Passion, People and Principles
post # 200 — September 26, 2006 — a General post
The September 4 issue of The New Yorker contains an article about a researcher, Spelke, who studies babies and infants to try and detect whether or not there are gender differences in how our minds really work.
What I found most stimulating of all in the piece was the following Spelke quote: “Nobody should be troubled by our research, whatever we come to find. Everyone should be troubled by the phenomena that motivate it: the pervasive tendency of people all over the world to categorize others into social groups, despite our common humanity, and to endow these groups with social and economic significance that fuels ethnic conflict and can even lead to war and genocide.â€
Indeed I AM troubled by this tendency to define ourselves and others by the group we belong to.
- My team versus your team
- My nationality versus your nationality
- My religion versus your religion
- My race versus your race
- My gender versus your gender
- Management versus employees
- Our company versus its customers
- My generation versus your generation
- We true believers versus the bad guys
Ever since I read Ayn Rand as a teenager, I have been an individualist. I am uncomfortable with deriving my identity from the various “groups†I belong to —gender, nationality, race, etc. For better or for worse, I am defined by my own characteristics, not by generalities based on my group identification — and I prefer it when others think this way.
As Spelke points out, mostly they do not. Most people derive their primary identification from their group.
Even when it is motivated by an honorable desire to rectify past discrimination, it is nevertheless “group think†to base one’s arguments on group identification. For example, a female blogger sent me an email, very gently asking why there were no female bloggers on my blogroll. The thought had never occurred to me to contemplate the question — you might just as well have asked whether or not there were any African American or Muslim bloggers on my blogroll (I don’t know.)
Do you care whether your group is represented? Should you?
As Spelke points out, isn’t group think “Our side versus their side†the cause of the world’s problems. Shouldn’t we stop fighting for our side, and demonizing the other team?
Can’t we derive our pride from our own accomplishments, not those of the team we are on.
It is my honor to host the Blawg Review, a weekly selection of blogs related to the law.
Since I am not a lawyer, and this blog site is meant to appeal to a broad international audience working in a wide variety of professions and industries, I have (as previously announced) restricted my choices to the themes of work and professional life, firm management, marketing, strategy and careers (rather than legal topics per se).
1. Competition v. Collaboration in Firms
Tom “Bald Dog” Varjan has the blog post of the week in my view.
Of Sailors and Mountaineers: The Inherent Dangers of Internal Competition is a compelling piece of analysis, which nevertheless still leaves us wrestling with the mysteries of why our organizations run as they do. Are we all too competitive for our own good? If so, how has civilization thrived? Don’t miss it.
2. Throttling Clients
Ed Wesemann has a terrific blog for law firms called Creating Dominance, and his latest post is about “throttling†clients (no, it doesn’t mean what you think it means). It’s not glamorous stuff, but it’s important.
He discusses how he went about analyzing low-profitability clients, and then engaging actions which induced the clients to change their behavior (or leave). A clear exposition of some basic that all firms should be doing — and don’t!
3. Work-Life Balance
Stephanie West Allen at idealawg introduces us to Hot Worms and Workaholics: Let the Workers Be! She tells us that some worms live in water so hot that it would kill other worms:
“I have met many hot worm lawyers and I suspect there may be whole firms composed primarily of hot worms. These lawyers thrive on conditions that might prove injurious or even fatal to other lawyers. I am concerned for the hot worm lawyers and the damage that might be done to them if someone decided that these torrid wigglers needed to swim in cooler waters, to achieve life balance as defined by some other worm. In many cases, a cool, balanced worm may be an unhappy or dead worm. Lawyers come in a wide variety of temperaments, each with a unique, individual, ideal allocation of what and how much goes on each scale of life. That uniqueness is best respected for the sake of the lawyer, the firm, and the client.â€
Fascinating — a wonderful counter-conventional blog post.
