Firm Foundations
How do you fast-track the business-savvy of your partners, to match an equally fast track growth strategy? According to Nigel Knowles, joint CEO of come-from-nowhere-in-the-past-eighteen-months global giant DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Carey, the answer is to partner with the Harvard Business School and send them back to the lecture halls in batches of fifty to sixty, for a week of bespoke, high intensity training.
Legalweek.com has an article this week on the DLA Piper / HBS training course.
Of course, the Harvard Business School has had its Leading Professional Service Firms executive education course going for the best part of a decade now. Some of the case studies mentioned in Legalweek's article sound suspiciously like the same ones that were used when I did this course way back in 1998. On the other hand, it does seem that the DLA Piper partners are being worked a tad harder than we were back then.
With the increasing drive towards commercialization of the legal profession, the importance of good quality strategy and business management education cannot be over-estimated. The four main strands of the training also cannot be faulted:
. aligning strategy and the organisation;
. developing and aligning professionals;
. leadership, culture and change; and
. business case studies which are used to apply real lessons learned.
Hats off to Knowles and his collegues!
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