Adventure of Strategy

If Citibank’s Law Group Head and friend, Dan DiPietro, is correct, US law firms may soon be battling unprecedented economic pressures. We believe that Law firms must immediately prepare by reassessing their strategies in order to:

• minimize the potentially firm-threatening impact and
• capitalize on competitive opportunities

1.    Strong Leadership

In ancient times, the Cherokee Nation had one chief who would rule during times of peace; another during war. The need for hard, courageous decisions, even sacrifice, is common to both recessions and wars. In both, strong leadership is critical if hard decisions are to be taken and actually executed.

2.    Ramp Up the Frequency of Financial Data Reporting

Things can change fast in a recession. Clients, under financial pressure themselves, terminate engagements. Revenues may contract. Debtor payment periods and write offs may deteriorate, putting pressure on liquidity. The firm’s key financial metrics must be monitored far more frequently than in booming times.

3.    Make the Hard Decisions Humanely and Fast

Layoffs, if required, must be quick and humane not only to preserve capital, but also to get the firm past this trauma quickly and focused on working forward again. Continued employment of underperformers must be carefully assessed. Where the market is no longer buying specific services there are two choices: retool (quickly) or separate. (Do not misinterpret this as a suggestion to rush to lay off people though. Long-term considerations suggest this is a last resort option for all personnel except those who ought to have been asked to leave years ago.)

4.    Get Practice Leaders and Client Team Leaders Focused on Short-term Action Plans

Actions must be executed more quickly than in “good times” and therefore designed for rapid implementation. Plans must be focused, systematic and disciplined. Those that will actually drive plans must be integrally involved in crafting them and managing their execution. Feedback and accountability measures are critical to ensure that the plans are executed, especially when they relate to the hard, courageous decisions (point 1.) Non-billable time becomes a valuable asset and must be actively managed to ensure that key tasks receive priority.

5.    Involve Your Clients

In recessions, client mobility increases. Client needs evolve more quickly as new threats and opportunities emerge. Firms need to go beyond simply expressing empathy and assuring continuing loyalty. They need to actively position themselves to meet emerging key client needs. This cannot be done without actively discussing business (not just legal) issues with clients. If you don’t have client teams in place for your key clients, now would be a good time to start!

6.    Manage Internal Expectations: Business as Usual Could Be Lethal

Remember the tale of the two frogs? The first is dropped into a bowl of hot water. It jumps out. The second is dropped into a bowl of cold water and slowly heated up. It doesn’t jump out and eventually dies. Similar procrastination has been the death of too many good firms. Leaders need to explain internally what is being done to weather the recession and the likely impact on the financial positions of your people. This knowledge will motivate your people to do what is expected of them rather than default to “business as usual.”

7.    This Too Shall Pass: Keep a Balance With Your Long Term Strategy

Think strategically about whether and where to cut short-term resources. Retaining some temporarily unprofitable practice areas and individuals may be advisable if they are important to your long-term goals. On the other hand, a recession is an excellent time to re-engineer or sever areas that have become less profitable but have been tolerated to avoid conflict.

The Chinese character for “crisis” consists of two symbols. One means “danger,” the other “opportunity.” While strategy may be more challenging during recessions, if you grasp the nettle, opportunities will arise to enhance your client mix and your talent base.

What can Edge do to help? Four things, primarily:

• help you assess the features in your current strategy that would need to change in order to “recession-proof” your firm and help you amend your strategy accordingly; and

• help you develop your strategy’s necessary action plans and facilitate the (likely difficult) discussions about executing those actions; and

• help your lawyers develop critical strategic business skills required to bulletproof your existing crown jewel clients from competitors. (Bulletproofing transcends mere “training” and involves a focused methodology that yields immediate results.)

• help you target market new clients whose current providers simply can not continue to satisfy them in challenging times.

Our best regards,
Gerry Riskin & Rob Millard

Guy Kawasaki is punting a book on his blog with a nicely provocative title: The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By. If you think that you already know enough about entrepreneurship, take the test. I just did and equalled Guy's score of .... 40%. (Ouch!)

Says the author, Scott Shane:

“People start businesses based on the myths we tell ourselves about entrepreneurship and then are hurt when confronted by reality. Investors believe these myths and invest money and they’re disappointed when they don’t hold true. Policy makers make policy based on these myths and then wonder why the economy isn’t growing with all these entrepreneurs now in it.”

This resonates strongly with why so much strategy ends up flawed too, because we believe the myths that we tell ourselves about:

1.  what our clients think.
2.  which services / clients / fee-earners are profitable, and which are not.
3.  how good we really are, at what's really important.

Looks like Amazon is about to make another sale off me!

