
Amassing credits from a variety of educational institutions (eight institutions in all); Lori was well educated but still had no bachelor’s degree. Along the way however, she had earned significant executive experience in business development, business operations, and product marketing and management.
In 2004, she co-founded a technology startup focused on global call centers. As the firm continued to underperform four years later, the board pinned the company’s failure to be cash flow positive on the services delivery organization she headed. Lori left shortly thereafter having learned three lessons:
- Innovation can’t thrive in companies with a toxic culture.
- Shortcuts to enterprise value creation fail.
- Leaders set the tone and are ultimately responsible for the culture of the firm.
The company had created a business model that contributed to the decline of U.S-based customer service centers by enabling companies to outsource and off-shore jobs to emerging economies at a fraction of the cost.
Lori left that company feeling, as she put it, “soulless and hollowed out.” That was when she committed to going back to school, from a bachelor’s degree, to masters, to earning her PhD. She worked with Dr. Austin Hoggatt, professor emeritus from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley who became her mentor. Lori investigated Harvard’s DBA program and compared it with CWRU’s Weatherhead DM programs. She had family in Cleveland and knew Case Western Reserve was a respected research institution. She also wanted to be among a peer group of accomplished senior professionals focused on management research and academia as well as practice. She chose the DM because of the program’s cohort structure and rigorous research process.
The program appealed to Lori because she wanted to focus her research on aspects from her career experience. In particular, as she puts it: “How to create organizations that don’t suck the soul out of people or the soul out of the planet.” Working with Professors Richard Boyatzis, Kalle Lyytinen, Chris Laszlo and Jagdip Singh, Lori explored how leadership contributes to a company’s innovation climate. Her dissertation findings identified a leadership-focused model of innovation, where interpersonal relationships, organizational climate, and leadership behaviors directly impact innovation outcomes. In short, high-performing teams innovate with human connection as the mortar.
During her journey, Lori taught quantitative methods classes in the DM Program, and she taught several other courses at Weatherhead to prepare for a second career in academia. She is currently a member of the DM Alumni Advisory Council.
Today, as described on The Ohio State University’s faculty website, “Dr. Kendall's consulting and research centers on entrepreneurial ventures and intrapreneurship within established firms. She is a mixed-methods researcher focused on micro and meso-level relational dynamics that affect organizational sensemaking under uncertainty, which subsequently impacts innovation and firm growth. Her publications include works on entrepreneurial cognition, relational dynamics influencing contextual ambidexterity, and mental model shifts driving paradigm change within social benefit firms. Lori was the 2021 Recipient of the Fisher College of Business Pace Setters Daniel Westerbeck Graduate Teaching Excellence Award at OSU. Formerly a Distinguished Fellow at the Weatherhead Fowler Center, she led researchers on behalf of the Goi Peace Foundation to show performative shifts in the evolution from shareholder models toward becoming positive impact firms.”
Having been responsible for driving the growth of venture and private equity-based firms, and with 20-plus years’ experience leading technology software and service firms, Lori’s teaching and research today bring together her boundary-spanning experience with technology team dynamics and entrepreneurship.
In her time off, Lori helps rescue dogs, transporting from rural underfunded shelters in Kentucky to foster and rescue organizations on the East Coast. And when she’s not cheering on the San Francisco Giants, she and her wife Tisa enjoy music, theater and the arts, as well as kayaking and hiking.
