Above and Beyond KM

What dataset informs your mindset? That’s the question that Dr. Hans Rosling would ask you if he could. When he probed this issue with his university students in Sweden, he discovered that some of their views in the 21st century were based on a dataset that reflected the reality of … the 1950s.  In fact, their responses to his questions were so bad that he said that chimpanzees could do better. (Apparently chimps are able to get the answer right 50% of the time.)

Dr. Rosling is a Swedish professor of public health who has become famous for his ability to take dry statistics and convey them in a clear and compelling fashion.  Along the way, he has been dispelling many of the myths that inform our mindset.  He challenged a US State Department audience in 2009 with the following words:  ”Does your mindset correspond to my dataset? If not, one or the other needs upgrading….” The unspoken premise was that his dataset should trump the flawed mindset of anyone who does not have a fact-based view of the world.

Building a Fact-Based Worldview

If you go the website of Gapminder, the organization Dr. Rosling co-founded, you’ll find the following appeal:

Gapminder is a non-profit foundation based in Stockholm. Our goal is to replace devastating myths with a fact-based worldview. Our method is to make data easy to understand. We are dedicated to innovate and spread new methods to make global development understandable, free of charge, without advertising. We want to let teachers, journalists and everyone else continue to freely use our tools, videos and presentations.

Your contribution will help us in our efforts to explain how the world is changing. Your generosity will strengthen our independence.

Help us achieve a fact-based understanding of the world. Support our work by making a donation today.

As I read the appeal, I found myself wishing that the legal industry had a Gapminder-like organization to help us move from myth to a fact-based worldview. What data is your firm collecting? Do the data have integrity? Do you have capable people who can analyze that data and communicate what’s meaningful? Or are your firm leaders making decisions that reflect their favorite myths?

Ron Friedmann has a recommendation for law firms intent on developing a fact-based worldview:  ”Law firms should collect data to measure the multiple aspects of `service delivery’ and the `client experience’.” If you were to follow Ron’s recommendation, what would that mean for your firm?  What would you count? What would matter? I suspect you’re going to have look far past billable hours and realization rates to examine the profitability of matters and individual lawyers. What about measuring the rate at which lawyers of your firm innovate? Or the rate at which they convert business development opportunities into sustainable income streams? How do you measure client engagement and client satisfaction? How do you measure the contributions of law firm administrative departments? (In terms of dollars under budget? Or in terms of value delivered to clients?) And, how do you measure the contribution of each person in your firm towards the health and welfare of the firm?

There are many opportunities for us to learn more about our business through the careful gathering and analysis of data. However, I don’t mean to minimize the challenge.  Most folks in law firms are not trained statisticians. We don’t always know what to count or understand the problems implicit in how we collect and analyze what little data we have.This is an area in which our entire industry could benefit from some training and some standardized approaches.

What dataset informs the mindset of your law firm leaders? That’s the question Dr. Hans Rosling would ask them if he could.  But, since he can’t, shouldn’t you?

[Photo Credit: Tom Woodward]

Lawyers have many special gifts, but one of the most vexing is the ability to “issue spot.” They are trained to take a proposition in both hands and then turn it upside down and inside out until they have identified all the potential problems.  This is hugely helpful to a client who is trying to weigh the risks and benefits of a proposed business transaction.  However, this tendency can be hugely challenging for IT and knowledge management personnel who are trying to persuade a lawyer to adopt a new tool or a new way of working.

Now don’t get me wrong — some of my best friends are lawyers.  In fact, I’m a lawyer. Even so, I must admit that lawyers can be a little negative from time to time.

But lawyers are not the only ones.  Tony Schwartz has observed that the negativity bias is something that all humans share and it can lead us to wallow in the slough of despond:

Because human beings have a strong “negativity bias,” we pay more attention to our bad feelings than to our good ones. It once clearly served our survival to be vigilant about what might go wrong and that instinct persists. Today, it may serve to buffer us from disappointment, but it also promotes disproportionate and destructive discontent. The simple question “What’s going right?” provides ballast in tough times.

So What’s Going Right?

This can be the best question to ask when you are seeking feedback on new technology or a new law firm knowledge management initiative.  It can change the energy in the room and draw out the truly constructive comments.  Best of all, it encourages the lawyers involved to use their considerable brainpower to focus on opportunities for growth rather than obsessing about potential problems that may (or may not) stop a project dead in its tracks.

