I wish those big firms had taken this advice.

Fresh off my post yesterday about all of those AmLaw 100 firms that wouldn’t have hired me out of law school comes this bit of advice from StartupNation I’d wish those hiring partners had embraced:

Whenever you need to add a new person to your team, make the decision easy on yourself: just hire the ones who smile.
. . .
Here’s my point ... when you’re making decisions about which humans to select for your team, even if these people will only communicate internally with other team members and not interact with your customer community, you can’t go wrong with smilers! Of course you’ll consider team chemistry/fit (in my opinion, THE most important conventional selection criteria – and I spent 19 years as an executive recruiter helping companies make these choices) and a person’s skill level to do the job at hand, along with lesser important factors as you make hiring decisions. But when it comes down to that ultimate choice differentiator, go with the smile!

At least I’m pretty sure I was smiling at the beginning of the interview.

Hackaday keeps the doldrums at bay.

Could your firm benefit from a hackathon?  From Bnoopy:

The idea is that you make a day-long event (at whatever frequency you want) where everyone works on something that is:

• valuable to the company
• but not what they're "supposed" to be working on and
• that can be taken from idea to working prototype in one day

We started our hackathon at 9:00am and ended at 8:00pm. From 8:00-10:00pm we did presentations where each team member or group showed their work.

We did our first hackathon last Thursday and the results were amazing. It's unbelievable what you can get done in a day with a focused, motivated and creative team.When you give people the time to do the thing that always seems "just out of reach" people's creativity cracks wide open. Check out the specific results here.

What was particularly cool was the energy it brought to the team. People felt envigorated and recharged. In fact, one of our engineers was so excited he exclaimed (during the presentations) "Dude, I just want to crawl into my hole [his cube], grow a beard, a build shit!". I couldn't have put it any better myself.

Are you truly smart?

Scott Berkun writes essays.  Really smart and useful ones. A recent favorite is Essay #40 Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas.  Now I know lawyers are trained to defend bad ideas (or at least advocate for clients with bad ideas), but what really struck me when I read the essay is just how often I’ve seen this behavior in opposing counsel, colleagues, and even myself.  Read the entire essay.  Here are just a few choice excerpts.

On the problem with smart people:

The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they’re wrong. This is bad. Worse, if they got away with it when they were young (say, because they were smarter than their parents, their friends, and their parent’s friends) they’ve probably built an ego around being right, and will therefore defend their perfect record of invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if it’s based in delusion, or results in them, or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery, called smartypants lane, filled with people who were buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say “Well, at least I was right.”)

And on setting priorities, intelligence, and wisdom:

At any moment on any project there are an infinite number of levels of problem solving. Part of being a truly smart person is to know which level is the right one at a given time. For example, if you are skidding out of control at 95mph in your broken down Winnebago on an ice covered interstate, when a semi-truck filled with both poorly packaged fireworks and loosely bundled spark plugs slams on its brakes, it’s not the right time to discuss with your passengers where y’all would like to stop for dinner. But as ridiculous as this scenario sounds, it happens all the time. People worry about the wrong thing at the wrong time and apply their intelligence in ways that doesn’t serve the greater good of whatever they’re trying to achieve. Some call this difference in skill wisdom, in that the wise know what to be thinking about, where as the merely intelligent only know how to think. (The de-emphasis of wisdom is an east vs. west dichotomy: eastern philosophy heavily emphasizes deeper wisdom, where as the post enlightenment west, and perhaps particularly America, heavily emphasizes the intellectual flourishes of intelligence).

And this, on communal thinking and why attorneys still bill by the hour (sort of):

Just because everyone in the room is smart doesn’t mean that collectively they will arrive at smart ideas. The power of peer pressure is that it works on our psychology, not our intellect. As social animals we are heavily influenced by how the people around us behave, and the quality of our own internal decision making varies widely depending on the environment we currently are in. (e.g. Try to write a haiku poem while standing in an elevator with 15 opera singers screaming 15 different operas, in 15 different languages, in falsetto, directly at you vs. sitting on a bench in a quiet stretch of open woods).

That said, the more homogeneous a group of people are in their thinking, the narrower the range of ideas that the group will openly consider. The more open minded, creative, and courageous a group is, the wider the pool of ideas they’ll be capable of exploring.

If you break it, it may ultimately pay for itself.