An article in IT Week in the UK this week titled Web 2.0 Confusion Hindering Firms reports on research that has just been completed by IT consulting firm Parity, into levels of understanding of Web 2.0 tools in organizations. In many ways, it read to me like similar research results about understanding of the importance of the internet to business, back in the early 1990s. My interest in IT is limited to its application to strategy and its impact on strategy in the firms that I serve, so IT Week is not on my usual reading list. The heads-up came from a new "intelligent" current affairs search tool that I am test driving, called Silobreaker. (More on this once I've "driven" it a bit more. Looks promising, so far.)

In any event, nearly half of senior managers polled did not understand the benefits of promoting Web 2.0 in the workplace and a third of IT managers said they lack understanding of this new area of technology. But .... of those who did find benefit in using Web 2.0, over half said they were able to work more efficiently, or could work together across different locations more easily.

HR staff are apparently similarly uninformed about Web 2.0, according to a different research project by security firm Clearswift. They found one in five HR decision makers are unfamiliar with Web 2.0 phenomena like social networking sites, and 65 percent said they deny employee access to these sites. Half of those surveyed said they have had to discipline staff for time wasting on the internet.

John Court, an IT manager for law firm SJ Berwin LLP, said it is increasingly difficult for his IT team to distinguish between personal and business usage and said end-user education and awareness raising about the impact of using such sites is key.

Yes, Web 2.0 tools are indeed still very much at the front edge of the curve. As with so much innovation, the first adopters amongst law firms [a couple of years ago, now] were fringe firms who had people passionate about technology to champion the idea. They were followed by the global leaders, who saw the potential and had the critical mass to give a new idea a try without fear of significant consequences if it turned out to be a waste of time. Allen & Overy and Linklaters are two that I have some personal knowledge of in this area, that have made great strides in building Web 2.0 concepts into their firms. That leaves those "in the middle." Not that this, in itself, presents a problem. There is much to be said for learning from the successes and mistakes of others.

One thing is for sure, though:  Web 2.0 and its new approaches to how firms work (like brainswarming, for instance) are here to stay. If ever there was a trend to watch, it is this one. One does not need to be amongst the first to adopt the new approaches (it's too late for that now, anyway) .... but it would not be a good idea to lag too far behind the pack, either.

The Lawyer in London has picked up on our Brainswarming concept. Here's their somewhat tongue-in-cheek clip from their weekly column of 12 November:

"Prepare yourself for some new business jargon that is being cooked up in the US of A. The word is 'Brainswarm' and it is being pioneered by American law firm analyst Rob Millard (www.robmillard.com).

Millard says: "Brainswarming uses swarm theory to solicit firmwide input into a firm's strategic planning process, using a dedicated enterprise blogging platform as a tool."

Just nod and smile if someone ever mentions it in a meeting. Nod and smile."

It's not that complicated. What we call brainswarming is simply using Web 2.0 tools already gaining wide traction in the more progressive law firms, to harness the "collective intellect" of the firm for their strategy process. No more, no less. I wish that we could claim to have invented the concept too, but in fact IBM did in 2003 with what they called jamming (a fascinating process that involved thousands of employees in > 100 countries over 72 hours.) Ten or even five years ago, this would have been a big deal and technologically very complex and expensive to achieve. Today, it's simple and cheap.

Thanks to the folk at The Lawyer.com for the mention :-)

The World Economic Forum has just published a series of scenarios titled The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the World: Scenarios to 2025. The link gives an overview of the study, a link to the executive summary and a link to a video interview with Nicholas Davis, one of the scenario planning experts involved in the study. (Hat tip to The Bayesian Heresy.)

Scenarios are a vastly underrated tool in the strategist's toolbox. Clifford Chance went through a widely publicized scenario planning exercise in 2005 but beyond that, they are not very widely used in professional service firm strategic planning processes. This is a pity, especially in today's highly dynamic and rapidly evolving markets, and firm's would do well to consider their use more closely.

Scenarios are very useful tools for looking at what may happen. Firms almost always tend to base their strategies on a fixed view, or at least a narrow forecast of what may occur in the future. Their strategic planning processes are also not generally good at considering cause-and-effect more than superficially, or just into the immediate future. As we all know, this raises the danger of unanticipated consequences or a strategy that does not fit with alternative futures that may emerge.

On the other hand, scenario planning really casts the net wide; to explore many different possible futures. Firms can use then use scenarios to test their strategies against this range of alternative futures, some of which they may not even have considered when crafting their strategy.

Scenarios can also make it easier to have uncomfortable discussions about difficult topics. This is because they aim to explore possibilities around those difficult topics, rather than being prescriptive about their solutions. They are really more about exploring the future; not about telling anyone what should or will happen.

The October (Fall) 2007 edition of our firm's professional service firm strategy and management journal, Edge International Review, is available for download (for free) here. Click on the image above for a larger graphic of the cover where the article titles are legible. You can download either the whole journal, or individual articles, as you choose.

We had a good turnout and a fascinating debate at the Managing Partners' Forum (MPF) meeting at the offices of White & Case LLP in Manhattan this morning. The discussion centred mostly around the differences in approach to strategy in firms in the United Kingdom vs North America, and also in CPA (Accounting) Firms vs Law Firms, uncovered in the recent MPF strategy survey.

