About Rob

Rob is, first and foremost, a business strategist. His practice is mostly with law firms on both sides of the Atlantic and, to a lesser degree (at present anyway,) elsewhere in the world too. He has also had strategy experience with other professional service firms, including one of the world's most prominent accounting firms. He is a partner in Edge International who, for nearly a quarter of a century, have been widely recognized as one of the premier strategy and management consultants to law firms, especially in North America. He can be reached at millard@edge.ai

Areas of Practice:
  • Professional Service Firm Management
  • Change Management
Professional Associations:
  • Strategy committee of the American Bar Association's Law Practice Management Section 
  • Managing Partner's Forum
Education:
  • MBA Henley Management College in England
  • BL (landscape architecture) Pretoria University in South Africa
  • Undergone further professional development training at various business schools, including Harvard

What makes Rob different?

Rob's approach to strategy is heavily focused on putting systems and structures in place to help firms develop an effective ongoing process of strategy, rather than developing a fixed plan that tends to be outdated as soon as the ink dries in today's rapidly changing world. He coined the term dynamic resilience to describe this philosophy of creating a strategy that prepares the firm to be able to capitalize on a range of possible futures, instead of the one that is most desirable or likely at the time.

This philosophy is based on five incontrovertible truths:

1.The world is changing far to rapidly and unpredictably to be able to rely on a long-term plan as the primary strategy instrument.
2.A great deal of strategy takes place outside of a firm's formal strategic planning processes. (According to a 2007 McKinsey & Co study, more than 75%.)
3.A focus on action and the skills and resources that a firm needs to be able to actually execute its strategic intent is just as important as the focus on that strategic intent itself.
4.A firm's culture needs to be proactively evolved in order for dynamic resilience to develop, and to align with the firm's strategic intent. This takes dedicated action.
5.The goal of meaningful differentiation from one's competitors, in the eyes of one's clients, is not only unachievable but essential for superior performance. Properly executed, a 'dynamic resilience' approach to strategy virtually guarantees this.

Rob holds an MBA from Henley Management College in England, which was rated in 2007 by The Economist magazine as the 10th best MBA program in the world. He has also undergone further professional development training at various business schools, including Harvard. He serves on the strategy committee of the American Bar Association's Law Practice Management Section and also as one of the primary researchers on the London based Managing Partners' Forum worldwide professional service firm strategy project. In England, he presents a regular half day masterclass on law firm strategy, primarily to small to medium sized firms. In the USA, he is a sought after speaker at conferences on law firm management and strategy.

Prior to joining Edge International in 2003, Rob used to manage a consulting firm in South Africa that he founded in 1993, grew into an organization of more than 60 people and then later sold. As a young man, he served as a company commander in one of the South African Army's premier infantry regiments and also worked for several years as a game ranger in one of Africa's largest game reserves. He is now resident with his family in Freeport in The Bahamas.

Besides the blog Adventure of Strategy Rob is also heavily involved in an initiative to use enterprise blogging as a tool for effective strategy crafting. A key aspect of this currently is the Brainswarming tool that uses an enterprise blog platform to host virtual debates on strategic topics within firms (or other organizations) seamlessly across time zones and geographic boundaries.

Rob has taken proven concepts, data and models from the most up-to-date military strategy, several global strategy think tanks, emerging concepts coming out of business academia and other fields (such even as chaos theory and the concept of complex adaptive systems,) to develop an innovative and robust framework that builds on existing models of law firm strategy. He has created a methodology that is new, yet solidly grounded and tested, within which firms can reinvent their own approach to business strategy and craft better futures for themselves.

If you want a business strategist that will help you simply craft a strategic plan to create the illusion of certainty, then Rob is not the right person for your firm. If, however, you are serious about developing the capability to create strategy as it becomes necessary, dynamically as the market evolves, then give him a call. It may just be that three to five years from know, you look back at the time that you changed the way that you thought about strategy as being the point at which your firm really started to move up in the market!