Although this
Hildebrandt article dates back to 2000, its premise that law firms
of the future will migrate to the model of having full-fledged CEO’s
as business leaders strikes me as visionary then and almost palpably
the direction in which the world is headed today.

This migration will be driven by the one irresistible outside force:  Clients.  How
so?  I’ve repeatedly said that the biggest single complaint clients
have is that lawyers don’t really understand their business.  I’m
beginning to believe this is a structural problem with the legal profession,
and not merely a universally-repeated failure of training or diligence
on behalf of lawyers.

By "structural" I mean that the qualities that make for the creme
de la creme of the legal profession—extraordinary thoroughness,
a focus on spotting all the issues, exhaustive research, a high degree
of risk aversion, an utter inability to risk being wrong—are
pretty much a short catalog of all the qualities a successful businessperson
will not embody.  What then, would having a "CEO"
at the head of a law firm do to fix this, or at least to paper it over
attractively?

Primarily, it means that donning the mantel of CEO and living its
mission permits, nay requires, one to learn business.  To
stop "thinking like a lawyer" and to start thinking audaciously.  To
truly be able to walk in your client’s shoes.  And for those lawyers
who reply, with marvelous internal inconsistency, that their firm will
never have a CEO because: (a) they’re not about to give up any control;
and (b) having a CEO would make no difference anyway, the answer lies
in the story of DEC and Ken Olsen, its CEO in 1977 who uttered the
immortal words titling this post.  Where would DEC be today if
he had envisioned a place for the computer in the home?  Two guys
named Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were having precisely that thought.