My presentation slides of the survey results are attached below. If you'd like to download a copy (2.8MB) and use them to improve your own firm's strategy processes, you are most welcome to do so.

Download file

Imagine a tool that allows "everyone to see and understand the diversity of legal systems and laws that exist around the world - and to be able to do so at the click of a mouse."

That is the dream behind the Global Legal Information Network ("GLIN") that the Law Library of the US Library of Congress started in 1993, and which is now well into a major five year upgrade commenced in 2004. Furthermore, the the Library of Congress has awarded just awarded ATS Corporation a $14 Million contract to enhance the Global Legal Information Network yet further. A comment on a posting about GLIN on slaw.ca reports that GLIN has experienced a 70% increase in traffic and anticipates a tenfold increase in storage capacity in the first [ATS] contract year.

Oxford Analytica has launched a forward-view current affairs service called The World Next Week. These guys produce really good stuff, so this is a resource well worth adding to one's RSS feed. Unlike so much of this kind of information that comes with an investigative journalist slant (not that I'm trashing investigative journalists - they serve a critical role in society - merely observing that they often come at things from a particular angle and don't go deeper than a topic's newsworthiness dictates) the Oxford Analytica material comes from a global network of recognized authorities and experts collaborating.

Take a look at their article Recession Rhubarb on whether or not there will be a US recession. They believe that  likelihood of a recession in the next 12 months is 13.3%. Dramatically lower than what some others say but, as they point out, there is so much variation in view between different credible economic sources, that it is impossible to draw meaningful conclusions. 

There is just over a week to go before Verasage's conference in Las Vegas, that is being billed as The CPE/CLE of the Century (and the one your partners probably don’t want you to attend.) If you can be in Las Vegas on Monday 22 October, then get hold of the folk at Verasage and see if you can still get a place. The cost is only a couple of hundred bucks and the line-up of speakers is most impressive. You'll learn not only why billing by the hour is an antiquated idea, but also real and proven alternatives, from people that are actually using them.

Sadly, I will not be there myself as there is a conflict with another commitment that I had already accepted. Were this not the case, I most definitely would be there and in fact I tried quite hard to try to work a miracle to make it possible to do both. Simply wasn't achievable.

Further to my blog posting earlier this week ago calling for a more sophisticated approach to the tools that firms employ to craft strategy, herewith an article to be published in December this year in the Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences. Titled Neurocognitive Inefficacy of the Strategy Process , it holds back no punches when attacking either Michael Porter's 'Five Forces' for that ubiquitous old faithful, the SWOT analysis. Thanks to Stephanie West-Allen for the pointer! Click the title above for a PDF of the unedited manuscript, or click below for a brief summary courtesy of yours truly.

Here's a 'sound byte' :

"The application of purportedly  “rational” tools or techniques or protocols or models or frameworks to the problem of new strategy formation appears overwhelmingly ineffectual. Few, if any, organizations actually obtain new or revised strategy from such efforts. When the genesis of a dramatic change in an organization’s objectives and strategies finally is tracked down, it invariably is the result of an “informal” process, more often than not unrelated to the formal planning effort itself."

Fighting talk, indeed!!! I'm pleased to find yet another person pointing out that the strategic planning emperor has no clothes, though! There is just too much at stake for the firms that we serve for the smoke and mirrors that so often masquerades for a strategy process.

The authors of the paper are Harold E. Klein of the Department of General & Strategic Management at the Fox School of Business and Management at Temple University and Mark D'Esposito who is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

A few weeks back I had a fascinating discussion with an officer in the US Marine Corps about the current doctrines of military strategy and how they translate to business. He told me that a major current area of focus is finding ways to reduce the time that it takes to plan operations while, at the same time, disrupting the enemy's ability to plan. He also said that "everybody knows" that a strategic plan is out of date immediately after it is drafted.

In today's rapidly changing world, this makes perfect sense in business too. (The first part, at any rate!) Yet it is clear from the results of our August 2007 Managing Partners' Forum strategy survey that the "average" law firm, both in the United Kingdom and North America, uses neither the full range of information sources that they need for the firm's leaders to make good decisions, nor the tools available to get strategy crafted and executed as quickly and effectively as possible.

My fellow strategy researchers Bruce MacEwen and Andrew Hedley and I are still ploughing through the quite fascinating data and we will be releasing the full results within the next few weeks. In the meantime, herewith a few preliminary remarks about strategy velocity, data sources and tools.

If you're unclear about how the new Web 2.0 internet based IT tools that are emerging are different from the conventional software solutions that we have become used to, then this 5 minute video by Rod Boothby at Innovation Creators will give a pretty good overview. Also some solid insights into how this is going to affect knowledge work as the new tools increase dominance over the old. I think that it is IMPERATIVE that firms track this trend. If the topic interests you in greater depth, there is a white paper (still in draft) available too.  Click the image above to access the video.