4. Advice for Young Professionals
Bruce MacEwan at Adam Smith, Esq. has a review of “The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law†(ABA, 2006), a wonderful book from Mark Hermann (of Jones Day). With great humor and deadly accuracy, Mr. Hermann cuts through the cant and provides tough love advice for those on their way up (and a few who have stopped rising).
I have read the book, and “Adam†is right. Managing partners in law firms should buy copies for all their junior lawyers. In addition, I would estimate that at least one-half of the book applies to all young professionals, in any industry.
5. Leadership, Emotions and Performance
Arnie Herz at legal sanity, reporting on a Harvard Working Knowledge forum, explores the role of positive leadership in creating the motivation, creativity, and performance of the knowledge workers.
Arnie reports that, according to the piece, a key discovery the researchers made is that workers’ performance is tied to their “emotions, motivations, and perceptions about their work environment”. There are lots of other good links in the blog to research in the field of “Positive Organizational Scholarship.â€
6. Must BigClients have BigFirms?
JD Hull at What About Clients? estimates that ‘bet the company work’ is perhaps 10% of legal corporate work out there, if that. So what about the other 90% of available corporate legal work? Is there any reason why firms ranging in size from 5 to 150 lawyers with the right talent and specialties can’t do that work for BigClients?â€
The questions is raised: when firms large and small can serve your needs, where do you go? Think carefully, and on the back of examination booklet explain why friendly neighborhood grocery stores no longer exist.
6. Future Earning Potential of Firms
Gerry Riskin of Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices provides a link to an article by his EDGE International colleague, Friedrich Blase, on assessing a firm’s future earning potential by examining its human capital, its structural capital, its relational capital and its investment capacity.
It will start your thinking processes — there’s a lot to be done exploring these topics.
7. Advice on the road to L
F/k/a [formerly known as] links to a number of law professors offering advice to first-year law students, and offers the observation that “much of that “lost†feeling never does go away — because far too many law school applicants, law students and practicing lawyers never took the time to assess who they really are and what they actually do want from life and from a career.â€
Like the rest of us.
8. Client Satisfaction
Mark Beese at Leadership for Lawyers continues the (re)announcement of survey company BTI’s results that clients’ satisfaction with lawyers is going down dramatically, but provides link to other surveys and sources with confirming data.
BTI’s findings (which have been extensively reported for a while now) should be the springboard for deeper discussion of the sources and cures of low client satisfaction in the law, but so far the analysis hasn’t progressed — at least in the blogosphere. Let’s hope the firms themselves are taking the hint.
9. Recruiting Interviews
Eric Muller at Is That Legal? contributes a memory about being “conned†at an interview by one law firm partner into commenting on someone at another law firm who turned out to be her husband.
Ethical or good recruiting tactic? You be the judge!
10. Spotting the Winners Early
Carolyn Elefant at Law.com Legal Blog Watch reports in A Future Billing Machine is Born about a Washington Post story on a young man, Dravidian, who:
“whipped through college in one year, relying on a combination of 72 AP credits that he collected in high school, followed by 23 credits his first semester in college (instead of the usual 15), a whopping 37 credits the next (he’d complained that he had too much time on his hands the first semester), with the last three, needed for a double major, completed during the summer. The article reports that after finishing up a master’s in math, Banh will forego the doctorate and head to law school to become a patent attorney.”
As Elefant puts it: law firms, start your recruiting engines.
11. A Harvard Business School Case Study
Nathan Koppel, guest blogging at Larry Bodine’s Professional Services Marketing blog, informs us that Harvard Business School has written a 40-page case study on Philadelphia’s Duane Morris.
Based on my memory of how MBA students treated the companies offered up to them for dissection, this may not be the privilege that some at Duane Morris think it could be.
12. Diagnosis in Law and Medicine
Jim Belshaw at Managing the Professional Service Firm (what a catchy name!) picks up on a contribution by Prem Chandavarkar to begin an analysis of how diagnosis is performed in law versus medicine.
