Join Me at BarCamp

I’m going to be hanging around a lot of people waaaaaaaay smarter than I am at BarCamp Los Angeles next weekend (Saturday and Sunday, March 4–5, 2006).  I’ve tentatively titled my session “UnConferencing for Normal People — Taking the UnConference Mainstream.” 

While everyone else is building cool web2.0 applications full of ajaxy goodness (I don’t really know what that means, either), I’ll be working to build the perfect conference.  I’ll post my presentation up here later this weekend.

Come join me!  Have a Beer.  Don’t cost nothin’.

Technorati Tags: unconference, barcamp, barcampla

Domain Name for Sale

Don’t know how I missed this one, but Kevin Heller is selling the domain name sucksmyan.us.  Too funny!

Pickle Your Great Ideas

Here’s another idea from David Seah that I absolutely love:  The Pickle Jar.  Here’s his explanation:

I’m sometimes distracted by too many project ideas. When the ideas pile up, my productivity sinks because I keep thinking about them, and multitasking slows me down. To keep focused, I evolved a mind trick called The Pickle Jar that, despite its hokey name, actually works for me. It got me through my thesis, when writing was the last thing I felt like doing.

The Pickle Jar is an actual glass jar that once held pickles. Next to it is a square pad of paper, about 4 inches on the side. To get unrelated thoughts out of my mind, I write down a brief synopsis down, fold it twice, and put it into the Jar.

The physical act of writing down, folding, and then “pickling” the idea for later consumption is weirdly cathartic. Since I’m no longer in danger of forgetting the thought, I can relax. The act of formulating on paper has also satisfied the urge to follow up on it. The size of the paper also prevents you from writing too much…there’s just enough room to get the essence of the idea down.

Technorati Tags: picklejar, DavidSeah, innovation,

Build a Strategy Network in Your Firm

Andrew Razeghi has a great article titled Create Success: Stop Thinking Like a Lawyer he wrote a few years ago, but that I just found.  Among other things, he takes on the topic of law firm retreats:

No firm can create strategy in a half day, or even a full day. Not only is the time insufficient, the contributors are isolated. There are typically no clients at such retreats, or any investment bankers, accountants, and other professional advisers that law firms work with. Therefore, the retreat often devolves into a feel-good exercise.

Wouldn't it be better to have 20 attorneys thinking about strategy for four hours a month for 10 months? Who are those who make things happen? Who are the thought leaders in your firm? What if you gave them the chance to think strategically as a part of their job? Create a "strategy network" within your firm - a web of business thinkers with a structured forum in which to think about the business of law, not the practice of law. This network should not just include senior partners and rainmakers, but new partners and senior associates too.

I really like this idea and think it could be a good fit for a practice group or small law firm.  Anyone want to try this in their firm?  I’d be happy to help you get it off the ground.

Best Management Ideas

Lisa Haneberg posts the winning entries in her Best Management Ideas contest.  All are worth a read.

Great Client Brainstorming Tip

I ran across this great tip on brainstorming a better career on the Achieve-It! blog:

Take a pad of paper and write down at the top your objective in question form.  Then, simply list out 20 answers to your question. 

For example, in this case, you would write “What should I be doing with my time and life?”  Then stay seated for a half hour to an hour coming up with answers to that question.  The key to this exercise is coming up with 20 answers - don’t quit until you have 20 answers.

Take this tip, and at your next client meeting take 30 minutes for you and your client to both complete the exercise, answering the question “What is a successful outcome of this case” or something similar.  Trade answer sheets and discuss.

I wish I’d thought of this for my mediation practice.  Imagine having each side do the exercise and then giving their answers to the mediator

Legal Writing Tips from Elmore Leonard

Well, not exactly tips on legal writing, but pretty solid advice from my favorite author.  The best of the bunch?

Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.  The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .   he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.  A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

Imagine if Law Review writers followed the last tip.  No more footnotes!

Technorati Tags: elmore+leonard, writing, law+review

Law Office of the Future for the Mobile Lawyer

Man, I’ve got to get me one of these.  The only problem, not much of a waiting room.

Attorneys Aren't Knowledge Workers - Ron Baker

Attorneys Aren't Knowledge Workers by guest blogger Ron Baker

In light of my last post titled Your Employees are Volunteers, this one is sure to cause some cognitive dissonance.  My VeraSage Institute colleague Dan Morris thinks I'm wrong about professional firms being filled with knowledge workers; he believes the majority of them are more akin to factory workers.

Now I know this is a heretical view, but Dan assembles a very powerful argument to support his assertion.  He doesn't deny professionals have the potential to be knowledge workers.  His argument is they are not largely because of the incentives and structures of the firms in which they operate, which function like sweatshops of yore.

