Adventure of Strategy

"To business that we love we rise betime and go to it with delight"
Anthony and Cleopatra

Today marks the 444th anniversary of William Shakespeare's birth (on 23 April 1564.) It seems almost as long since I last blogged :(

The fact is, I've been heavily engaged with a strategy assignment that is very much within the category that Shakespeare meant when he wrote the above.

Freeport on Grand Bahama Island, where I am lucky enough to live with my family, is a unique place. It is a "privately owned" and operated city in terms of a treaty (the Hawskbill Creek Agreement) which was signed in the 1950s between the Government of the Bahamas and an American businessman, Wallace Groves. The city's controlling authority, the Grand Bahama Port Authority, is currently owned by two British families. I am coordinating the formulation of a strategy for a prospective new owner, namely the British banking and private equity magnate Roddie Fleming. It is a fascinating exercise. The strategy that I have been mandated to create takes a very long term view and has to be based on "triple bottom line" (economic, social, environmental) sustainability. It is focused not just on the return on investment for Roddie Fleming, but in very real terms on the needs of the people of Grand Bahama, the other businesses on the island and the Government of the Bahamas too. The very pinnacle of "best practice."

There are obstacles, but hopefully all will have settled down by the (northern hemisphere) summer and we will be able to start to execute what promises to be something truly worthwhile and fascinating. In the meantime, my work with professional service firms through Edge International has contracted to only the strategic planning work that I really enjoy and where I excel. Especially when it involves helping a firm get to grips with the larger challenges that are emerging in this first decade of the 21st Century. It really is great to be able to restrict one's practice only to engagements that one loves!

I will try to keep up a more frequent flow of blog posts too, now that I have "broken the drought."

Sincere thanks to the +/- 30 law firm leaders that attended my law firm strategy masterclass at the Cafe Royal in Picadilly, London, this morning. Attached, as promised, are the slides from the masterclass, which have been password protected with the password that we agreed this morning. If you attended the masterclass and have forgotten the password, email me and I'll remind you.

Download file

To my other blog readers:   Please forgive me that on this occasion, I am keeping the slides restricted to those that attended the masterclass.

I'm in England again this coming week. London and Bristol this week from Monday until Thursday and then Manchester from Friday through until Monday 10 December. I haven't had time to contact all my clients and friends but if you like, contact me and let's see if we can find time at least for a coffee or beer.

Today, I visited an old and dear friend who is dying in a hospice here near Sevenoaks in Kent, England. Richard, only 35 years old, was a boy in a Boy Scout troop (the 1st Bordeaux) that I ran back in South Africa, all of two decades ago. Ten years or so ago, he paid me the greatest compliment that I have ever received, by telling me just what an impact I had on his teenage years.

Now, he is dying.

It is difficult to believe that the person that I saw today is the same as the accomplished rock climber and athlete that Richard was as a teenager. The brain tumour that is killing him has completely paralysed the left side of his body. Morphine and steroids keep his pain at bay and make life tolerable. Yet, despite it all, he shows an indefatigability of spirit that has left me humbled.  He is making chess sets. One at a time, each one a project to keep his brain working and to keep him alive for one more day; one more week.

Just been watching South Africa beat Argentina 37-13 in the Rugby World Cup semifinal. Bryan Habana is the nippiest wing South Africa has had in a while. He scored two tries, the second from a lightning intercept way upfield. Percy Montgomery's boot (he kicked 17 points) was also right on form.That makes it us versus England in the final next weekend. Will the Springboks be able to repeat their 1995 performance and bring home the cup? (See above.) I'm going to be in San Juan, Puerto Rico for the ABA Law Practice Management Section meeting. Sure hope I can find somewhere to watch the match!

I have updated both my biography and my service profile (for the first time in a disgracefully long time.) If you'd like to read the updated versions, please click on the tabs "About Rob" and "How Rob Works" above, or click on the hyperlinks instead.

I am humbled and honored that Tom Collins of morepartnerincome has listed this blog as one of:

I'm at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Centre here in Nashville Tennessee, for the ALA Region 2 & 3 Conference. Tomorrow, I have my session on "The World and the Legal Profession in the 21st Century." Herewith the PDFs of the slides. Hope they help!

Download file  (Handouts,  3.8MB)
Download file  (Slides 1 - 40,  4.3MB)
Download file  (Slides 41 - 80,  5.5MB)

If you'd like to discuss me doing a similar presentation in your organization, perhaps followed by a facilitated discussion about what to actually do about it, please email me.