It doesn’t go deep, but it’s a useful beginning on an important topic.
13. Branding a Fruit
Dilanchian Lawyers and Consultants caught my attention by telling the history of transforming the humble Kiwi fruit, through wise use of Intellectual Property tactics, into a branded product.
A bit of a diversion from our theme here, but a fun blawg tale.
Next, let’s turn to some interesting blogs about blogging.
14. Marketing Yourself and Your Practice
Kevin O’Keefe at Real Lawyers Have Blogs reports on “Blonde attorney gets new clients at MySpace.â€
No comment. Decide for yourself what you think about it.
15. Profile of a Prominent Blogger
Dennis Kennedy provides a useful link to an interview with (and about) him on the JD Bliss site, entitled Success Story: Dennis Kennedy: “TechnoLawyer of the Year” Bridges the Gap Between Law and Technology.
For the few who don’t know his background, it’s a good place to start getting to know the well-known lawyer, consultant, speaker and writer who is considered among the most influential experts on the application of technology in the practice of law.
Dennis was very kind and generous with his time when I was trying to understand what a blog was. If you don’t know him and his work, you should.
16. Blogging by Trainees
Scott Vine at Information Overlord picks up on a UK Legal week report that Watson Farley & Williams is getting its trainees to write a weekly blog on the firm’s web site. Each of the firm’s 12 trainees will take it in turns to write the weekly blog, describing the work they have been involved in and the firm’s training and social activities. Neat!
17. Blogging During a Court Case
Justin Patten at Human Law has a brief piece speculating on how blogging might influence the practice of law: “I envisage scenarios where lawyers in conjunction with PR Professionals and blogosphere monitoring tools, assess how a case is being seen on the web. Thereafter an assessment will be made whether a legal remedy is the right solution.â€
18. Regulatory Restrictions on Blogging
Walter Olson at Point of Law collects some links pointing to the emerging concern that new Bar regulations in New York “might make it nearly impossible for attorneys in the state to publish or contribute to blogs about the law. (Each individual post would trigger elaborate compliance obligations of its own.)â€
19. Blogging as a Substitute for Law Reviews
Ian Best at 3Lepiphany speculates that blogging by law students and others could create a much more powerful substitute for law review articles.
Seems persuasive, important and powerful to me.
That’s it!
Blawg Review has information about next week’s host, and instructions how to submit your blawg posts for review in upcoming issues.
post # 197 — September 22, 2006 — a Careers post
Steve Shu brought my attention to a fascinating article reporting on a study of 5,000 MBA students from 11 graduate business schools in Canada and 21 schools in the U.S.
The study is entitled “Academic Dishonesty in Graduate Business Programs: The Prevalence, Causes, and Proposed Actionsâ€. It was conducted by management professors at Rutgers, Washington State and Pennsylvania State universities, and will appear in the next issue of the Academy of Management Learning & Education journal.
The study found that 56 per cent of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the last year, compared with 47 per cent of non-business students.
Jim Fisher, vice-dean of MBA programs at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said he wasn’t surprised by the results, since MBA students are highly competitive and have a high need for achievement.
To dampen the impulse to cheat, students at Rotman must sign a form every time they submit course work for grading to ensure they comply with academic honesty policies. When MBA students work in teams, they also must sign forms stating that they didn’t cheat, nor did their teammates.
“Those numbers are probably under-reported,” said Donald McCabe, lead researcher on the study and business strategy professor at
Rutgers. Since the survey was voluntary, more dishonest students were less likely to fill out the survey, and those who did complete it may have under-reported how much they cheated, McCabe said.
The study suggested that MBA students were more likely to cheat than others because they were focused on “getting the job done, versus how they got it done. They will suggest, in the business world the emphasis is on getting the job done at any cost.”
“There is also employer pressure to get high marks,” Larry Wynant of the University of western Ontario said. “The past few years there has been tremendous pressure to get jobs, because the employment outlook has not been as rosy (for MBA graduates) as in the past.”
