Stop Start Continue

Barbara Payne at Blog for Business has this great brainstorming tip she found in the Winning at Work newsletter:

Next, get three pieces of flip chart paper and label them "Stop" "Start" "Continue" -- then ask your staff to work in groups of 3. First group brainstorms answers to the question: "In order to (raise revenue by XX dollars, solve this issue, etc.), what do we need to stop doing?"

Second group does it with "In order to (raise revenue by XX dollars, solve this issue, or whatever), what do we need to start doing?

Third group brainstorms this one: "To (raise revenue, cut costs, solve this issue, or whatever) what do we need to continue doing? Hint: Brainstorm about what's working really well.

Then rotate everybody around so that everyone gets a chance to give each question their best shot. Now you summarize all the points, assign a financial impact to each point that's been raised, make it all into a report that says exactly what you will do (lay someone off? cut a program?) if your stuff doesn't work.

I love the "stop - start - continue" method. What would your firm's three questions be?

Good News for Small Firms

Thanks to Arnold Kling at EconBlog, I found this paper from William J. Baumol that explores why independent inventors and entrepreneurs contribute disproportionately to breakthrough inventions. This is good news for small firms and solo lawyers. Pull out the study whenever you are competing against a large firm for business:

The evidence shows that there is a rather sharp differentiation between the contributions to the economy’s technological innovation that are provided by entrepreneurs and those that are offered by the large internal R&D laboratories of established businesses. Large business firms, which account for nearly three-quarters of U.S. expenditure on R&D, have tended to follow relatively routine goals, slanted toward incremental improvements rather than revolutionary ideas. Greater user-friendliness, increased reliability, marginal additions to application, expansions of capacity, flexibility in design—these and many other types of improvement have come out of the industrial R&D facilities, with impressive consistency, year after year, and often pre-announced and pre-advertised. In contrast, the independent innovator and the independent entrepreneur have tended to account for most of the true, fundamentally novel innovations. . . . It is a plausible observation, then, that perhaps most of the revolutionary new ideas of the past two centuries have been, and are likely to continue to be, provided more often by these independent innovators who, essentially, operate small business enterprises.

What are your revolutionary ideas? Come on, small firm lawyers, we've clearly got the advantage here, so use it!

Coming Soon - Five by Five

One of the ideas from my innovation weekend is a weekly forum I'll call "Five by Five." In weekly posts, I'll ask five people -- who are experts in their fields -- to give me five ideas on a given topic. Every week, the five people will come from a different (usually non-legal) discipline, but the topic will always focus upon the innovative marketing, pricing, and delivery of legal services.

I'm already working on my list of invitees and welcome any suggestions. All participants in the Five by Five will get their choice (and I'm completely serious here) of an official "the [non]billable hour" hat or t-shirt.

As a compliment to the weekly series, I've set up a kind of a [non]billablehour extranet/wiki for all my readers to participate in and contribute to the discussion. I'll unveil more details tomorrow.