Focusing on the positive is not intended to sidestep reality or allow you to bury your head in the sand.  Its purpose is not denial.  Rather, its purpose is to elicit feedback at an early stage — before the tool or resource is so fully baked that it cannot be adjusted.  Asking about what’s going right can help the anxious stop obsessing about the impossible goal of perfection and start focusing on what’s necessary and possible.

If you want to be agile, if you want to innovate, start asking about what’s going right.  You might be pleasantly surprised by what you learn.

[Photo Credit: Manuel Bahamondez]

For the average worker, it might seem like a dream come true. However, I suspect that some information technology folks consider it a nightmare. What’s the issue? The advent of the consumerization of IT; something Scott Finnie calls “CoIT.” Dion Hinchcliffe describes the elements of  CoIT in the following way:

1) businesses taking more local control for IT, 2) workers using their own preferred computing devices and apps, and … 3) manageable processes for rapid uptake of enterprise apps, mashups, and devices matched with IT support processes that scale to match.

While this may not seem an ideal scenario for the traditional IT department, it most likely is within the limits of what can be tolerated.  However, what happens when the business gets “carried away” and starts driving IT initiatives? Here’s Dion Hinchcliffe’s explanation:

The overall trend towards ad hoc adoption of personal and cloud technology at work seems to be inexorable. More and more IT is moving out from under the CIOs budget, just over 30% by some estimates. Perhaps most disruptive of all, however, is the sudden appearance of extremely stiff competition for IT services. While the move to self-service IT in general has been a steady trend for a decade — and which is starting to be called CoIT — it’s the outright diversion of business budgets directly to external IT providers, whether they are the newer SaaS vendors and app developers or the more traditional IT consulting firms and VARs. In short, the business likes the selection and service it’s getting elsewhere, and routing around IT in many cases. [emphasis added]

Suddenly, we have a situation in which the IT department no longer is in complete control and may well have trouble imposing a locked down computing environment.  Now, if you’re working in the financial or legal services industries, consider what happens when you couple the move to CoIT and external IT providers with growing incursions by hackers. According to a recent report in Bloomberg News, there’s been disturbing hacker activity directed towards law firms lately:

Over a few months beginning in September 2010, the hackers rifled one secure computer network after the next, eventually hitting seven different law firms as well as Canada’s Finance Ministry and theTreasury Board, according to Daniel Tobok, president of Toronto-based Digital Wyzdom. His cyber security company was hired by the law firms to assist in the probe.

[...]

`As financial institutions in New York City and the world become stronger, a hacker can hit a law firm and it’s a much, much easier quarry,’ said Mary Galligan, head of the cyber division in the New York City office of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Galligan’s unit convened a meeting with the top 200 law firms in New York City last November to deal with the rising number of law firm intrusions. Over snacks in a large meeting room, the FBI issued a warning to the lawyers: Hackers see attorneys as a back door to the valuable data of their corporate clients.

To be honest, I don’t envy law firm IT directors.  They are faced with the difficult task of imposing stringent security measures even as they watch their internal clients scurry out the door, exercising their right to choose their own IT tools and chasing self-service IT as a means to get out from under the control of their organization’s IT department.  While security concerns have often trumped other considerations in the past, it will be interesting to see if the newly emboldened  IT consumers will insist on using their preferred devices and self-service IT despite heightened security concerns.

It’s a nightmare scenario, coming to an IT department near you — soon.

[Photo Credit: Terry Freedman]

For fourteen centuries she had information that everyone wanted. So they traveled from all over the ancient world to seek her guidance. And they paid lots of money for the privilege. Who was she? Pythia, the priestess of Apollo and the oracle of Delphi. Thomas Sakoulas describes how she worked:

Plutarch served as a priest at Delphi, and in his histories he has left many details about the inner workings of the sanctuary. Pythia entered the inner chamber of the temple (Adyton), sat on a tripod and inhaled the light hydrocarbon gasses that escaped from a chasm on the porous earth. After falling into a trance, she muttered words incomprehensible to mere mortals. The priests of the sanctuary then interpreted her oracles in a common language and delivered them to those who had requested them. Even so, the oracles were always open to interpretation and often signified dual and opposing meanings.