Christopher Carfi shares an interesting Warren Buffett quote in this post titled, In Search of Failure:

 "I often felt there might be more to be gained by studying business failures than business successes. In my business, we try to study where people go astray, and why things don't work...Albert Einstein said 'Invert, always invert, in mathematics and physics,' and it's a very good idea in business, too. Start out with failure, and then engineer its removal." - Warren Buffett

So, seek out what is broken, figure out why it broke, and go fix it.  Excellent advice.

Sock it to me

I’m a big fan of Idea-a-Day and subscribe to their daily e-mail alert.  The other day, this one graced my in-box:

Create a sorter in the style of coin sorters, but for socks. It would be able to pair them up, and hold one by until the other sock of the pair was inserted into the machine. It would also dispose of socks with holes in, and throw away the other one when it is inserted.  Day 1710 by Becky Walpole

If you want to get a daily dose of cool and quirky ideas, go ahead and subscribe.

Think in Ink

Finally, a blog about working in ink that has nothing to do with the Tablet PC.

The Best Productivity System Ever

 Patrick (last name unknown) wrote about his productivity system in a comment to this really great post from Ishbadiddle:

The best system IS the one that works for you. Here’s mine:

1) Get married
2) When something needs to be done ask your spouse to do it
3) Prioritize: If your wife says that she will do it, it is important.
If your wife says that you should do it, it’s kinda important.
If she doesn’t say anything, it’s not very important.
4) Go to the web and read up on all the past episodes of “The Shield”
5) Let a week pass.
6) Ask your wife if she did “those things” she was supposed to do. Look concerned.
7) She will ask you if have done your things. Look exhausted and say you will try.
8) Do this for a couple of months. Every once and while ask her “Isn’t there something we were supposed to do this week?” This will ensure that little things don’t fall between the cracks. It also implies that you care, which believe me fellas, goes a long way.
9) Do one or two things that your wife has reminded you to do three or four times.
10) Go back to step 2.

Single Sentence Procrastination Fix

Overcoming Procrastination Through the Pull Method:

I choose to start on one small imperfect step, knowing that I have plenty of time to enjoy life.

LexThink.com is Now Live

Dennis, Sherry, and I have been working hard on LexThink! 2.0 and we’ll have some news to share next week.  For now, take a look at our new web site.  It is still in beta, and we will be adding a lot more to it in the next 7 days, including forums, multiple RSS feeds, and more entries in the blog.  I created the site using Squarespace, a hosted blogging tool that has tons of cool features, and am pretty pleased with the result.  Let me know what you think, and stay tuned for some news on LexThink! Solo:  Building the Perfect One Person Enterprise.

Pair up for productivity

In the most recent issue of Steelcase’s 360 e-zine is an article titled The Next Evolution of the Personal Workspace that suggests working in pairs (dyads) offers demonstrable increases in productivity, innovation, and workplace morale.

When pairs collaborate, they build on each other's thoughts and ideas in a process that psychologists call “laddering.” This process starts when we're young and is critical to how we learn. Dr. Charles Crook, a British psychologist and researcher, notes that how much people can learn is limited when they work alone, and that learning can be taken farther if people work and learn together. “Collaboration is critical to learning,” he says.

An interesting study, pointed out in the article, looked at travel agents (who often work in pairs with their clients) before and after their workplaces were changed to encourage dyadic work:

When a better workspace was created that allowed side-by-side collaboration and supported multi-connected displays, the results were clear:

• privacy was increased for the pair
• customers were more engaged and active customers could more easily track itineraries and costs
• redundant work was eliminated
• transaction costs decreased
• customers reported a better experience and more satisfaction due to the physical set-up
• transaction time was reduced to 5-10 minutes vs. the typical 30 minutes

Should lawyers and other professionals work more often in pairs?  The study seems to suggest a pretty significant improvement in efficiency and customer satisfaction.  Sadly, there was no study on how much clients liked being billed at two professionals’ hourly rates instead of just one’s.  (sarcasm intended)

Law Students, Don't Hold Your Breath

Thanks to Rob at BusinessPundit for a pointer to this BusinessWeek article on Rensselaer’s new MBA program:

For starters, the degree is broken down into five "streams of knowledge," rather than traditional majors or concentrations. Each stream delves into a different aspect of business, such as Creating & Managing an Enterprise, and Networks, Innovation & Value Creation. It's not that students don't learn economics, marketing, or strategy. Instead, each of those basics is blended into the larger concepts. A typical class might involve a discussion, led by a finance professor, of a company's change in value after a corporate merger, followed by a look at the case by a management prof from an operations point of view. Because the teaching is rooted in events in the contemporary marketplace, there are no textbooks per se. "Our textbooks are newspaper and magazine articles," says Phillip H. Phan, professor of strategic management and entrepreneurship.