The Verasage Institute is holding a public forum in Las Vegas on Monday 22 October, that would be of interest to any professional service firm leader who is interested in "21st Century" strategy and management. Keynote speakers include Christopher Marston, founder and CEO (right out of law school) of Exemplar Law Partners, which now has a multinational practice based on 100% value billing (no timesheets!) and an unconditional client satisfaction guarantee. Also Brendan Harrex who heads up the Harrex Group in New Zealand, which is an accounting firm that has also gone the value pricing route and banned timesheets. Christopher is now 31 years old and Brendan is 33.

At $129 for the day, it has been priced so that it is affordable even if your firm won't cover the cost! Highly recommended! Registration details are on Verasage's web site here (scroll down.)

I'm delighted to announce that together with Bruce MacEwen in New York and Andrew Hedley in London, I have taken on the task of director of the Managing Partners' Form's Strategy Panel. Should be fascinating. We will be running regular surveys and other research projects on topics of strategic importance to managing partners of professional service firms and then presenting and discussing the results at meetings of the panel at various cities across the United Kingdom, USA and beyond.

The inaugural survey is out right now. It aims to discover:

• Attitudes towards strategic planning
• Responsibility for formulating strategy
• Sources of data used when formulating strategy
• Tools used in formulating strategy
• Assessment of opportunities and threats facing firms
• Frequency, duration and time horizons when formulating strategy
• Overall satisfaction with the outcome

I suppose that it had to happen sooner or later, what with the increasing convergence of diverse data sources. If I understand things correctly, this company, netfactor, offers to install software on your system that will track the IP addresses of computers that visit your web site, cross reference those IP addresses with databases recording computer ownership to determine who owns the computers and then cross reference that data further to provide addresses, telephone numbers, etc. You then get a spreadsheet detailing everybody who has visited your web site, without their having identified themselves (consciously at least.)

If this is real, then a whole new generation of spam may be about to emerge, with an approach that starts: "We notice that you visited our web site yesterday ..."

Could be great for marketing and competitive intelligence, though, if it is not abused.

Hat-tip to MBA Depot.

Effective writing is one of the most critical skills for any professional. If one is working essentially with knowledge as a work product, then communicating that work product effectively and accurately in written form is obviously of cardinal importance. The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University is a resource that I find useful in 'raising the bar' in my own use of the written English language.

Seth Godin has just posted a brilliant entry titled NOBS, the end of the MBA.  "NOBS" stands for New Order Business School. He hits some hard points about the relevance (or lack thereof) of conventional business school / MBA training to the real world.

This is good thinking material for those who are wondering how to make their lawyers / accountants / other professionals who are already truly gifted in their professional practice, be equally gifted on the business side.

Godin's NOBS will have a few unique characteristics, compared to Harvard, Stanford, Wharton and other well known top end business schools.

The latest addition to my blogroll is Stanford University Professor Bob Sutton's blog Work Matters. Feel free to pay him a visit  - he writes really good stuff. I blogged about Bob in my post earlier today. His other blogs at Evidence Based Management and at Harvard Business Online are well worth a look, too. Given that so much that goes on in firms is based on gut, politics or other forms of dubious alchemy, it is refreshing to see somebody else advocating solid evidence as a basis for strategy!

Bob has also gained much fame (or perhaps notoriety) recently with his book on the No Asshole Rule.

I'm busy reading Solving Tough Problems, an excellent little book by Adam Kahane. Kahane was the architect of the Mont Fleur Scenarios that were developed in South Africa in 1992, just before the formal end of apartheid, to develop a range of possible views on South Africa's post-apartheid future. The proponents of the exercise were the then still black liberation movements, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC.) The books covers far more than just scenario planning, though. (Important though scenario may be as a tool in the strategist's toolkit.)

Well, I suppose that it is possible that somebody might publish something earthrending in the last two weeks of 2006 but, presumably working on the assumption that the best is already with us, Harvey Schachter of The Globe and Mail in Toronto has just published his list of the top ten business books of 2006. They are:

Want to read that new book that has just been published but don't have a couple of hours to spare? Wikipedia has just launched a new service that may help. Called WikiSummaries, it contains book summaries in the form of articles and chapter summaries.

There are not that many books yet in the database, especially not business books, but that will no doubt change quickly. In the meantime, here are links to the WikiSummaries of Jim Collins' Good to Great, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Blink, and Steven Levitt's Freakonomics. Is this the beginning of the death knell for enterprises selling book summaries? (Who can compete if someone else is giving away what you sell, for free?)

Being a wiki, the summaries are contributed by the public at large and may be edited by the public at large, with contributions being moderated to ensure quality and avoid malicious vandalism.

Charles Handy, one of England's foremost management gurus (although he describes himself as a social philosopher these days) has launched a site called The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management. The site examines the roles and teachings of a range of business gurus, with text, audio and explanation of common management terms.

