Recent conversation with a veteran friend in the industry. He had correctly deduced from a recent column in these pages that I’m (re-)reading the all-time strategy classic Playing to Win by A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin (Harvard Business Review Press: 2013) and...
By “only two strategies,” I mean what if there are only two general ways of creating a sustainable competitive advantage? I’ve read a lot of the business and management literature on strategy (believe me…) and this thought first surfaced when I...
For those of you who may not have spent years as I did in and around Wall Street, “don’t fight the tape” may be an obscure phrase but its meaning is essentially self-evident. If the market (the “tape”) is strongly headed in one...
One thing you can count on when two law firms merge is that neither one buys the other. I use “buy” in its simple and core sense: Nothing is obtained in exchange for payment. No cash changes hands; no stock is exchanged, no assets are purchased or...
Psychologists call us humans, among other things, “meaning-making machines.” We’re always looking for the reason why, the cause for the effect, the coherent narrative that pulls it all together and ties it up neatly. So far so good, but of course...
We often ask law firms, “Who’s your competition?” The single most frequent response we get is, “Well, no one, really.” This is delusion on stilts. Every business, I would venture to extend that to any human organization, has competition,...