I read this at the same time that that the “20-something†daughter of some good friends was telling us about her new job as a personal assistant in the world of public relations. She pointed out, with great discomfort, that it was not unusual for her boss to say “I worked on the XYZ account for 4 hours but bill them for 20.†There’s even a word for this form of lying in PR firms, accounting firms, consulting firms and law firms: “value billing.â€
I have no problem billing a client BY AGREEMENT on what a project was worth, but the casual acceptance of lies astonishes me.
We have crossed over into dangerous territory. When there is the normal expectation that most other people will cheat (given the opportunity) things WILL rapidly descend into the expectation that everyone will. We then have a distrustful, society based on the expectation of corruption — and everyone becomes super-defensive.
I won’t say I have never, ever sinned, especially when I was young and stupid. But what kept me on the true path was the overwhelming sense of guilt and the consequent vow that I would never lapse again. It is one thing to succumb to temptation. It is another to give up one’s very belief in principles and pass that cynicism and skepticism on to those around us and to those who report to us.
What happens if, in school and in the first job, we raise a generation of people who think lying, cheating and stealing are the ways you get ahead?
post # 196 — September 21, 2006 — a Client Relations post
When giving a presentation, you can focus on one of three things: your material (we must cover all these slides), yourself (let me impress you), or your audience (let me serve you in some way). Guess which it should be.
Make sure you address the audience’s needs, concerns, wants — not yours. They will give you back what you want if you serve them first.
Nothing is more guaranteed to lose an audience than forcing them to sit in a darkened room watching someone go through a fixed, invariant set of slides, no matter how insightful or attractive. Turn the house lights full up so you can see everyone. Hand out copies of all your slides in advance. Work to EARN your audience’s attention. Don’t try to control their attention – they will just resent it.
If you get through all your material, the presentation is a failure. If you cover your all of your material, you obviously did not engage and were not interrupted enough by the audience’s questions.
Clear exposition is rare and immensely valuable; get all the help you can get. Rehearse with an audience who have been given permission to critique.
When giving a presentation, write down in advance (just for your own benefit) the major points you want your audience to walk away with. If it doesn’t fit on one small card, your presentation is too unfocused.
Don’t underestimate the value of a nicely turned phase: Make it memorable! Try to find the phrase that summarizes the paragraph, the slogan that summarizes the key thought, the restatement that reminds them of your theme. Open with it. End with it.
Agreements? Disagreements? Other thoughts?
post # 195 — September 20, 2006 — a Careers post
On Friday, the 29th of September, (8 or 9 days from now) I will be giving a speech to 150 faculty members from European business schools on the topic given above.
It just occurred to me that if I blogged about it here, some of you may have some ideas and messages you want me to pass along.
Traditionally, there have been four ways business schools (and other professional schools) interact with business:
- Conducting research which helps us understand business better (i.e. an academic, intellectual purpose of contributing to knowledge.)
- Producing prepared students, ready for productive work lives
- Conducting research that is helpful to practicing business people
- Conducting executive education programs for mid-career and senior people
I’m not sure what absolute “grade†I would give to business schools around the world on each of these things, but I don’t think it’s high on any of them.
I’m least equipped to evaluate the academic scholarly contributions of business school faculty — I was never a good academic even when I was a business school professor. And anyway, that first purpose is not what I’ve been asked to talk about (even though many professors would consider it their primary purpose and obligation.)
What about producing prepared students ready for business or professional life? As we have discussed here, I don’t think many schools do a wonderful job with helping students develop the social, psychological, interpersonal, political and emotional skills to succeed in life. Business schools don’t; law schools don’t; PR degree-programs don’t; education in general doesn’t.
I did note in the Wall Street Journal special Report today (Wednesday September 20) that some business schools like Michigan and Dartmouth Iin the US) and ESADE (in Europe) are rated very highly in developing (or screening for) students who are willing team players without the pomposity that graduates of some other schools have. Anyone want to comment on what those schools are doing well?