Here goes with one of those very infrequent personal posts.

There is a certain lady in London who is both a good friend and somebody that I greatly admire. A solicitor by profession, Sue Stapely specialises in reputation, crisis and issues management communications, especially in the legal profession and amongst high profile individuals. Over the past decade or so there have been a whole range of firms and folks who have found themselves standing the proverbial "sticky brown stuff" who have Sue to thank for the fact that they emerged with their reputations intact. In many respects, she is a most remarkable person!

I received an email from her today to advise: "If you follow the link at the bottom of this message, you will discover that your friend has probably taken leave of her senses... but all in a very good cause, or two." So I did click on the suggested link, and rather than reaching for the phone to call the "men in white coats," I find reason for my admiration of the lady to crank up yet a few notches more! Click the image above to see why!

Way to go, Sue + Stuart, and all the very best on your travels!

Zimbabwe has no oil and no strategically critical position astride a major trade route, so it is understandable that the world has other priorities right now. Which is a pity. The above graph (the red line) shows the country's GDP in 1980 Zimbabwe dollars, expressed as an index with 1980 at 100. This gives a reflection mostly of the depreciation of Zimbabwe's currency.

This week, I am in Madrid and busy with a week long PhD residency that is being held at the Universidad Europea de Madrid. A fascinating experience, so far, given the diverse group of people participating both amongst the faculty and the doctoral students.

I am amongst the latter. A PhD, I have been asked by several people over the past few months? Don't I have enough, between a busy professional practice, a lovely wife and two kids, and life in general, to keep me amused? Yes, I do. But ...

I have just returned from an engagement back home in South Africa, facilitating merger discussions between two law firms. Successfully, as you might discern from the bottle of champagne about to be "popped" by the two chairmen in the picture above. (Graeme Polson left and Themba Langa right.)

For one of the firms, Rooth & Wessels, this is the first merger and the first change of name in its 117 year history. This proud, somewhat conservative old stalwart counts the South African Reserve Bank, the Financial Services Board and even the Law Society of South Africa itself amongst its clients. They are feared litigators. The other firm, Langa Attorneys, was founded post-apartheid and, demographically, is wholly black. Its chairman, Themba Langa, is well known in Johannesburg commercial law circles.

I was responsible for facilitating the negotiations, and helping the merger committee craft both a combined strategy for the new firm and a detailed action plan to take them through to the formal launch on 1 October. The new firm, Rooth Wessels Langa, will focus on financial services, aviation, project finance, litigation, corporate and commercial law, property law and will also be launching a multidisciplinary tax advisory service with a focus on customs and excise.

What is truly fascinating is that the two firms represent sectors of South Africa society that less than two decades ago were effectively at war with one another. It is wonderful to watch differences being overcome as people craft strategy together, to achieve objectives that would be out of reach for them individually as separate firms. I am firmly of the belief that it is not so much cultural differences that kill mergers, as the failure to create a clear, detailed and highly compelling view of the future firm, focusing particularly on those aspects that can only be achieved together. That way, the momentum to overcome differences that do exist or that arise later is generated almost spontaneously.

Rooth Wessels Langa will have black economic empowerment ("BEE") credentials (essential in South Africa today) that are unsurpassed amongst the mainstream commercial law firms in South Africa, together with deep and sophisticated levels of legal expertise and a track record spanning more than a century. In short, a sound foundation on which to build a very substantial 21st Century African law firm.

What's good enough for Clifford Chance is good enough for me. Inspired by an article in the Wall Street Journal, I have registered with guru.com and put up a number of tasks that have been on my "to-do" list for months, for outsourcing. If this meets expectations, it's going to drive my efficiency up a quantum leap! I'll keep you posted.

On a less happy note, I had the hard drive on my laptop seize up on me two weeks ago and only got all the software squared away and reinstalled a day or two ago. Most of my data was backed up, of course, but some problems still slipped through. For instance user names and passwords that were 'remembered' by the computer, that I hadn't loaded manually in years. Note to self: keep copies of these written down in a safe place, too. It has been an incredible hassle, and at least past of the reason for the paucity of postings in May. I only mention it because you may want to learn from my misfortune, too.