`You will go you will return not in the battle you will perish’ was an example of this duality of meaning. The above sentence can be interpreted two different ways depending where the comma can be placed. If a comma is placed after the word `not’ the message is discouraging for him who is about to depart for war. If on the other hand the comma is placed before the word `not’, then the warrior is to return alive.

In an age of uncertainty, access to information was valued, and the ability to interpret critical information was valued even more.  In fact, it led to the creation of a very nice business model:

A booming industry grew up around the Oracle. Temples were built and rebuilt, priests were trained, rituals evolved and sacrifices were performed. Priests interpreted the incoherent utterances of the Pythia. Presents were brought to both placate the deity and in the hope of influencing a positive prophesy. The Delphic temple itself became one of the largest “banks” in the world. Delphi became a center for banking and commerce.

The oracle and priests of Delphi are the spiritual ancestors of modern professionals who guard valuable information closely and share it selectively in exchange for considerable compensation. Lawyers and doctors have for years been the guardians of specialist bodies of knowledge to which lay people have needed access. But what happens when information is free? When your clients and patients have easy access via the Internet to the information for which you previously charged, what does that do to your role and your revenue?

As doctors having discovered, the result is patients who read Internet information and then show up in their doctor’s office with an extensive list of questions. Yes, this does make for more engaged healthcare consumers.  But contrary to physician worries, it need not render doctors obsolete. Why? Because the chief question of most of these patients is how to discern the reliable information from the downright wrong and misleading information. Dr. Kevin Pho reports that Drs Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman wrote recently in the New England Journal of Medicine about the opportunity free information presents:

Information and knowledge do not equal wisdom. … Physicians are in the best position to weigh information and advise patients, drawing on their understanding of available evidence as well as their training and experience. If anything, the wealth of information on the Internet will make such expertise and experience more essential.

In Dr. Pho’s view, doctors can provide real value to their patients by acting as their guides through the freely available Internet information:

Doctors have to get used to the fact they are no longer the sole source of a patient’s health information. Instead, they need to serve more as interpreters of data, and be willing to separate the tangible information from the increasing amount of noise patients find online.

But what about lawyers?  At the end of the day the best business model for doctors and lawyers rests on their ability to provide more than the rudimentary materials available freely on the Internet. It rests on their ability to provide the benefits of their valuable experience and judgment to lay people.  This suggests the need for a more strategic approach to sharing information.  Given how quickly information spreads online, how long can you guard your firm’s information as if you were guarding gold bricks? Granted, if you have the secret recipe for Coca-Cola, guarding it rigorously makes sense.  But as far as much legal and medical information is concerned, its half-life is rather short.  This leads to an interesting question for law firms: do you want to invest energy restricting access to a resource of diminishing value, or do you want to be known as the go to firm that has confidence to provide useful information free of charge online, secure in the knowledge that the firm is always developing specialized experience and judgment for which clients will gladly pay good money? For a profession that is used to charging a premium for all information, this is challenging economic and cultural terrain to navigate. For the firm that finds the right balance between clinging to information until it turns to dust and giving away the shop, this is a marvelous opportunity to attract clients who want to know they are working with lawyers who really are at the top of their game and who have the cutting-edge knowledge, experience and judgment to back it up.

The oracle of Delphi was displaced by radical changes in political and religious power. The oracles in law firms and doctors’ offices are in danger of being displaced by technology.  How will they respond?

[Photo Credit: Bricke Dotnet]

The Financial Times recently published an interesting report entitled, US Innovative Lawyers 2011.  I encourage you to read that report in its entirety soon.  In the meantime, here are some highlights and observations.

According to the report, FT’s researchers received 272 submissions (including from 53 AmLaw 200 firms) and interviewed more than 300 lawyers and clients to identify the most outstanding innovations.  Each submission was scored in terms of (1) originality , (2) the rationale behind the work, and (3) the impact of the work on the client, the industry or on business more broadly.