I would not give business school faculty at large a particularly high score on producing useful business research. First, it should be noted that few of the key managerial ideas of past decades (TQM, Six-sigma, business process reengineering, etc) actually originated with faculty research. Get the impression that most “BIG†ideas and big thinking come from consultants and business itself. Or am I being unfair?
I have written before that I am nervous about businesses using business schools for executive education. I think business schools can do a wonderful job at teaching analytics and things of the mind, but are less well equipped to teach managing (ie dealing with real live human beings.)
So what would I do to improve all this, even a little?
Here are a few initial opinions:
- Build on strengths not weaknesses — most graduates of business schools (at least in the US and UK) go into consulting, investment banking and other advisory businesses (PR, accounting, etc.) Very few graduates really go to work for ‘regular’ companies. Maybe business schools should admit to themselves that they are training consultants, not managers.
- Business schools like everyone else should spend more time listening to their custromers — if they can ever figure out who the faculty really want to serve. Other academics? Recruiters? Students Its very unclear.
- Invite business people in to give lectures and seminars not to the students but to the faculty
- Require that all faculty do a consulting job for a local business (NOT executive education) and have the client come back and report to all the students and the rest of the faculty how helpful the professor was
- Make all business school academics run their own business, and report annually to the rest of the faculty how well it is going
- Find ways to screen students (and faculty?) for character, not intelligence
- Focus more on designing educational experiences (not content) that help students develop skills through guided practice (how to function in teams, etc.)
- Stop trying to do a little bit of everything: require that each business school have a strategy, a target niche and a differentiation. Working to build this in competition with other schools will help faculty understand organizations much better.
- Set publicly announced targets for the school’s startegyand appoint an external monitoring board (with high visibility and embarrassment.) Introduce accountability into faculty memebers’ lives.
So, those are some of the ideas I plan to throw out.
What would be some of your ideas of things business schools could do to improve their mutual understanding with business?
post # 194 — September 19, 2006 — a Careers post
Thanks to Larry Star, CEO of Harrison and Star, for pointing me to the following excerpt from “Lear’s Fool: Coping With Change Beyond Future Shock†by D. Verne Morland
POSITION DESCRIPTION
POSITION: Lear’s Fool JOB CODE: FOOL-AlINCUMBENT : (Open)
REPORTS TO: Chief Executive Officer
ORGANIZATION : Executive Office
LOCATION: Merlin’s Parapet, Heath & Moor Road
BASIC FUNCTION: To disturb with glimpses of confounding truths that elude rational formulation. To herald the advent of cosmic shifts and to apprehend their significance. To challenge by jest and conundrum all that is sacred and all that the savants have proven to be true and immutable.
DIMENSIONS:
Budget: None (save for spangles and bells)
Number of employees supervised: None (God forbid!)
Revenue impacted: All (and then some)
NATURE AND SCOPE: The incumbent must not be a recognized expert in any field (they’re dangerous). Demonstrable competency in many fields is required and the individuals “track record” should be good but must be not perfect. The incumbent may not have worked previously as a “serious consultant” unless he recants……
PRINCIPAL ACCOUNTABILITIES:
Since for most of us the ability to think creatively about the future is inversely proportional to the weight of today’s responsibilities, the incumbent should feel obligated only to:
- Stir up controversy,
- Respect no authority,
- Resist pressures to engage in detailed analyses.
The incumbent must avoid verbs like study, analyze, plan, develop, refine and assure in favor of verbs like observe, identify, associate, explore, synthesize and stimulate. He should neither lead nor follow, but should stand outside the normal chain of command.
He must exploit his intellectual “carte blanche” to ask outrageous questions and to challenge basic assumptions. He must seek accuracy, not precision; originality, not consistency; insight, not completeness; and a focus on the future, not a preoccupation with the present.