Now this is a powerful argument, and it made me pause to reexamine my core assumptions about automatically asserting that just because someone is a credentialed professional they are automatically a knowledge worker.

There's no doubt they can contribute a certain amount of creativity and innovation to the jobs they perform and the customers they serve, but being a knowledge worker also requires that the leaders of your organization recognize and treat you like one.

Stephen Covey writes about exactly this in his latest book, The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness:  "It's the leadership beliefs and style of the manager, not the nature of the job or economic era, that defines whether a person is a knowledge worker or not."

When you consider the metrics used by most firms to measure their team members, they all come from the Industrial Revolution's command-and-control hierarchies (realization, utilization, billable hours, etc).  Yet as I discussed in my posts on The Firm of the Past and The Firm of the Future, the metrics we use to measure a knowledge worker's effectiveness are woefully inadequate.

Dan further supports his argument by stating that true knowledge workers:

• Don't have billable hour quotas.
• Spend at least 15% of their time innovating and creating better ways to add value to customers (this destroys efficiency under the old metrics!).
• Understand that judgments and discernment are far more important than measurements in assessing performance.
• Are focused on outputs, results and value, not inputs, efforts and costs.
• Don't fill out timesheets accounting for every 6 minutes of their day.
• Are trusted by their leaders to the right thing for the firm and its customers.
• Are passionate and self-motivated, and don't need constant supervision.

If the above describes your firm, congratulations — you are a true knowledge organization.  Perhaps nothing illustrates the value knowledge workers can add to a business than last week's purchase of Pixar by Disney for $7.4 billion in Disney stock.

Disney will have to respect Pixar's culture and continue to let it make quality movies at its own pace, in its own way.  Otherwise, if Pixar's creative talent leaves, "Disney just purchased the most expensive computers ever sold," according to Lawrence Haverty, a fund manager at Gabelli Asset Management.

Unfortunately, most professional firms we've come into contact with around the world do not fit Dan's criteria, which is why he makes such a strong case they function more like manual laborers than knowledge workers.

UPS founder Jim Casey remarked in 1947:  "A man's worth to an organization can be measured by the amount of supervision he requires."

The moment you feel the need to hover over your knowledge workers, either physically or metaphorically with the Sword of Damocles — the timesheet — you've made a hiring mistake.

Until professional service firm leaders begin to grant their team members autonomy — Greek for self-governance — and treat them like self-respecting knowledge workers, I think Dan's argument trumps mine.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: ron+baker, knowledge+workers, law, firm

A Tip for Sleepy Lawyers

The Caffiene Nap:

The Caffeine Nap is simple.  You drink a cup of coffee and immediately take a 15 minute nap.  Researchers found coffee helps clear your system of adenosine, a chemical which makes you sleepy.  So in testing, the combination of a cup of coffee with an immediate nap chaser provided the most alertness for the longest period of time.  The recommendation was to nap only 15 minutes, no more or less and you must sleep immediately after the coffee.

Constraints for Lawyers?

Here is a good practical introduction to the Theory of Constraints from the Juice Analytics blog.  The author is going to try imposing these constraints on his company:

• Create artificial deadlines with teeth. Something real and bad has to happen when a project extends beyond a deadline. What if a team had to write a document describing why a deadline was missed?
• Limit design freedom with less space, fewer colors, fewer tabs and buttons. At Juice, we recently found that we had some fairly radical limitations on the space available to create a web interface. What started as an annoyance helped us take some great steps forward.
• Cap team size. What if you limited every team to five or fewer people? Just imagine the efficiencies and focus — and all the people you could legitimately exclude!
• Try without money. What if you had no marketing budget for a new product? I bet most of the companies that succeed with viral marketing are those that need to. Big companies admire the power of using customers as a salesforce — but advertising is so much more well understood.

As the author notes, “There is pain in fitting into constraints. And it isn’t always worth it. But there can be pay-offs in innovation, efficiency and focus.”   Where can you utilize the Theory of Constraints in your practice? 

Technorati Tags: constraints, law+practice

The Marketing Concept - Ron Baker

The Marketing Concept by guest blogger Ron Baker

There is only one boss:  the customer.  And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.  -Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart (1918-1992)

I miss Peter Drucker.  He was one of the few management consultants who had original insights, could write without making his readers feel like they were watching a fly ascend a drape, and has taught me so many lessons there is no way I can even separate his thinking from my own.  He deserved a Nobel Prize, and it's a shame he didn't get one (they are not given posthumously).

One of his lessons was you are not in business to make a profit.  Profit is merely oxygen for the body; it is not the reason for being.  Profit is nothing more than a lagging indicator of what is in the hearts and minds of your customers.