At the end of the day, which firms made the cut?  FT identified 26 firms in the US as truly innovative:

• Davis Polk & Wardwell
• Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom
• Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton
• Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe
• Latham & Watkins
• Cravath, Swaine & Moore
• Paul Hastings
• Sullivan & Cromwell
• Seyfarth Shaw
• Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison
• Kirkland & Ellis
• Dewey & LeBoeuf // Mayer Brown
• Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher // White & Case
• Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft
• Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld
• Dechert
• Morrison & Foerster // Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz
• Simpson Thacher & Bartlett
• Jones Day // Weil, Gotshal & Manges
• Fulbright & Jaworski
• Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer // Proskauer Rose

What made these firms stand-out?  These firms say they rely on their culture and human capital to innovate.  In particular, they hire smart people who like to find new and better ways of solving problems for clients. One firm pointed to its lockstep compensation model, but since plenty of non-lockstep firms made the grade, that most likely is not the decisive factor. According to the FT report, the factors that distinguished the firms on the list from the others were “their commitment, their ability to adapt and to work together in the best interests of business to unusual and important effect.”

How can law firm knowledge management help?

While I don’t know the extent to which each of these firms relied on their knowledge management resources to foster innovation, the innovations reported suggest that KM can help make a firm and its lawyers more innovative in the following ways:

• Much innovation arises from making small changes to what came before. In legal practice, this means we need to give our lawyers easy access to precedents and practice guides so that they have a solid foundation from which to innovate.
• Innovation can go beyond specific matters to providing online information and advice on a subscription basis.  KM and library services can play an important role here in gathering the data for the client-facing resource.
• Innovation with respect to the business of law can have a huge impact as well.  Seyfarth Shaw’s Lean Six Sigma efforts put the firm on FT’s list.
• KM personnel and practices can help support alternative fee arrangements and project management efforts.
• Jeffrey Carr, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, FMC Technologies, is a well-known advocate of changes in the legal industry.  Among other things, his in-house legal department has created a wiki to share legal advice internally and is developing M&A process maps.  Are you doing anything similar?

As I said at the beginning of this post, it’s worth your time to read the report in its entirety. While the specifics of each legal matter may not resonate for you, focus on how what you do (or should be doing) could help your firm get on that list and stay on that list.  The KM principles we espouse and the information we handle daily  can help bring about the innovation to which our firms should be aspiring.

If Lisa J. Damon has a bridge to sell, I’m buying it.  And, it’s not because I’m all that gullible.  However, over the course of one hour she changed me from an admitted Lean Six Sigma skeptic into a person willing to consider the possibilities of that approach for every law firm. I had previously heard several presentations on the law firm miracle that is Seyfarth Lean Six Sigma, but it was only when Ms. Damon and Seyfarth’s Chief Information Officer, David Hambourger, explained how they and their colleagues are beginning to change the way the lawyers of their firm actually practice law that I began to appreciate the scope of their accomplishment.

First a little background, Six Sigma is a business technique developed by Motorola to quickly identify and fix defects in its manufacturing processes.  Lean is a business technique derived from the Toyota Production System to redesign a manufacturing process to make it more balanced and consistent, thereby removing waste from the system.  (Another way of looking at this is to eliminate anything that does not create value for the end customer.)

At first blush, neither approach to manufacturing would have much obvious application to the work of any lawyer who considers herself or himself to be an artiste. Even in a so-called “law factory,” I’m not sure many would consider lawyers to be in the manufacturing business.   However, Seyfarth’s leadership came to the conclusion that elements of their practice needed to be handled with the same discipline Motorola and Toyota brought to manufacturing.

What drove them to this conclusion? Economics.  As their clients started requesting more alternative fee arrangements, Seyfarth’s leadership correctly concluded that the firm would take a loss unless it could find a way to reduce its own costs of production. So six years ago they began with the following goals:

• improve predictability of fees
• lower client costs
• increase transparency
• allow clients to collaborate
• provide clients with real-time access to fees and the management of a matter

After looking at pure Six Sigma and Lean, and talking to clients who had used these approaches, Seyfarth settled on a modified Lean Six Sigma approach tailored for legal services.  To begin with, they eliminated the jargon, some of the statistical tools and the heavy-duty math. (Ms. Damon acknowledges that the focus on numbers demanded by Six Sigma would have been a major turn-off for every lawyer in the firm who went to law school just to avoid another math class.)  They also built in some strategy, project management and change management.  Along with this, they hired client-facing professional project managers and created a project management office. The other key element is a commitment to continuous, sustained improvement (kaizen) in the quality of the services they deliver.