REQUIREMENTS:
Candidate for this position must have:
- Broad temporal horizons – both past and future – and a dominant future “zone orientation.”
- A “Renaissance Man” mentality involving some experience in many areas and the conviction that the Dark Ages must be left behind.
- An ability to work comfortably with nebulous issues in strictly qualitative terms for as Harvard’s John Steinbruner has noted: “If quantitative precision is demanded, it is gained in the current state of things, only by so reducing the scope of what is analyzed that most of the important problems remain external to the analysis.” This thought is echoed by Garber and Oliver who suggest that “once an issue has become a number, it’s probably too late to deal with it.”
The candidate must not have:
- Strong preconceptions (e.g., national patriotism, religious parochialism or dogmatism, professional specialization)
- Inviolable allegiances (e.g., corporate, national, professional)
Intellectual independence is essential for as Pablo Picasso observed: “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction, because the new idea will destroy what a lot of people believe is essential to the survival of their intellectual world.”
(Note: Misshapen head, if larger on right side, is OK.)
On a similar theme, Jeremy Raymond points out that the fool is the only one who dares to tell the king what is real, but must expect the odd cuff about the ears when he oversteps the mark (unwittingly). The courtier, on the other hand, is more commercial in that he protects his long term position, but may offer meaningless blandishments and dud advice to do this. His position in the court is secure because he doesn’t rock the boat, but passes on information to others.
The Fool is of course the highly paid face to face challenger of senior officers and the courtier is the purveyor of information to large numbers of others with the tacit approval of those officers.
Interesting metaphors!
Since I think the funniest movie ever made was “The Court Jester,†(1956, starring Danny Kaye) there are no prizes for guessing which role I think would be more fulfilling. All together now: “The vessel with the pestle has the pellet with the poison, but the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.†Run, don’t walk, to rent, download or buy this film, especially if you have any 9-year-olds in the house (or can borrow one)!
post # 193 — — a Managing post
Michelle Golden, whose own blog is always worth reading, writes in to ask about 360-degree reviews and upwards evaluations, especially in light of what she perceives to be a much needed shift from a labor force (“assetâ€) mentality to a knowledge-worker mentality. She writes:
Personally, I find them to be a very effective tool when executed properly (which I believe I do and have done for small firms up to a Big 4) though I see them poorly executed sometimes with what can be morale-damaging consequences.
In a well-done 360, I appreciate the contrast that comes to light between the subject’s views of him/herself, their managers’ perspective, their peers’ perspective and their direct reports’ perspective. And sometimes, the clients’ perspective.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the subject usually underestimates or overestimates (significantly and consistently) how they perform across a broad variety of management and leadership areas such as decision-making, crisis management, teaching, learning, follow-up/accountability, delegation, etc. Done well, I’ve seen 360s build confidence around strengths and indicate a clear path of important areas for people to work on.
My questions for you are:
1) What do you think of 360 evaluations for those who manage others or will be doing so?
2) Do you know of or use other tools that help establish measures of management characteristics such as those just listed?
3) If used, do you think they should be private to the subject for personal development or as a tool the organization uses to evaluate the effectiveness of their people?
Michelle, I find this question to be on a par with the question: “Should we ask our clients for feedback on how we are doing?†It astounds me that, even in some very elite firms, that battle is still being fought, yet it rages on, as does the debate over 360 for managers.
The simple truth is that, if you really want to be more effective at anything (sports, playing an instrument, romance, managing) you have to find a way to get constructive feedback, somehow. In life, the absence of complaints is not a dependable indicator of the absence of opportunities to improve.
So, it all starts with that big “IF†— do you care enough to want to improve? If so, then we’re just discussing mechanics. If you don’t (and the vast majority of people do NOT want to do what it takes to improve unless they are absolutely compelled to) then no 360-degree program is going to prove effective: there are too many ways for such systems to be gamed, subordinates intimidated, feedback to be ignored and change made optional.
