Adventure of Strategy

Herewith our Edge International September 2008 Law Firm Strategy Newsletter

We have two items for you this month. Firstly, some tips on how to execute (as in kill-off, annihilate and utterly destroy) a firm’s strategy. Secondly, news about and an invitation to participate in an exciting new research project on globalization and its likely impact on the US legal profession.

We hope that you find them both diverting and useful. Feedback, as always, is most welcome.

Our best regards,
Rob Millard & Gerry Riskin

THE STRATEGY EXECUTIONER

Executing (as in killing-off) a strategy is not difficult at all. Firing squads, guillotines or hanging nooses are unnecessary. All one needs to do to ensure that your firm’s strategy never sees the light of day is to follow these ten easy steps:

1.  ENSURE THAT THE STRATEGY IS NOT COMMITTED TO WRITING

It is far easier to kill a strategy that is not committed to writing, than one that is properly documented. To persuade your colleagues to put their pens away, first point out how rapidly the world is changing and how the strategy will be out of date “as soon as the ink is dry.” Secondly, suggest that the firm use loose ‘strategic guidelines’ or a ‘vision statement’ as its template for the future. Make sure then that the vision statement is so generic as to be meaningless (as most are anyway.) Use words like “nimble” and “flexible” and metaphors involving athletics or gymnastics. (These are particularly appropriate in an Olympic year!)

If your colleagues absolutely insist on a written strategy, ensure that it is worded in such a way as to be incomprehensible. Avoid simplicity. Create complex, multiple objectives that are preferably in conflict with each other. Use obscure management jargon and long words dragged from the depths of the dictionary. Terms like “paradigm” and “deliverable” and “market position” are particularly impressive. Make copious use of highly complex, ambiguous diagrams. These also illustrate how clever you are, in case your colleagues require reassurance in this area! (Don’t worry: They won’t let on that they don’t understand them for fear of appearing stupid themselves.) Your chances of success are greatly enhanced if nobody actually understands what the firm’s strategy is, or what they are actually expected to do.

Finally, make the strategy narrative as rigid as possible so that it cannot be modified if things change (as they are bound to do.) That way, you can go back to your colleagues in six months and tell them that you “told them so!” Hopefully they will then understand the wisdom of a loose approach without restrictive documentation.

2.   PLAY THE ‘DEVIL’S ADVOCATE’

This is an extraordinarily powerful strategy-killer. Start by pointing out reasons, “just playing devil’s advocate,” why the strategy might fail. Your colleagues are bound to join enthusiastically with that discussion, and in most cases this will consume the remainder of the meeting. If this is doesn’t work, move on to pointing out what harmful and unanticipated consequences might emerge if the strategy is successful. Focusing on possible client abdications or unanticipated costs (however unlikely) is usually a winner. If that too fails, as a last resort point out how much the cost of implementing the strategy is going to impact on this year’s partner earnings (using the worst case scenario, of course.)

Two particularly effective arguments that the ‘devil’s advocate’ can use if an idea does make it through this minefield is:

a. “We have (or some other firm has) tried that before and it didn’t work” or

b. “Nobody has ever done that before and we’re not about to be guinea pigs.”

The more scathing the language and vicious the glare used to deliver these arguments, the more effective they are likely to be. With junior associates and staff, you may be lucky enough to scare them off making the slightest suggestion about strategy ever again!

3.   ENSURE THAT OBJECTIVES REMAIN VAGUE AND UNMEASURABLE

In the unlikely event that the strategy survives step 1 and 2, the next step is to prevent the defining of objectives where success or failure can be accurately determined. Keep objectives loose and ambiguous! Making sure that they are worded in impressive but vague amorphisms usually does the trick. These might include:

•   We will strive to improve client satisfaction

•   We will increase job satisfaction amongst associates

•   We will develop a high-performance culture

Be careful, though. Objectives like these can be highly effective if improvement in performance can be sensibly assessed, so it is essential to prevent the use of metrics that can actually be measured.

4.   ENSURE THAT RESPONSIBILITIES REMAIN SHARED OR VAGUE

Whatever you do, don’t let individual responsibilities be allocated. If you do, the more enthusiastic amongst your colleagues may successfully translate their vague objectives into real actions. Worse still, they may actually do something constructive. Their successes may then influence others to do the same and before you know it, you will have failed in killing off the strategy. It is imperative that nobody has real accountability for anything. That way, nobody can be blamed for the failure to achieve anything.

5.   KEEP YOUR CARDS CLOSE TO YOUR CHEST

Open communication is anathema for any self-respecting strategy executioner. It is essential for people to be under the delusion that things are going extremely well, especially when the opposite is true. Information is also a critical strategic resource (see step 8.) When people get together and talk about strategy or the firm’s performance then there is always the danger that, like a disease, realization of the firm’s true situation may break out. The strategy may then well lurch back into life. See steps 6 and 7 for ways to prevent open communication.