Hat tip to Tom Peters for pointing it out.

Folk interested in a resource like this would probably also be interested in the Drucker Archives that I blogged about a few months ago.

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, authors of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence Based Management (HBS Press, 2006) have launched a web site called Evidence Based Management.

Evidence-based management, they say, is a simple idea. It just means finding the best evidence that you can, facing those facts, and acting on those facts - rather than doing what everyone else does, what you have always done, or what you thought was true.

Well worth a look. 'Hard Facts' is one of the best books I've read this year. Hap tip to Bob Sutton at Work Matters.

One of the emerging themes in professional service firm business management, is the idea that such firms are complex adaptive systems, and that they must be managed accordingly. The trouble is that complexity itself is a notion that is, well ..... complex! Difficult to get one's mind around. Like Systems thinking, complexity models are useful for those that understand them, to apply in the process of crafting strategy, but are best used in the background. In the same way that a patient does not really need to fully comprehend the inner mechanics of an electroencephalogram, in order to benefit from it.

That said, I was delighted to come across a very cool graphic on complex thinking, that is worth taking a look at for two reasons:

1) It explains the art of complex problem solving succinctly and imaginatively

2) It is an absolutely "best-of-breed" example of how to communicate a complex idea graphically and interactively.

Scroll your cursor around the graphic and watch it spring to life!

Hat tip to Anecdote down under in Australia.

One of the most important skills that any strategist needs to master, is the ability to see things as they really are. Skill, you might ask? Not a form of inbred attribute? Something that one is born with? No, it's mostly skill. An instinct that can (and should) be learnt.

An important part of this kind of insight is about being open to more than the mindset that one tends to automatically default to; being aware of and overcoming the blindspots that cloud one's vision and judgement.

Innovation Zen has a post today titled The Enemy is the Mindset, that is well worth a read.

My fellow Edge International principal Patrick McKenna has just published a new book called First 100 Days, which is a guide for new managing partners taking up the reigns in their firms. It is quite magnificent. Patrick has published it as an e-book that can be downloaded (for free) by clicking here.

Up till now Patrick was probably best known for his earlier book First Among Equals, that he co-authored with David Maister.

My personal view: Patrick's latest offering makes an important addition to the toolkit available to professional service firm strategists and I strongly recommend it to anybody taking up a leadership role in such a firm. Bravo, Patrick!

Retreats are a regular feature in many firms' strategic planning processes. If you are planning one, here are some resources to help you get the most out of it, besides the usual getting to know one's colleagues better and having a good time all round.

From Edge International's web site:

Retreats - The Edge Approach
Planning a Law Firm Retreat: Part 1
Planning a Law Firm Retreat: Part 2
Mount Everest Syndrome

Bruce Marcus has a White Paper on the topic that can be downloaded from his blog's web site, too.

Hope this helps ....

Click image to enlarge

The Summer 2006 edition of Edge International Review, Edge International's quarterly strategy and management journal, is now available online. For a Table of Contents and to download the journal, please visit Edge International's web site.

Bloggers Joy London of excited utterences and Ron Friedmann of Strategic Legal Technology have compiled a list of outsourced / offshore service providers relevant to the legal services industry. Mostly from India, but a few other countries too. Say the authors:

The list does not include offshore litigation support (coding or EED) or vendor-provided technology services. Nor does it include offshore vendors without a specific legal focus."

Friedmann also references an article on this extremely "hot" strategic topic, in the June 2006 edition of National, the journal of the Canadian Bar Association. The article, called Over The Horizon, can be downloaded as a PDF by clicking here.

While competitive intelligence (CI) has long been a standard tool in mainstream industry and in consulting firms, it has only recently come to the fore in law firms.

This is according to an e-brief received from the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) earlier to day, quoting an article in the Boston Globe and another in Legal Technology.

Uber-guru Tom Peters has tons of free stuff on his web site. Not only does he routinely post the slides from his presentations that he does during his continual whirlwind global galavanting, but there are a whole range of other things of interest to professional service firm strategists, freely available for download.

The most recent is Project05 : "a 240-page PDF full of rants (CEOs Are Idiots!), raves (Lord Nelson Had All the Answers), and more."

Also look at The PSF is Everything : "in the face of outsourcing, automating, downsizing, and all the other possible assaults on your position, Tom gives you tips on turning your company, your department, or yourself into a Professional Service Firm-doing work that makes a difference.")

And, of course, if you haven't seen Tom's blog then that's well worth a visit too. Not everybody's "cup of tea," but then I'm quite certain that Tom would be most offended if it was...

Yesterday, I was introduced to a set of business intelligence ("BI") tools for law firms that I found truly astounding. Called the Redwood Performance Suite, it appears to be fundamentally new approach to management and analysis of the data that a firm's leaders need in order to track performance on an ongoing basis. Also to spotlight areas where management action is required to improve performance.