Coming soon to a law school near you?  Get serious.

It is all about the customer...

Steve Nipper sent me to this site that has a bunch of redone romance novel covers.  Even though most are semi-work safe, close your door anyway because they are so funny, everyone will want to see why you are laughing so hard.

(Steve saw it first on BoingBoing.)

Build your business backwards.

As we work to turn LexThink into a sustainable business enterprise, I’ve been thinking a lot about the lessons that came from our first event.  One of the best discussions centered around the idea that to build your perfect firm, you must first identify your perfect client.  Sean D’Souza must have been a fly on the wall in that conversation, because he hits the nail on the head with this post, which I’m liberally excerpting below:

Which way, you ask?  Why not reach out into the mind of someone you know. What is that person's name? What do they do in their business? What problem do they have? Can you ask them what problem they have? Can you narrow down what's stopping their profit? What would take that person (whoever that person is) to the next level?

Think of a fictional Natalie. Or a fictional Bruce.  What is he doing right now? What is she frustrated with? Where does he want his business to go? Why is she unable to take weekends off? All of these issues are gaps.

Find out where you can fix the gaps. Bruce and Natalie have loads of issues. And you can be a specialist in fixing just a few of those issues. What can you fix?

Think backwards. Start with a target audience. Think about them, sitting at their desk at 7pm on Saturday night. What would change their life? How can you change their life?

You're a specialist. What do you do best?  Think intently. What we have here is more than just an audio logo or a communication issue. What we need to have is a deep understanding. When we think in specifics, the specifics reveal themselves.

Does LexThink Strike Again?

Jeremy Blachman, a LexThink attendee, wants to improve big firm life:

I just feel like there's some room for thinking here, there's some room for brainstorming about institutional change, and putting some smart people together to solve this puzzle of why so many people working at these places don't seem all that happy about it and what some better models might be, or way to fix these models, or maybe even just explain why the current model is actually working quite well. And to get the fresh perspectives of people who are first going into this, and the perspectives of people already there, people who love it, people who don't, I don't know -- I feel like maybe something good and interesting and fun could emerge.

The World is Flat?

Connie Crosby has some great quotes from an interview with Thomas L. Friedman, author of the book The World is Flat:  Where Were You When You Realized the World Is Flat? (Or Have You?).  Some really interesting food for thought:

We are led by lawyers who do not understand either technology or balance sheets. I am hoping, though, that many of them have kids, who, when they have a moment to take a break from their iPods, Internet, or Google, will explain to their parents running the country just how the world is being flattened.

Go to Connie’s post for a bunch more quotes, and if you are interested, buy the book.  It just made it on to my reading list.

Chickens in your backyard, and other cool trends.

I really love my Trendspotting newsletter.  This table of contents for  this month’s edition includes:

Urban farming
Cruises for the MASS CLASS
Design or die!
Pleasure Cards
Three innovative t-shirt concepts
TRYVERTISING intermediairies

Check it out by subscribing here.

Take Five and be a Better Boss

Rosa Say has another great tip in her post titled The Daily Five Minutes.  She suggests that each day, managers give five minutes of “no-agenda time” to at least one employee.  Here are some benefits to the managers:

In the process of developing this habit, they greatly improved their own approachability. They had nurtured a circle of comfort for their employees to step into and talk to them——whenever time presented itself. The Daily Five Minutes itself soon became a more personal thing. Employees started to share their lives with them——what they did over the weekend, how their kids were doing in school, how they felt about a local news story. Managers began to know their employees very well, and their employees began to relate to them more as people and not just as managers. They were practicing the art of ‘Ike loa together. 

Managers ceased to judge employee situations prematurely, for they had built up a relationship that demanded all be allowed to speak first——and they wanted to speak with their employees, sure they’d receive more clarity. The Daily Five Minutes became a “safe zone” where employees felt they could talk story with their manager “off the record,” and managers learned to ask, “Are you venting, or asking for help? Do I keep this in confidence, or do you expect me to take action?” It became clearer who was responsible for following up on things.  Managers had less and less of those “if only I had known about this sooner” surprises.

Think about doing a Daily Five Minutes with all of your employees.  Then extend it to your clients and see what happens!