I thought I'd take a look and see where the externally referred traffic through Adventure of Strategy originates. The results may be seen in the pie chart above. Fully two thirds of the traffic comes from the various search engines, with by far the lion's share (61% out of 67%) coming from Google. The second largest source of traffic is from other pages within Adventure of Strategy itself. As you can see, a significant amount of traffic over the past few months has also been referred from Seth Godin, Gerry Riskin, my own firm Edge International's web site and Tom Collins' blog, More Partner Income. Thank you, gentlemen!

As to where the readers of this blog are in the world, some of you may have noticed the little Clustrmaps graphic way down in the bottom left hand corner of the site. It tracks which country / city (that's all) readers are from. Currently,  Adventure of Strategy's global readership distribution looks like this:

Finally, where does Adventure of Strategy fall in the "rankings" amongst the 72,000,000 or so blogs estimated to be in existence worldwide as at April 2007? According to Technorati, it ranks currently at number 33,784, which places it in the top 0.046%. Thank you to all my readers, who have made it so.

Nothing whatever to do with professional service firm strategy but I just couldn't resist posting this photo of the McNaught Comet  over Devils Peak (Table Mountain to the left) in the city of my birth, Cape Town, South Africa. Apparently it is > 100 x the brightness that Halleys Comet was, on its last visit to earth back in 1986.

Of Counsel magazine, a journal aimed at the legal services market, has an article titled Survey of Consultancies Yields Some Helpful, Some Curious Findings in their January 2007 edition that places Edge International amongst the Top 3 strategy and management consultancies to law firms. The article reported on recognition and perception research done amongst managing partners of law firms of 100 + attorneys. The article focused on the North American results, so excluded the fact that the survey results also indicated a very high level of unaided name recognition for Edge International amongst law firm managing partners in the United Kingdom, but less so in continental Europe.

To quote from the article:

"[Edge International] did have a 56 percent positive rating among respondents, 25 percent neutral, 19 percent no perception and 0, that's ZERO percent had a negative perception."

The other two firms amongst the top three were Hildebrandt and Altman Weil. Interestingly, the market showed a distinct clustering at the top, with a large gap between the Top 3 and the No 4. This is identical to the market profile revealed by similar research undertaken several years ago, too.

According to Altman Weil's Ward Bower (one of the true veterans of the law firm consulting field):

"I think one thing that the survey might demonstrate is the difference between a commitment to being the biggest as opposed to being committed to quality. I think that Edge has that commitment (to quality.)"

Thank you, Ward. There is no higher praise than that from a most respected competitor.

Unfortunately, Of Counsel is not available online so I cannot provide a link to the actual article. If you'd like a copy, please contact me and I'll see what I can do about getting a copy of it to you.

The world is a tiny place! Yesterday, I got an email from my friend Ted Dwyer, an LLB MBA type in England specializing in financial performance related consulting and training with law and accounting firms, asking if I knew a chap called Chris O'Riley. Chris is one of the owners of LDM Global, a leading international provider of document management and litigation support solutions to the legal profession, corporations, government and financial institutions.

Like me, Ted said, he also lives in Freeport here in the Bahamas.

Five minutes later, there was a knock on the front door and there was Chris! He lives a couple of houses down the street! Both of us are still in shock that someone in such a similar field lived so close by and neither of us knew.

I've neglected my aggregator for a couple of days and it has punished me by filling up with over 1000 posts. At just a second or two each to decide whether to read a post or not, and reading about 1 in 20, that's still about two hours to plough through the lot. Here are 10 out of the 1000 that particularly caught my eye:

1.  If you've heard of Bob Sutton's book The No Asshole Rule - Building a civilized workplace and surviving one that isn't, then you'll enjoy this 4 minute 42 second video on how he came to write the book. Valuable lessons to all those of us that have to endure jerks in our organizations.

2.  Comment of the Association of Corporate Counsel’s 2006 Chief Legal Officer Survey by The Wired GC. The top three reasons for giving law firms the boot: (1) Cost management  (2) Mishandling matters  (3) Lack of responsiveness.

3.  Skadden Arps serving hot cocoa to warm up cold lawyers, from The Wall Street Journal

4.  Bruce MacEwen at Adam Smith Esq on law firm diversity and also (5) on Mediocre Strategy, Superb Execution : or the Difference between Brains and Guts.