I've just spent a fascinating morning with Oxford Analytica here in Oxford, England. Oxford Analytica is the organization that Clifford Chance turned to, to undertake their scenario planning exercise that underpinned their strategy review last year.

I was privileged to be invited to attend their daily briefing as an observer. This meeting was a round-table "what has happened in the world in last 24 hours that we need to know about," that is modeled on the 'daily briefing' instituted by Henry Kissinger for Richard Nixon. Oxford Analytica's founder, Dr David Young, was one of Kissinger's key advisors.

Few in the field of strategy and management would be unfamiliar with the name of the late uber-guru Peter Drucker. This web site, Drucker Archives, has a wealth of information related to his thinking and work. To quote from the site itself:

"The Drucker Archive contains the life works of this extraordinary thinker and "social ecologist". This body of work will serve students, managers, scholars, and researchers for generations to come as the works and thoughts of Peter Drucker continue to ripple through our intellectual community."

Thanks once again to MBA Depot for pointing the way.

MBA Depot has a link today to an article in Inc Magazine's Inc.com on the psychology of entrepreneurs. It makes fascinating reading. The article reports on a solid research study undertaken recently on 250 current and former leaders of Inc. 500 companies that debunks many of the myths about what makes a good entrepreneur, and highlights a few unexpected characteristics. The debunked myths are:

Dave Lorenzo, author of Career Intensity, has several recent posts on his blog of the same name, that would be of interest to professional service firm strategists wanting to "up" their personal game.

They include:

Goal Framing
Frame your personal goals in a positive rather than negative sense.

The Eight-Step Process to Manage Your Emotions
How, during the process of strategy formulation and elsewhere in life, to overcome the urge to leap up and throttle idiots that desperately need it!

and ....

Time Management Expertise
Basic "Time Management 101" in a 60 second read.

Some other cool stuff too .......

Here is a list of 100 Rules for NASA Project Managers, compiled by Jerry Madden, Associate Director of the Flight Projects Directorate at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Really good common sense stuff here for anybody that needs to manage projects of any sophistication.

Thanks to Clarke Ching for the pointer.

Stephanie West Allen has a posting on her blog idealawg, that contains a link to whole suite of lectures (25 of them) given by Tal D. Ben-Shahar in his spring semester course at Harvard on the psychology of leadership. It is a quite remarkable series, but then Ben-Shahar did teach two of the three most popular courses at Harvard College that semester! The course is described on the Harvard site as follows:

"How can leaders - in the business sector, politics, or education - create an environment that facilitates growth? Topics include transformational leadership, personal identity, change, ethics, peak experience and peak performance, motivation, and systems thinking."

One of the characteristics of the leaders that really 'ring the bell,' is a thirst for knowledge and self-betterment that never dries up. There can be few areas where the need for top-rate skills is greater. I commend watching and listening to these lectures to anybody's personal self-education programme.

To link directly to the lectures, click here. (Ain't technology wonderful?)

I've just added a permanent link from this site to Anecdotes - Insights and Empowerment from Australia. They've got some great stuff, particularly on complexity theory and other emerging trends in strategy.

The pic above, by the way, comes from a presentation that I assembled some time ago on the subject of law firm strategy and illustrates that sometimes 'differentiation' simply involves looking at something familiar from a different angle!

Strategic blindspots seems to be popular topic amongst readers of this blog. (My posting Blindspot Analysis - Uncovering Strategic Bias has featured on the list of five most read postings on this blog for two out of the past three months.) Given that so much of my own practice revolves around strategy, it is also a subject that is keeping me increasingly fascinated, too. Not so much blindspots as 'per se,' as how to identify them and what to do about them during strategic process.

Craig Henry, in his blog Lead and Gold, blogs about a new book on the topic that will certainly be in my next contribution to Amazon.com's profits. The book is called Changing Minds - The art and science of changing our own and other people's minds, by Howard Gardner.

His insights are critical not only for those who have to think themselves about strategy, but also those tasked with driving change.

Click on image to enlarge

Google has launched a tool, Google Trends, that will be of interest to strategists. It allows one to search which terms are being used most frequently in Google searches, including comparatively by entering several different key words. The frequency with which these terms have been used, going back to 2004, is then plotted on a graphic.

For instance, the graphic above shows a comparison between the three of the largest law firms in the world, namely Clifford Chance, Baker & McKenzie and DLA Piper Rudnick. Interesting to see how much interest DLA Piper has generated on the web since its emergence at the end of 2004 with the merger of DLA and Piper Rudnick Gray Carey.

Beware, though. This is a keyword search. The tool cannot differentiate between different uses or relevances of a particular word or term. To illustrate, I did both a comparative analysis of McKinsey & Co, Bain & Co, Accenture and my own firm, Edge International. (Are you ready for this? OK, click here.) Could it be that we are really so much more interesting to Google users than our heavyweight competitors, or did other kinds of "edge" also come up? Obviously the latter. Cool addition to the strategists toolkit, nonetheless.