We have discussed getting feedback on this blog particularly in the discussion: Getting Good at Getting Feedback (16 people joined in on that one so far).
I also reported in another blog post on a manager who asked his people to evaluate him and promised to resign if he did not improve by 20% (Teaching Guts), which tells you something about my view on your third question, Michelle.
In my experience, the overwhelming majority of 360-degree programs fail to deliver the desired benefits of actual improved managerial performance for one (or all) of the following reasons:
a) There is actually a lack of understanding of what the manager’s role is, so it’s hard to provide feedback to and evaluate the manager if what he or she should be good at is ambiguous (or has a high level of deniability — “That’s not my job†“That shouldn’t matter if I deliverâ€, etc.)
b) Feedback is collected with highly structured, bureaucratic questionnaires which do not address the relevant behaviors and characteristics. They are too formal.
c) The feedback is delivered in such a way (eg without coaching) that the recipient is allowed to “misinterpret†what the information is really saying
d) The feedback is kept ‘confidential’ so there is no ‘embarrassment factor’ if the manager fails to improve. The system relies on best intentions — the system is not a strict accountability system, which it needs to be if it is to work. Mangers exempt themselves from accountability when they can.
My quick summary is that a manager who really wanted to improve would not need the formality of a companywide 360-program to get there, and managers who do not wish to be held accountable will not only not be helped by the system, they will ensure that it has no teeth!
There’s more, Michelle, but let’s see what you and others in the real world who have direct experience with 360-degree programs have to say.
post # 192 — September 18, 2006 — a General post
The Blawg Review showcases the best recent posts on law blogs (or “blawgs,†as the lawyers like to call them) each week.
I will be hosting the review on September 27 as part of the Blawg Review’s special September “back to school” series of academic hosts. I am letting you know in advance in order to encourage my readers to submit your own articles for the review.
If you aren’t familiar with the Blawg Review, you can peruse this month’s other “back to school†editions hosted by Workplace Prof Blog, the Institute of Global Security Law and Policy blog and Concurring Opinions.
I am a business and management type and NOT a lawyer, so I particularly encourage bloggers (and blawgers) to submit articles on the realities of work and professional life, the business of law, firm management, marketing, strategy, and career development.
I will do my best, but it will be hard for me, a non-lawyer, to assess and interpret purely legal submissions. I ask for prior forgiveness for any errors I make!
Blawg Review Submission Guidelines
- Deadline for submission is 11:59 p.m. PST on Saturday, Sept 23
- I greatly appreciate if you can send your submissions well before the deadline!
- You are welcome and encouraged to submit blog posts by other people which you’d like to recommend as well as your own writing.
- Articles on law practice management, marketing, business strategy and career development are especially welcome.
- Click on this Blawg Review submission link to submit your article
With your support, I look forward to presenting readers here as well as the Blawg Review regulars with an excellent roundup of blog articles on the business of law and life as a lawyer.
post # 191 — — a General post
“Why Merge?” – new strategy seminar download This week’s podcast seminar, “Why Merge?“, discusses the pros and cons (mostly cons) of trying to achieve strategic benefit through mergers. This seminar includes:
- Menu, Bulk, Dots, Alchemy & Crisis: the five types of professional company mergers
- Client-centric merger strategies
- Four-point checklist for a successful merger
My Business Masterclass audio seminars are always downloadable at no cost. You can download Why Merge? or or sign up to receive new seminars automatically every week by subscribing to my Business Masterclass series with iTunes or other podcast players. (Click here for step-by-step instructions on how to subscribe.)
Given all the merger activity that DOES take place, my skeptical views about the benefits of mergers in professional businesses seem to be out of step with what’s going on out there. What am I missing?
post # 190 — September 15, 2006 — a General post
To give your love without conditions, but to work every day to deserve the love you receive in return.
****
Your thoughts?
