Regular readers will know that Warren Bennis, the USC business
professor and Chairman of Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership,
is IMHO one of the few people in the world who actually has anything
to say about leadership. (OK, Jim Collins of "Good
to Great" may be another, rare, exception.) Bennis’ "On
Becoming a Leader" is
probably the single best book on the topic I’ve ever read.
A large part of leadership involves knowing when to get out of the
way—particularly when a firm has laid the groundwork for the
birth of "Great Groups" (for example, the original Disney animators,
or the Manhattan Project—groups that seriously believed they
could change the world and approached the task with "obsessive brio"). Bennis’
latest candidate for a Great Group award is Google.
A non-negotiable prerequisite to a Great Group-enabling culture
is permission, nay encouragement, to have fun; Bennis may be underestimating
matters when he writes that "98%" of U.S. businesses don’t understand
that people are more creative when they’re having fun. Not
so fast, you’re saying: "Fun" in a buttoned-down law firm?!
I would argue that some of the true legal innovations of the last
few decades (the insight into what IRC §401(k) actually permitted,
for example, or the invention of the poison pill), have occurred
in environments where lawyers felt they could stretch. "Fun"
may be asking too much; but "permission to fail" is not.