Henry Mintzberg (pictured above,) Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampell, in their 2005 book Strategy Bites Back, present 5 "P's" as a way to define strategy. Each "P" shines a spotlight on what strategy is / means / encompasses from a different angle, to provide a comprehensive overview that is probably more useful that definitions that try to fit all into a couple of sentences.

The 5 "P's," adjusted where necessary to fit into the professional service firm universe, are as follows:

If you were able to ask just one question of a client, with the assurance that the answer would give you a good indication of their level of satisfaction with your firm's services, what would that question be? Fred Reichheld's article The Microeconomics of Customer Relationships (subscription or purchase for $6.50 required,) in the Winter 2006 edition of the MIT Sloan Management Review, has the answer. It is:

"One a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is 'not at all likely' and 10 is 'extremely likely,' how likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?"

Depending on the answer, clients would be categorized as promoters (scores of 9 and 10,) passive (7 or 8) and detractors (6 or less.) Note that passives do not straddle the 50% or even the 60% mark. Anything less than 70% is viewed negatively.

General Electric, already the 9th largest company in the world by revenue, is using this model to try to drive its organic growth rate from 5% to 8% pa. According to Reichheld's data, a promoter has a net present value (NPV) to the firm of 1.5 and 2.5 times that of an "average" client (i.e. a passive.) On the other hand, a detractor frequently has a negative NPV. Sometimes, a surprisingly high negative NPV. The article explains how a firm can calculate these figures for themselves and also how to use them. A summary follows:

I have railed against lousy PowerPoint design several times over the past few months, including the postings Death by PowerPoint and Beating Powerpoint Overload, but Contrasts in Presentation Style : Yoda vs Darth Vader on Garr Reynolds' blog Presentation Zen truly had me in stitches. Imagine how Darth Vader would compile a PowerPoint presentation! How would Joda, the Jedi Master, do it? Princess Leia? Like one of those that commented on this posting on Garr's blog, I'm convinced that the 'dark lord' consults on PowerPoint design to many of those speakers whose small-print-multi-bulleted-complex-graphics slides we've all had to endure!

What has PowerPoint to do with strategy? Well, it's a tool very commonly used to communicate strategy, all too often in such a way as to put the audience to sleep! A strategy that is not effectively communicated, like any other message, does not yield results. So while you're visiting Garr's site, take a look at his posting Links to Presentation-Related Video Clips too. It has links to clips to some world-class speakers and milestone speeches including Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King ("I have a Dream") and even Frank Zappa, intended for both strategists and normal people to use to 'up their game' when it comes to their presentation abilities.

Comments, as always, are most welcome and may be posted below.

If your interest in professional service firm strategy extends beyond just what you need to do within your own firm, and deeper into the lofty realms of the academic aspects of the topic, then this is for you.

Take a look at the web site of the Clifford Chance Centre for the Management of Professional Service Firms at Said Business School at Oxford University. It contains links to a brief overview of some of the research literature on professional service firms and also on the professions. It describes the centre's current research agenda and contains a range of research working papers authored by the centre's faculty. Currently, these working papers are as follows:

Need to compare international business costs across the world? KPMG's web site Competitive Alternatives may have the information that you need. It contains comparative costs for a wide range of goods and services across nine countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Singapore, United Kingdom, United States.) The data has a user-friendly search tool so it can be compared in all sorts of different ways and was collected between July 2005 and February 2006.

This is another posting of the Strategy 101 kind, in this case to introduce another of the basic tools that professional service firm strategists need to have in their toolboxes. This tool was first mentioned on this blog in my previous posting Love Your Dogs?

Only firms that have superior market share that can grow their business and develop the organizational learning capabilities to really capitalize on their experience. Empirical studies by the Harvard Business School in the 1970s first confirmed the basis for this assumption, leading the way to the development of the Boston Consulting Group's (BCG) Growth / Market Share Portfolio Matrix.

In the professional service firm context, the BCG matrix is a tool to determine the attractiveness of a service or practice area, based on the service life cycle and the experience curve. In other words, it provides critical information that strategists need, to help decide where the firm should be focusing resources over the next strategy cycle.

Surely the most dramatic mythological example of rebirth and renewal, is the Phoenix (or "Firebird.") It is found in ancient Egyptian mythology, various myths derived from it and, most recently, in Professor Albus Dumbledore's study in Harry Potter.

Said to live for 500, 1461 or for 12594 years (depending on the source), the phoenix is a bird with beautiful gold and red plumage. At the end of its life-cycle the phoenix builds itself a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix arises. The bird was also said to regenerate when hurt or wounded by a foe, thus being almost immortal and invincible.

Imagine, for a moment, that you were able to regenerate your firm in this way. Miraculously, you were able to instantly transform it into an organization of the highest performance with, what's more, that performance being sustained.