To make these wholesale changes in the way they practiced law, the lawyers of Seyfarth also had to make wholesale changes in the way they carried out the business of law:

• They replaced their professional development and promotion model with a more dynamic model based on advancement by competency and achievement rather than tenure.
• They replaced their compensation model so that it rewarded results achieved rather than time spent.
  • Seyfarth has a scorecard system based on the ACC value index. They survey clients and then reflect that response in partner compensation.
• They moved from merely automating manual processes to the creative, strategic use of knowledge, expertise and operational information.
• They changed their service model from bill/pay as you go to one with a more strategic focus, with defined outcomes based on client business goals.

Lisa Damon is honest about the work involved in making such extensive changes within her firm.  While they don’t yet have 100% adoption, she says they make a new convert every day. Along the way, they take every opportunity to improve their practice and their business. As the inimitable Ms. Damon put it, “Seyfarth loves to process map. We create process maps for anything that moves within the firm.”  In addition, they approach this in a way that flattens the hierarchy within the firm; everyone with expertise is brought into the effort — whether they are professional project managers, paralegals, secretaries or lawyers.  In the beginning, they create their process maps with paper and pen. Later, they record their process maps using a lawyer-friendly tool called Task Map (an overlay to Visio). Once the process maps are created, they are linked to key knowledge management tools such as case analysis, checklists and samples. Better still, each process map can be tailored to the needs of individual clients or matters.

On the IT and knowledge management side, Dave Hambourger reports that they started by implementing enterprise search.  They also have built extranets that create new business for the firm.  (They are not just inert document repositories).  Another important element is the way they have deployed SharePoint to deliver “memorable value” to clients.  This includes matter management tools and financial dashboards.  The matter management tools show both the percentage of the project completed as well as the percentage of the budget spent. Since the dashboards are visible to the clients, the lawyers of the firm have had to learn the discipline of entering their time daily.

Lisa Damon will be the first to tell you that none of this has been easy or cheap.  However, the sheer joy with which she tells the Seyfarth Success Story suggests that the undertaking has been well worth the effort. At the end of the day, sustaining a success story like this requires top-level business support, careful project selection, project discipline, and a focus on continuous improvement.  Seyfarth shows that it can be done.  Is your firm willing to try?

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If you’d like to learn more about SeyfarthLean, I’d encourage you to read (or listen to) the following:

• Law and Order (iSix Sigma Magazine) — see also the Seyfarth press release on this article
• Lean Six Sigma Tools, courtesy of Seyfarth Shaw’s Lisa Damon (Rees Morrison)
• Making it Lean (ABA Journal)
• Raising the Bar: How Seyfarth Shaw Provides Efficient Delivery of Legal Services Through Lean Six Sigma — and see also the Seyfarth press release on this podcast
• SeyfarthLean: A Commitment to Deliver Quality and Measurable Results (Seyfarth)
• SeyfarthLean Background (Seyfarth)
• Value Practice: Use of Tailored Six Sigma Methodologies at Seyfarth Shaw (ACC)

The history of medicine is filled with all sorts of interesting lessons for lawyers and law firms.  Consider the science of blood transfusions.  According to the Wikipedia article on blood transfusions, the first recorded transfusion allegedly occurred in 1492 when an innovative (or perhaps desperate) physician suggesting reviving a comatose Pope Innocent VIII by giving him the blood of three young boys.  Since this was in the days before the circulatory system and intravenous access had been discovered, the blood was administered through the patient’s mouth.  The pope died, as did the three boys.  In this case, the delivery mechanism proved to be not just ineffective, but fatal.

Fast forward to the late 17th century when Richard Lower performed the first human transfusion in Britain by introducing the blood of a sheep into the arm of one Arthur Coga.  (Mr. Coga was described as “the subject of a harmless form of insanity.”)  According to the Wikipedia article,

Sheep’s blood was used because of speculation about the value of blood exchange between species; it had been suggested that blood from a gentle lamb might quiet the tempestuous spirit of an agitated person and that the shy might be made outgoing by blood from more sociable creatures.