He indefatigably pointed out that "there is only one valid definition of business purpose:  to create a customer."  This is known as the marketing concept. 

The purpose of any organization--from a governmental agency, non-profit foundation to a corporation--exists to create results outside of itself.  The result of a school is an educated student, as is a cured patient for a hospital.  For a law firm, a happy and loyal customer who returns is the ultimate result.
 
The only things that exist inside of a business are costs, activities, efforts, problems, mediocrity, friction, politics, and crises.  There is no such thing as a profit center in a business; there are only cost and effort centers.  In fact, Peter Drucker said in a 1997 interview, "One of the biggest mistakes I have made during my career was coining the term profit center, around 1945."

The only profit center is a customer's check that doesn't bounce.  Customers are absolutely indifferent to the internal workings of your firm in terms of costs, desired profits levels and efforts.  Value is only created when you have produced something the customer voluntarily, and willingly, pays for. 

For example, cosmetic companies, as Revlon founder Charles Revson pointed out, sell hope.  What makes the marketing concept so breathtakingly brilliant is the focus is always on the outside of the organization.  It doesn't look inside and ask, "What do we want and need?" but rather it looks outside to the customer and asks, "What do you desire and value?"

Your firm exists to serve real flesh and blood people, not some mass of demographics known as "the market."  In the final analysis, a business doesn't exist to be efficient, to do cost accounting, or to give people fancy titles and power over the lives of others. 

It exists to create results and wealth outside of itself.  This profound lesson must not be forgotten.

Thank you Mr. Drucker.  R.I.P.

Technorati Tags: peter+drucker, cost, profit, law+firm, ron+baker

You Only Need Four Ideas

From this month’s edition of Brainmail:

A US study says that just four ideas copied thousands of times account for 80% of all breakthrough new businesses created between 1965 and 1995. The four ideas are: power retailing, focus/simplify/standardize, value chain bypass and mega-branding.  Ref: Strategy + Business (US)

Which of the four will your firm rely upon to create your breakthrough new business?

Introducing Ron Baker - Guest Blogger

One of the coolest things about blogging for me is that I have gotten to know some really amazing people.  One of those folks is Ron Baker.  When I first started blogging, I called him an absolutely amazing visionary and called two of his books, The Firm of the Future (with Paul Dunn) and The Professional's Guide to Value Pricing “absolute must reads.”  Ron left a comment to that post, and since then he and I have grown to be friends.

Ron and I were talking about his new book, Pricing on Purpose, and I asked him if he’d like to promote it on this blog.  Instead of a quick Q&A, he’s written several provocative posts for my readers.  The first will follow today.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to have him here on the [non]billable hour this week.  I hope you enjoy what he has to share.

For those of you who don’t know Ron, here’s his bio:

Ronald J. Baker started his accounting career in 1984 with KPMG Peat Marwick's Private Business Advisory Services in San Francisco.  Today, he is the founder of VeraSage Institute, a think tank dedicated to teaching Value Pricing to professionals around the world.

As a frequent speaker at events and conferences, and a consultant to professional service firms on implementing Total Quality Service and Value Pricing, his work takes him around the world.  He has been an instructor with the California CPA Education Foundation since 1995 and has authored eleven courses for them.

He is the author of the best-selling marketing book ever written specifically for the professions, Professional's Guide to Value Pricing, Sixth Edition, published by CCH, Incorporated.  Also, Burying the Billable Hour; Trashing the Timesheet; and You Are Your Customer List, published by The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants in the United Kingdom.  His book, The Firm of the Future: A Guide for Accountants, Lawyers, and Other Professional Services, co-authored with Paul Dunn, was published in April 2003 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and is in its fourth printing.  His latest book, Pricing on Purpose:  Creating and Capturing Value, was published in February 2006 (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).  His next book, The Canary in the Coal Mine:  Why Your Company Needs Key Predictive Indicators, is due out in the latter part of 2006 (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

Ron has toured the world, spreading his Value Pricing message to over 70,000 professionals, including leading a seminar series of Value Pricing seminars for the American Association of Advertising Agencies in 2005.  He has been appointed to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountant's Group of One Hundred, a think tank of leaders to address the future of the profession, named on Accounting Today's 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005 Top 100 Most Influential People in the profession, and received the 2003 Award for Instructor Excellence from the California CPA Education Foundation.
   
He graduated in 1984 from San Francisco State University with a Bachelor of Science in accounting and a minor in economics. He is a graduate of Disney University, Cato University, and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business course:  Pricing:  Strategy and Tactics.  He is a member of the Professional Pricing Society and presently resides in Petaluma, California.