What Would Vader Do?

Well, Darth Vader has a blog.  Here are some great management tips from the guru himself:

Vader on Managing Difficult Employees:   ...You try to be an effective manager, you weed out the bad apples like the late Admiral Ozzel -- only to find that an insidious culture of incompetence has somehow transformed your deadly pan-galactic armada into a fleet of spaceballs.

And this response to a comment:   While you may feel at first this approach to be overly broad-handed, have you considered killing people who don't do your bidding or sing your praises?  Try it. It's cathartic, and it doesn't take long for others to really get with the programme.  Good luck! 

Vader on Innovation:  Admiral Ozzol took the fleet out of hyperspace too close to Hoth, and the Rebel Alliance were -- you guessed it -- alerted to our approach. The cornerstone of Ozzel's arrogance is his insistence that rebel technology is so vastly inferior to Imperial technology that we need broker no caution.

This attitude is typical of a man who could not rephase his own fusion orb if his life depended on it. He cannot fathom what rebel engineers may accomplish out of desperation. People who are good with things, people like me, can appreciate the infinite diversity of possible tools buried in artful combinations of even the humblest technologies. Give me an hour to reconfigure an industrial grade repulsolift and I will give you an ion cannon and enough parts left over to build a droid to run it.

Ozzel just isn't the creative type.

Vader on Negotiation Strategy:   What crystallized the situation for me was something the Duke of Foulbash said, bringing his brown fist down on the table: "Lord Vader, what is at stake here is a millennium of tradition! That is the heart of this matter."

The Duke was right. I told him so. Then I assassinated the entire royal family, down to the last forgotten bastard.

And do you know what? The Trime System is a leading commercial concern in the sector today. They grieved but they got over it. Once liberated from the yoke of an insoluble, deeply emotional dilemma the people of the Trimean worlds were free to build new bonds, to establish vibrant new institutions, and to create new traditions.

Vader on Client Transparency:   "You may ask," I told him, turning away to the glass. "As an ant may ask the sun why it shines. It is beyond you, Admiral. See to your duty."

Vader on Dealing with Technology:   It can be challenging to maintain your dignity as a dark tyrannical overlord when the circuitry in your left leg constantly misfires, threatening to send you off on a mad pirouette without notice.

Next time you are faced with a management conundrum, just ask Vader!  Leave a comment to his latest post.  You might just get a response from the Dark Lord himself.  Just don’t be a smart ass, in his bio, Darth says he “enjoys fixing things, listening to music, and crushing people's treacheas with his mind.”

I was robbed!

OK, I didn’t get chosen as one of Legal Affairs Top Twenty Legal Thinkers in America.  I demand a recount, because if you Google “Most Influential Legal Thinker” I’m number two! 

Become a Client to Become Visionary.

One of the themes that came out of LexThink was that, in order to build the perfect law firm, you first needed to identify your “perfect” client — one you could be passionate about serving — and then ask them what they needed/wanted in a lawyer. 

In this post about the development of the first computer spreadsheet program, Tom Evslin argues that VisiCalc would have never been developed  if the programmers had asked people what they wanted, because so few people could even visualize  “a program which works like a big sheet of accounting paper but, when [a change is made] in one place, the change propagates through all the rows and columns.”  Tom continues:

The point of this story is that no survey or focus group will ever tell you what the next great thing is going to be.  That kind of idea, that kind of product, comes from visionaries who understand a new technology well enough to dream up an unintended use and who are stubborn and skillful enough to implement what nobody even knew to want. 

Perhaps this is the reason we lawyers so rarely have breakthrough insights on how to improve our business model.  Computer programmers will regularly use programs created by others and restauranteurs will eat at other establishments.  How often can this be said of lawyers?  How many legal professionals do you know who are regular consumers of legal services (besides their own)?  I’d go so far to say that most businesses with poor reputations for customer service are run by people who don’t frequent their competitors’ establishments.

Exercise:  Become a client.  Instead of drafting your own will, handling your own real estate transaction, or reviewing your own contract, go to the most well respected lawyer in your area — and the least respected.  Don’t tell them you are a lawyer.  Before, during, and after your visit, pay particular attention to the client experience.  How were you treated?  How did you feel?  How long did it take to get your phone calls returned?

We’ve all heard the quote, “A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.”  Perhaps it is more true then we realized.  Until lawyers can better understand the needs and wants of our clients, we will not be able to dream up those “unintended” ways to better serve them.