Blood changing personality? This is yet another flawed theory that has proven to be completely false.  Today, not only do we not try cross-species transfusions, but medical science has taught us the dangers of trying to transfuse across blood types:

It was not until 1901, when the Austrian Karl Landsteiner discovered human blood groups, that blood transfusions became safer. Mixing blood from two incompatible individuals can lead to an immune response, and the destruction of red blood cells releases free hemoglobin into the bloodstream, which can have fatal consequences. Karl Landsteiner discovered that when incompatible types are mixed, the red blood cells clump, and that this immunological reaction occurs when the receiver of a blood transfusion has antibodies against the donor blood cells. His work made it possible to determine blood type and allowed a way for blood transfusions to be carried out much more safely. For this discovery he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1930, and many other blood groups have been discovered since.

To recap, not only does the delivery mechanism need to work properly, but you also need to be sure that the blood you are transferring matches perfectly with the blood of the recipient.

So what does this have to do with law firms and their clients?  Consider the various types of work product that law firms push at their clients. Legal alerts, current awareness, research memoranda, draft documents, billing statements — the list is endless.  Now, imagine that each is a blood product.  How do law firms ensure that these products match the blood type (or preferences or working style) of their clients?  Do they ask clients beforehand what their preferences are? Or do lawyers imagine that a cross-species transfusion from law firm to client will work better for them than the history of medicine indicates?

Consider also the delivery mechanism — email blasts, law firm websites, extranets or the occasional tweet.  Are clients even paying attention? Wouldn’t it make more sense to deliver these materials in a way that fits neatly with the technology platform and information flow of the client? Clients have figured this out.  That’s why some are demanding that billing information, for example, be delivered via an electronic platform chosen by the client. And yet too many law firms persist in the old-fashioned blast or broadcast method of marketing and client communications.

Sending out an alert memo via email to a client who doesn’t have a reliable system to store, retrieve and share it for later use is as pointless as trying to do a blood transfusion via someone’s mouth.  Imagine how much better it would be if your memo were seamlessly received by and stored in the client’s knowledge base, together with clear contact instructions so that the client could reach you when a related issue arises.  As I wrote in a post entitled Dino, Dodo, Extranet,

We’ve heard in-house counsel express the desire for law firm content without having to hunt for it. They would like it in an environment of their own choosing and design. So instead of providing content access tools like extranets, should law firms be thinking harder about better content delivery tools?

Imagine a virtual umbilical cord stretching from a law firm to its client’s knowledge management system, providing a regular supply of helpful resources? Imagine being an in-house lawyer who doesn’t have to go to a thousand places on the internet to find information, but rather can simply surf a single familiar internal platform? Imagine that in-house lawyer’s delight when they can find easily the information appropriate to the decision at hand, and can identify and follow-up with the lawyer and firm that made the retrieval so pain free? Imagine the impact of these experiences on the relationship between that law firm and its client?

Now that’s the type of transfusion that actually promotes better health for the client and the law firm.

[Photo Credit: CarynNL]

What’s the purpose of your organization? (No, that’s not a trick question.) Deb Lavoy and her colleagues at OpenText believe that answering that question is the first critical step every organization must take.

Putting their money where their mouth is, OpenText hosted on July 11 the first of what promises to be a thought-provoking series of conversations about the purpose-driven organization. The speaker at the event* was Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why. Drawing on examples as diverse as the civil rights movement, Navy SEALS, the Wright brothers, Apple and Disney, he explained that the primary role of a leader is to have a vision of the world as it can be, and then to articulate that purpose with enough clarity and energy so as to inspire others to work towards that purpose.

Granted it’s promotional material, but here’s a synopsis provided by his publishers:

In studying the leaders who’ve had the greatest influence in the world, Simon Sinek discovered that they all think, act, and communicate in the exact same way — and it’s the complete opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be lead, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.

Any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but very few can clearly articulate why. WHY is not money or profit- those are always results. WHY does your organization exist? WHY does it do the things it does? WHY do customers really buy from one company or another? WHY are people loyal to some leaders, but not others?

Starting with WHY works in big business and small business, in the nonprofit world and in politics. Those who start with WHY never manipulate, they inspire. And the people who follow them don’t do so because they have to; they follow because they want to.

Why does your organization need a well-articulated purpose? Simon Sinek believes that without a clear and compelling purpose, you cannot recruit, retain and inspire the highly motivated people who are so committed to a shared sense of purpose that they will move mountains to achieve it. It’s this willingness to go above and beyond that sets them, and ultimately their organization, apart.

