Leadership Matters: Why Domino's Dominates

Please check back every Monday for more Leadership Matters columns by "Dr. Todd," founder of IMPACT Consulting and Development.

Hopefully you are not hungry at this moment because I'm going to ask you to do a visualization exercise. Imagine you are standing on a mountain top, looking down on the flatlands and you see (probably to your surprise) 100 acres of pizza. That's 174,240 square feet (over 16,000 square meters) of flat, round, square, pepperoni, cheese (anchovy?) goodness. We're talking about three football fields (2.25 soccer fields for our metric friends.

That's a lot of pizza. It is also equivalent to the amount of pizza sold daily in the U.S. from over 71,000 pizza outlets. This is the competitive landscape that Domino's Pizza (DPZ Quote) CEO David A. Brandon has to deal with.

Last week I wrote that innovation is no longer an option, but is now a necessity. Brandon is an example of a leader who clearly gets this. To the point that today's business has to focus more completely on the customer, it is no surprise that Domino's not only beats rivals Papa John's (PZZA Quote) and Pizza Hut (YUM Quote) in the Annual American Customer Satisfaction Index, but this year also took the top spot from Starbucks(SBUX Quote) and Wendy's(WEN Quote) in the limited service restaurant category.

I met Brandon at the Mackinac Policy Conference in Mackinac, Michigan sponsored by the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce (Mackinac is nowhere near Detroit, go figure). You may have seen Brandon in a recent ad where he burned a cease-and-desist letter from Subway related to an advertisement stating Domino's sandwiches beat those of Subway in a taste-test. A former college athlete, Brandon is charismatic and fully engaging when he talks about the innovations of the pizza business.