Letter from London
Our custom after trips of some substance is to report back to readers in the form of a “Letter From ____,” and since I spent all of last week in my Second Favorite City in the World, here you have it....
View ArticleThe War for Talent Gets Teeth
Copious has been the coverage around Freshfields’ revised lockstep–for example, The Lawyer’s “Be careful what you wish for: First round of Freshfields partners hit by lockstep reform.” It turns out...
View ArticleIs your Managing Partner afraid of the partners?
Yes, it happens. We’ve seen several situations where the firm’s Managing Partner or Chair can’t bring themselves to make decisions–some arguably critical to the firm’s prosperity and vibrancy in the...
View ArticleThe Rule of Law
Something of a detour from our regularly scheduled programming, but we are not living in “ordinary times.” In the immediate wake of announcements from President Trump that he was ordering the end of...
View ArticleWhich War for Talent?
“Failure to attract and retain top talent” was the number-one issue in the Conference Board’s 2016 survey of global CEOs—before economic growth and competitive intensity. In more complex jobs, this...
View ArticleAnalytics is Hard: That’s the Good News
Michael Lewis’ 2004 bestseller, Moneyball, subsequently made into a movie in 2011, has entered the vernacular. We have Moneyball for government, Moneyball for writing (and awarding) grant proposals,...
View ArticleTelling Stories
Psychologists call us humans, among other things, “meaning-making machines.” We’re always looking for the reason why, the cause for the effect, the coherent narrative that pulls it all together and...
View ArticleWhat if there are only two strategies?
By “only two strategies,” I mean what if there are only two general ways of creating a sustainable competitive advantage? I’ve read a lot of the business and management literature on strategy (believe...
View ArticleIs Your Firm Playing to Win, or Not to Lose?
Recent conversation with a veteran friend in the industry. He had correctly deduced from a recent column in these pages that I’m (re-)reading the all-time strategy classic Playing to Win by A.G....
View ArticleWho’s Your Firm’s Real Client?
There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer. –Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York,: Harper, 1st ed. 1954); Routledge, 2012, at p. 37 Urban legend has...
View ArticleYou Don’t Want Leaders, and You’re Not Getting Them
We don’t often write purposefully on the topic of leadership, if for no other reason than it’s hard for most people to get past, “I know it when I see it,” but more substantively because we think it...
View ArticleThe Social Compact
The lawyer personality type scores notoriously high on “autonomy.” Certainly compared to average citizens, but even to average white-collar professionals, lawyers are driven to do their own thing...
View ArticleThe Nature of the Firm
My title for today steals literally from Ronald Coase’s legendary 1937 paper of the same name, which gained Coase the Nobel in Economics in 1991. The paper, barely over a dozen pages long, asks the...
View ArticleYour Guide to Change Management
Lurking in the wings, if not center-stage, in almost everything we do in our work with clients–and I imagine something similar holds true in the work of many of you, invaluable readers–is the nebulous...
View ArticleOn Business Models
AT&T’s long-delayed acquisition of Time Warner finally closed some days ago, and within about a week The Wall Street Journal put out a front-page story “It was once ‘game of thrones’ inside Time...
View ArticleLetter from Bogota
Last week I spent three full days in Bogota, meeting with firms and colleagues, giving a talk at the always-wonderful “Gun Club,” and generally trying to soak up as much market intelligence as I could....
View ArticleWho Does Your Law FIrm Serve?
The hard core bulls-eye of our practice is helping firms assess, refine, or discard and re conceive their strategic plans. We approach and proceed through the course of these engagements–as we do in...
View ArticleGender Diversity in Law Land: Reason for Hope?
The following column is by Janet Stanton, Partner, Adam Smith, Esq. The reason we’ve never written about gender diversity before is that there was frankly not much to say; regurgitating dispiriting...
View ArticleOur Culture of Individualism
A week or two ago I picked up a copy of David Brooks’ latest, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, and while this is not a book review or anything like it (I confess that I’m just a few...
View ArticleIntroducing the Maroons & the Grays: Part 1
We have never subscribed to the belief that law firms operate in a fundamentally undifferentiated industry—that each law firm competes with every other law firm—and that given the magic alignment of...
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