6.  Charles J. Lowry on five large law firms  Alston & Bird, Arnold & Porter, Bingham McCutchen (if you're into African wildlife you'll love the pic on their web site, too,) Nixon Peabody, and Perkins Coie that have made Fortune's Top 100 Companies to Work For this year.

7.  Robert Ambrogi's post on Virtual Family Dinners makes me wonder which firm will be the first to install the technology in their offices and lawyers' homes, to remove the need for them to head home  before 10 PM, so opening the door to the 3000 billable hour year! (Don't shoot me - I am joking!)

8.  Here's a spot of vocational guidance in the form of a short video featuring John Cleese and Michael Palin of Monty Python fame, courtesy of Dennis Howlett at AccMan. Chartered accountant or lion tamer? You decide.

9.  Rod Boothby, formerly of Ernst & Young and now with Teqlo on The Executable Web, on how the internet is morphing fundamentally from static web pages and hyper links to "a world in which the web both helps us to communicate and also automate complex tasks in our lives."

10.  I have no hesitation in adding Adventure of Strategy to the growing number of blogs related to the legal profession roundly condemning the attack by the senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism, on US law firms defending those detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, reported in the New York Times today. As my friend and colleague Gerry Riskin puts it:

Read his posting on the subject here.

Now here's a chap that could teach us all a thing or two about leaning over backwards for clients! He's the limbo dancer in the Port Lucaya market, just down the road from where we live here in Freeport on Grand Bahama island, and where we will be seeing the New Year in later this evening.

This will be my last posting of 2006. I have many people to thank for what has proved to be a momentous year. Most of all, my dear and long suffering wife Creena and my friends and fellow principals Mike Anderson, Patrick McKenna and Gerry Riskin in Edge International. Next year, I am absolutely convinced, is going to be hard work but FANTASTIC!

I started off this year knowing next to nothing about blogging, launching Adventure of Strategy back in February. In the ten months since then, it has climbed to the top 100,000 in Technorati (out of about 52 million blogs worldwide, apparently) and has become an inseparable part of my life. Not just posting but, far more importantly, reading what others have to say. Throughout the year, I have been educated, entertained and forced to think deeply about things that would otherwise have been glossed over. I have had my paradigms challenged, my brain stretched and my curiosity piqued. Input from fellow bloggers has without doubt improved my professional practice, my ability and enthusiasm to serve my clients well and of course it has improved my blog itself too. All this from people that, for the most part, I have never met or even spoken to!

To all of you, I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude. THANK YOU!!!

The following (in no particular order) are just some of those to whom this thanks is directed, specifically:

Stephanie West Allen at Idealawg has 'tapped' me to contribute to the 'Lawyers Appreciate' string that she started back on 22 December and ends at midnight tonight. I really enjoy Stephanie's blog. Our thinking coincides a great deal when it comes to the incredibly difficult task of managing complexity effectively in 21st Century organizations. So, with just a couple of hours before the start the seventh year of the 21st Century, and hard on the heels of my posting One Night Stands and Chinese Math earlier today, here goes:

Lawyers appreciate ... law firm consultants that deliver on their promises, exceed their expectations and strive to develop mutually valuable, professionally respectful long term relationships, rather than treat them simply as a source of interesting work and revenue!

Here is what my friend and fellow Edge International principal Gerry Riskin had to say on the subject a couple of days ago, too.

Thanks to the folk that did me the honour of coming to listen to me speak today at the ALA luncheon in West Palm Beach, FL. As promised, a (password protected) PDF of the presentation slides may be downloaded from here: Download file. If you've forgotten the password, please email me.

The Millard family (including two kids and two cats) has finally made the move from Johannesburg, South Africa to the north western quadrisphere. We are now resident in Freeport on Grand Bahama Island, about two minutes walk from a crisp white beach. Our new contact details are as per the 'contact us' button above.

There's been an eight day "drought" with no postings to my blog, which is the longest that I have left it untended since launching it six months ago. Sorry about that. Things have been just a tad hectic here in South Africa as I prepare to pack up and move my family to North America in five weeks time. (If you'd like to know why, take a look at the Clustrmap at the foot of this page.) Between now and then I have to travel to London for a week plus, Singapore for five days and probably short trip to Saudi Arabia too.

Some links that I have added to my blogroll in the last while:

Ann Michael's Manage to Change. (Making sense out of change. Ideas need to add up before they can multiply.)