At the beginning of March, Wikipedia published its millionth article in English. Or, rather, a Wikipedia reader somewhere on planet earth did. By today, it had climbed further to 1,024,000+ articles. Readers of my blog will have noticed that I use it quite frequently as a reference for things in my postings that may need explanation.

Is it accurate? How accurate can something that is compiled by the public at large be? Surprisingly so, actually. A recent study published in Nature put it in more or less the same ballpark here as Encyclopaedia Brittanica!

Bottom line: Wikipedia is an invaluable resource for strategists, managers, lawyers, accountants and people looking for a recipe to prepare huitlacoche. Thanks to Seth Godin for alerting me to the existence of this as-yet-untried delicacy (corn smut) on his blog posting today, Fungus (which has a parable in it about people trying new things, or not!)

Comments, as always, are most welcome. Please post below.

For larger view, click on image

A current Strategy+Business article, Love Your Dogs, suggests that conventional wisdom may be wrong when it dictates that resources should be focused on a businesses 'stars' while leaving 'dogs' to starve or hiving them off. (The terms, of course, come from Boston Consulting Group's famous model that divides businesses into stars, question marks, cash cows and dogs.)

This issue is a particularly troublesome topic in many professional service firms, where practice areas that may have commoditized to the point of marginal profitability are not faceless business units but one's partners, colleagues and, frequently, friends. So facing up to the need to starve or divest dogs is something that many firms simply don't have the stomach for. The result is that they are tolerated and sometimes (in the name of 'fairness') even invested in as much as high growth areas of the firm.

The Spring 2006 edition of Edge International's strategy and management journal, Edge International Review, is available online and can be downloaded (for free) from here. (Simply click the link that says "Download PDF" at the bottom left of the page.) It contains an article that I wrote titled Building Resilience : Developing Strategy That Thrives On Change. Please ensure that you have a good quality internet connection, though. The file is 36.8MB! If this is a problem and you'd like a copy of my article, by all means contact me and I'll email it to you. Please also feel free to forward this advisory to anybody else that might be interested in having a copy.

Ever felt like dozing off during a PowerPoint presentation? It's probably not your fault. Research suggests that conventional approaches with bullet points and text overload the mind's ability to assimilate and understand the information being presented, causing a 'sleep reaction.' This, of course, can be disastrous. Imagine if the presentation in question is you presenting the new strategy to the assembled firm, and 90% of them leave not having "got" what you were trying to say! And we wonder why so much strategy falls flat and is never executed!

Cliff Atkinson, author of Beyond Bullet Points, is presenting a one-hour complimentary webinar called How to Prevent PowerPoint Overload - Aligning your multimedia message with the way the mind works. All you need to "attend" is access to the internet and a telephone.

Atkinson designed the presentations that helped persuade a jury to award a $253 million verdict to the plaintiff in the US's first Vioxx trial in 2005, which Fortune magazine called "frighteningly powerful." The webinar takes place on 23 March 2006, at 12 noon United States Eastern Time. Click here to register (for free.) I'll certainly "be there."

Will one soon have to go to a museum to see a library like the one pictured above? In all likelihood, according to my friend and Edge International colleague Gerry Riskin, whose recent posting on his blog Amazing Firms Amazing Practices, dealt with the emergence of e-books in the legal profession. There is something elegant and substantial about rows and rows of leather bound tomes, and personally I think it will be sad to see the end of them. (I am a self-confessed bibliophile with a personal library of several thousand volumes myself, so take that from whence it comes.) But the notion of having the entire contents of that library in the palm of one's hand, with a good search tool so the contents are quickly and easily accessible, is truly mindblowing. Wow!

This posting presents another of the more conventional tools in the professional service firm strategist's arsenal. It is often used in conjunction with the Service Life Cycle, to determine which of the services that the firm offers are trending upwards, which are "question marks" and which are declining. All of which, of course, is critical in deciding where the strategic focus needs to be.

A few days ago I blogged about performance dashboards and their importance in delivering timely and accurate performance data to those entrusted with the firm's strategy. Now Simon Heap has referenced an interesting article in Business Week called Corporate Dashboards, on the same topic but with a particular slant towards software, especially that designed by a company called Netsuite, that can automate the process quite inexpensively. If anybody has had experience with this (or similar) software in a professional service firm environment, I'd love to hear from you.

How firms can get widespread input into their strategy processes, perhaps from multiple offices across the globe, is a subject that has interested me for some time. Even just how to get virtual teams to collaborate in ways that are more efficient and effective than with telephone conferences. Certainly, with today's technology there are many elegant solutions that firms are only just beginning to scratch the surface of.

Blindspot analysis uncovers flaws in the process of strategic decision making that are caused by bias and misinterpretation. Most strategy models rely on rational and objective behaviour and ignore the mental filters through which individuals process information. This often results in the decisions made being flawed, perhap