Technorati Tags: value+pricing, billable+hour, ron+baker

Thank You, Yvonne

I love Yvonne DiVita, even if she hadn’t written these kind words about LexThink! when talking about a recent conference she attended:

1. Not enough audience interaction – because you didn’t plan enough time for Q&A. It wasn’t the speakers or the presenters faults…it was the organizers fault! Puh-lease! The Q & A is THE best part of the event. Say, you should talk to Matt Homann over at the [non]billable hour. He and Dennis Kennedy know how to run a conference where everybody wins. They’ll set you straight. I hear they're available to help plan your next event in the open space style.

If you are planning a conference, I’d love to chat with you and share some of the lessons we’ve learned at our two “unconferences,” LexThink and BlawgThink.

Get Coached Up!

If you want to make meaningful changes in the way you manage your employees, you have to check out my friend Rosa Say’s Managing with Aloha Jumpstart program. 

Oh, and did I mention it’s free.

Write Your Firm Newsletter on a Postcard!

I came across Chuck Green’s Ideabook site yesterday, and once I found myself adding nearly every page of his to my daily links, I thought I’d devote an entry to this amazing resource.  If you want to see how great design can improve business (and client) communication, you have to set aside some time to check out Chuck’s site.  Just one great example:  a postcard-sized newsletter.  Freakin’ cool!

Trade Your Headache

Unless you are among the small percentage of hyper-motivated and totally focused people out there in the world, you know you have at least one “headache” sitting in a pile on your desk or on your to-do list.  It may be that project you keep putting off, that client you hate dealing with, or that phone call you just don’t want to make.  No matter what it is, imagine how happy you’d be tomorrow if it weren’t your responsibility any longer.

Well, odds are your co-workers have similar “headaches” they face every day too.  Here is a way to cope: 

Trade Your Headache.  Every week (or month) get together with your co-workers and bring your number one headache with you.  Identify it, and then trade it with one that someone else brought.  Think of it like kind of a regular white elephant gift exchange.  Just make sure the same headache doesn’t get traded over and over again.

I’m certain you’ll be happier, and more motivated, working to solve a different problem or complete a different task than the one that’s been dragging on you for so long.  Let me know how it goes.

Technorati Tags: motivation, lifehacks, procrastination, white+elephant, headache

Forcast your Future

Jim McGee writes about a speech by Paul Saffo.  In the speech, Saffo shared his rules for forcasting the future.  Though I won’t pretend to understand the meat of Jim’s post — or Saffo’s speach, for that matter — these rules are worth remembering the next time you need to predict the future in your business or your life:

Rule 1. Know when not to make a forecast. 

Rule 2. Overnight successes come out of twenty years of failure.

Rule 3. Look back twice as far as forward.

Rule 4. Hunt for prodromes.

Rule 5. Be indifferent.

Rule 6. Tell a story or, better, draw a map.

Rule 7. Prove yourself wrong.  

Technorati Tags: forcasting, predictions, paul+saffo, jim+mcgee

What is your ink to data ratio?

Before you prepare your slides for your next trial, or slap together another PowerPoint for a client meeting or presentation, read this article setting out some basic principles of information design from Luigi Canali De Rossi.  In it, the author gives some suggestions on ways to better present data (charts, graphs, etc.) in presentations.  Here are a few:

• Drop unplanned and unfunctional 3D effects from your information graphic. Unless you are a trained designer drop 3D graphs in favor of the apparently simpler and less fancy traditional 2D graphs.
• Eliminate all frames and borders. They are not needed. Your data will not escape the newly found free space around it, but it will "breathe" and will provide with a more relaxing and legible visual space.
• Drop also all unneeded borders of colors, bars, slices. Your eye can tell a column from an empty space without the addition of black ink around every object created by computer software.
• Cut the prison bars. The horizontal and vertical "gridlines" that many graph tools utilize is nothing short of a visual prison, sold to us with the excuse of helping our eyes better find the value reflected by each bar.
• Do not utilize bitmap, hatches, patterns to differentiate different bars, columns or slices. These effects are the heritage of the old times when there was no color available to differentiate different graph elements. These solutions are highly disturbing to the eye, they "vibrate" and create so called moiré effects. More than anything they look ugly and old-fashioned.
• Drop, eliminate, mute or simplify all remaining visual components which serve only decorative or unnecessary graphic-enhancing purposes. Reiterate and improve, until you can actually see that the quantity of ink you are using is truly serving the very purpose of communicating real data.

I know I’ve violated at least four of these rules in presentations over the last few years.  How about you?

Update:  If you want to learn more about presenting data, check out this article about Constructing Bad Charts and Graphs.