Business works by companies ordering from outside companies and people, and by being ordered from.
When your company orders something outside, it spends company resources to do it.
Resources mean money, time, and people.
I'm not in sales, so I'm not on the receiving end of orders — but I often order from outside companies in my work.
When you order, of course you don't only send a contract and purchase order — you exchange information and give concrete instructions on the workflow.
It isn't only one-off contact; ongoing back-and-forth is common, so "ordering" itself becomes a whole stretch of work.
And I think about the importance of ordering skill a lot.
When you order, you're using company resources, and often more than one person is involved — so a wrong or sloppy order wastes the company's money, time, and people.
Simply buying something more expensive than a competitor is the cute version; introducing a service can lock in a semi-permanent wasteful workflow and burn huge amounts of time and human resources.
And if you order without thinking through scenarios, the output drops too, of course.
From the outside, of course they're happy if you buy the expensive option — but beyond the order amount, the buyer's ability also affects the company's trust.
Changing topics: when people talk about what talent the company wants right now, they often list things like "an engineer who's run a large-scale service," "an accounting person who's taken a company public," or "HR who knows compensation design."
That might be right, but those are still only job titles — a bit abstract if what you mean is people who can handle company resources well.
In the end, how a company grows is mostly decided by how you allocate resources.
Going back to that conversation, you need people who can think as concretely as possible about things like:
"What kind of engineer, at what salary, on which part of which product?"
And not only inside the company:
"To grow the service fast, what do we focus on ourselves, and what do we outsource (which strong external partners do we pull in)?"
Not only a management lens — they'll also watch how they allocate their own resources, so they're strong players too.
Great executives always have this view, but they can't constantly grasp every edge of frontline work — so it's a trait managers need.
"When you hire, look at skills" is an old line everywhere, but judging how useful someone will be in the work is hard.
Even so, you have to keep thinking about which traits to value. Not only new hiring — you also need to check how well you're ordering today.
As I wrote at the start: if ordering is at the core of commerce, ordering ability is definitely something worth selling too.
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