6.  PESTER PEOPLE WITH INANE BUREAUCRACY

In order to create the illusion of open communication, flood your colleagues with emails containing petty bureaucratic trivia masquerading as strategy. This will quickly ensure that your emails get ignored completely. When you cannot avoid sending out an important email, then that will be ignored as well. When the strategy eventually collapses as a consequence you will be able to blame your colleagues because they didn’t respond to your communication. Keep people in the dark, starve them of critical information, and your changes of successfully killing of the strategy are far greater.

7.  REWARD PEOPLE ONLY FOR PRODUCTION

The successful strategy executioner pays no heed to ridiculous ‘balanced scorecard’ approaches to performance measurement and reward. They keep the focus squarely on production and only production. Measure and reward billable hours only! That way, people are discouraged from poking their noses into areas where they don’t belong. If anybody asks about strategy, smile and wave and tell them that their own interests would be better served by simply working harder. An added bonus is that this approach tends to maximize short-term profit, which your partners will appreciate when they make their drawings. As to the long term: leave that up to the poor idiot who comes after you!

8.  STARVE THE STRATEGY OF RESOURCES

Should you need to head off some over-enthusiastic fool who, despite step 7, starts actually implementing anything constructive, the best way to do this is simply to starve him or her of resources. Most actions require some form of funding and that is relatively easy to curtail, especially in today’s economic climate. Less obvious is cutting off the flow of resources like time and information. At the end of the day, strategy is reflected in what the firm is prepared to invest in. By ensuring that the flow of resources is directly elsewhere, you can deal a death-blow to any stray strategic initiatives that show signs of germinating.

9.  MAKE UNREALISTIC DEMANDS

Inevitably, you may still get some colleagues who are resilient enough to withstand all the previous steps, in their misguided effort to drive the firm forward. For these people, the time then comes to give them enough rope to hang themselves. An excellent way to do this is to acknowledge their enthusiasm and then (despite step 4) to make them personally accountable for specific tasks. Hopefully, they will be deeply flattered by the confidence that their firm has in them and redouble their enthusiasm. The key, then, is to make sure that you pile on far more than they can possibly deliver. Cheer them on, but don’t let them be rewarded for anything but fee earnings (step 7.) This ensures that the harder they work at their strategy tasks, the more they are penalized for their efforts. Eventually, they will collapse, setting themselves up as ripe targets for step 10.

10.  FIND A SCAPEGOAT

This is essential. At some point, your colleagues may notice that the firm has ground to a complete standstill. If you are not armed with evidence to the contrary, there is a real danger that the finger of blame may swing towards you. In the first instance, deflect this by pointing out how the market has changed so it is nobody’s fault. (This especially if the strategy document is drafted in accordance with step 1.) If this doesn’t work, produce copies of communications that were never read (step 6) and details about people who made promises but didn’t deliver (step 9.) Above all, make sure that your own billings remain high so that even if your colleagues do conclude that the failure is your fault, they dare not do anything about it.

DISCLAIMER

That’s all well and good, then, for the saboteur who DOESN’T want his or her firm’s strategy to succeed. If you DO want your firm’s strategy to be successfully implemented, then of course the opposite of all the above tongue-in-cheek applies. The sad truth, though, is that much strategy fails because of simple neglect rather than active sabotage. To understand the key issues involved in making sure that your strategy delivers all that you wish for your firm, download a copy of the following articles from our web site or email us and we’ll be delighted to send you a hard copy:


The Five Levels of Strategy

Strategy in a Web 2.0 World

Dealing with Blindspots

GLOBALIZATION AND THE US LEGAL PROFESSION

As its name suggests, the 'Strategy and Planning Committee' of the Law Practice Management section of the ABA has, as part of its mandate, to provide assistance to US law firms of all sizes in matters related to strategic planning. At a meeting in August in New York, it was decided that instead of focusing primarily on broad categories such as "marketing" and "finance," the committee would tackle a small number of specific issues that the meeting agreed were of central strategic concern to the profession. One of these issues, that Rob Millard has accepted responsibility for coordinating, is assessing the likely impact of globalization on the US legal profession over the next 5 - 10 years. This has been a particular area of focus and interest for him for some time now.

We already see some of these impacts unfolding. They include:


1.  Many clients (even some quite small corporations) becoming far more global in nature and requiring their lawyers to follow suit

2.  Outsourcing of an ever-increasing and ever-more-complex range of services to less expensive jurisdictions

3.  Standardization of many aspects of law as emerging economies upgrade their commercial legislation and WTO initiatives in this area gather momentum

4.  Advances in technology making access to information and global communications almost effortless (and almost free)

5.  The increasingly global aspirations of many new emerging economies

6.  A proliferation of collaborative arrangements such as alliances, networks and 'best-friend' arrangements

7. The advent of truly global firms that can offer clients a world-wide service capability

Our intention is, a year hence, to have crafted a comprehensive white paper on this topic, with many dozens of contributors from across the globe, that can be made available to US law firms in order to help them craft significantly better strategies to cope with (and capitalize upon) globalization. If you would like to be involved in this initiative, please would you let us know? If you would not but you know of anybody else in your firm that would, please would you forward this email to her or him? If you have any information or advice that you think would be useful in tackling this topic, we'd love to hear from you too.