Bruce Marcus's The Markus Perspective (A contrarian's view of professional services marketing and management)

Canadian Bar Association's PracticeLink

Lisa Haneberg's Management Craft (Discussions about state of the art management.)

Ron Lamb's The Language of Execution (Step Improvement in the Execution of Strategy. With failure rates above 50%, incremental improvements aren't enough.)

Stephanie West Allen's Idealawg.

Happy 230th Birthday to the many American readers of this blog. On the 4th July each year, I always remember the words of the indefatigable former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, during one of the speeches that she made during the bicentennial celebrations in 1976. They were (close as I can remember) :

"You are here to celebrate, and us to commiserate, certain events that took place 200 years ago, that we now regard as ... probably irreversible!"

Don't eat too many hotdogs ........

I'm off this evening (Saturday 10 June) to England (Oxford + London) for a week followed by Toronto, Canada the following week, so blogging may be a little less regular than usual.

I am presenting a paper and conducting a workshop at Ark Group Asia's Strategic Law Firm Management conference in Singapore from 23 - 25 August 2006. If you would like to download a copy of the brochure for the conference, click here.

I've been mining into the meta-data on my blog to learn a bit more about what people are reading and what not, so that I can aim what I write more accurately at what interests you.

The articles that received the most visitors in each of the last three months are as follows (top five for each month.) I'll post on May at the beginning of June.

TOP 5 - APRIL 2006

Harnessing the Phoenix 18 Mar 06
The BCG Growth / Market Share Portfolio Matrix 23 Mar 06
The Dangers of Multi-tasking 22 Mar 06
Trust and Betrayal in the Process of Strategy 20 Mar 06
Maister Bombshell 14 Apr 06

TOP 5 - MARCH 2006

Harnessing the Phoenix 18 Mar 06
Blindspot Analysis - Uncovering Strategic Bias 13 Feb 06
Trust and Betrayal in the Process of Strategy 20 Mar 06
The Dangers of Multi-tasking 22 Mar 06
The BCG Growth / Market Share Portfolio Matrix 23 Mar 06

TOP 5 - FEBRUARY 2006

Blindspot Analysis - Uncovering Strategic Bias 13 Feb 06
Creating a Community 15 Feb 06
Virtual Collaboration 13 Feb 06
Law Firm Strategy - Stellar Performances and Looming Changes 13 Feb 06
Essential Reading for Professional Service Firm Strategists 12 Feb 06

If you'd like to get an idea of the global distribution of those that read Adventure of Strategy, check out the ClustrMap tool at the base of the page. This tool seems to pick up about 1 in 10 visitors, compared to Movable Type's own tracking data, and it has only been running on my blog since 1 May. So the picture is somewhat incomplete. The trends are obvious, though. According to both, nearly 60% of this blog's readers currently are in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, then Canada, then Australia and then South Africa making up the last of the "Top 5." Readership in the Far East and mainland Europe is increasing steadily.

Just to show that there is no end to the stupidity of mankind, here is a blog devoted exclusively to putting things on cats. The most ridiculous thing of all? Of the approximately 38.2 million blogs in the world currently being tracked by Technorati, this is ranked No 85! That would make it 3170 x more popular than The Adventure of Strategy (which is still in the top 0.7%!)

What's the No 1 blog in the world? Well if you ever needed evidence that the world is flattening, here it is. The No 1 blog in the world is currently Chinese celebrity Xujinglei's blog, with 45,700 links from 28,151 sites.

Relevance to professional service firm strategy? Well, OK... Virtually zero. But hey, it's a weekend! Have a great one!

OK, when I started this blog I was determined to be really strict about only posting on stuff that is clearly and directly related to professional service firm strategy. But I'm going to make an exception tonight. Having been "tagged" by my great friend and Edge International colleague, Gerry Riskin, I figured that it would be rude to decline, and in any case it gives you a little more information about who Rob Millard really is, if you're interested. If not, by all means hit "next unread" on your aggregator.

There are many blogs on strategy, innovation and management. Many even on professional service firms, especially law firm "blawgs." This one is going to be different. I am positioning it right at the frontier of professional service firm strategy, where new ideas from entirely different aspects of life enter the arena. There they spark new insights that in turn lead to innovation and change in our firms. So although it will certainly cover serious items related to professional service firm strategy, it will also have regular postings from the "far side" which inform, educate or even just amuse the strategists tasked with the future of our firms.