For my readers in the legal industry, don’t assume that this conversation about purpose is only for our clients.  Bruce MacEwen writing at Adam Smith Esq covered some of this territory in Thoughts on IBM’s 100th: Idea or Product, where he attributes IBM’s nimbleness and longevity to its view of itself “not as an organization creating products but as an organization loyal to an idea.”  He then summarizes a list from The Economist of companies that are animated by ideas versus those focused on products:

• IBM:  Package technology for use by business
• Apple:  Package the latest technoology in simple, elegant form and sell it at a premium
• Amazon:  Make it easy for people to buy stuff
• Facebook:  Help people share things with friends easily
• Dell:  Building PCs very very efficiently
• Cisco:  Routers
• Microsoft:  Windows

Taking this dichotomy straight to the door of law firms, he asks: “Are there firms premised on fealty to ideas and firms premised on selling products (practice areas)?” After naming a couple of firms that might be “idea” firms, and one sad example of a “product” firm, he reaches a sobering conclusion:

Alas, I suspect that law firms premised on a widely recognized idea are rare.   Many would insist they are idea-based, but dig under the surface and I bet you’ll find a mutating assemblage of practice areas and geographies without-in most cases-an overarching idea that all the partners could tell you in their sleep motivates the firm.

If he is right about this, how will firms recruit, retain and motivate excellent people? How can firms ensure their own longevity? Is it really just about paying market salaries?  I suspect it has a great deal more to do with the type of culture a firm nurtures, and the quality of the clients and work a firm attracts.

As we continue in this period of economic uncertainty, it’s worth considering whether your law firm, company, business unit, department, school or nonprofit has what it takes for the long haul.  You should start by asking WHY.

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If you’d like to hear more about the importance of knowing your purpose, here’s Simon Sinek’s very popular TED Talk:

*Disclosure: This event was sponsored by OpenText and free to the public.

[Photo Credit: Godserv]

Imagine Cleopatra as a law librarian.

(Let me give you moment to wrap your mind around that thought.)

Consider the following:

• April 10 – 16, 2011 is National Library Week.
• April 11, 2011 was Equal Pay Day, the day that symbolizes how far into the year women must work on average to earn what men earn.
• The American Association of Law Libraries’ 2009 Biennial Salary Survey makes the following statement:

It should also be noted that the prevailing market rates of compensation for librarians, including those for law librarians as depicted in this report, may reflect a societal undervaluation of the education, knowledge and competencies associated with librarianship. Numerous studies have found an apparent gender-based devaluation of the work of professions and occupations that are predominantly female. Librarianship has been a predominantly female occupation since the late 1800s.

• According to the American Library Association – Allied Professional Association’s Better Salaries and Pay Equity Toolkit:

Although gains have been made over the years in gender equity within librarianship, most library salary surveys still point to higher average salaries for men than for women. [emphasis added]

Now compare what you’ve just read to the following excerpt from Stacy Schiff’s superb new biography of Cleopatra:

Cleopatra … came of age in a country that entertained a singular definition of women’s roles. …Egyptian women enjoyed the right to make their own marriages. Overtime their liberties had increased to levels unprecedented in the ancient world. They inherited equally and held property independently. Married women did not submit to their husband’s control. They enjoyed the right to divorce and to be supported after a divorce. Until the time an ex-wife’s dowry was returned, she was entitled to be lodged in the house of her choice. Her property remained hers; it was not to be squandered by a wastrel husband. The law sided with the wife and children if the husband acted against their interests. … As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands.

When you think of the extensive legal and financial rights women enjoyed in the first century BCE in Egypt, it’s a little shocking to consider how long it took women to win similar rights in this country.  And, even though we’ve made advances, it appears that much remains to be done for women working in the “traditionally female” domain of libraries.  In fact, in light of the pay inequities suffered by women librarians, it’s hard not to wonder if we aren’t backwards in our views of women when compared to ancient Egyptians.

To be honest, I’m not sure that Cleopatra would ever agree to be a 21st century female law librarian. Given her high level of education, political skill and leadership ability, do you think she would have tolerated the inequities?

Why do we?

[Photo Credit: William Arthur Fine Stationery]