by Bruce | October 12, 2012 | Articles, Compensation, Finance, Strategy
Lee Pacchia of Bloomberg Law recently interviewed me about some of the implications of “Growth is Dead.” Here it is: It’s 12 or 13 minutes but if you don’t have time for that we’ll be trying to cut it into bite-size snippets in the...
by Bruce | September 16, 2012 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
Our third installment in this series addresses partner expectations. Here’s the problem: There’s about to be a collision with reality. Let’s start with some data. In the quarter century since the The American Lawyer first published the AmLaw 100,...
by Bruce | July 31, 2012 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Partnership Structures
Last week we published a column noting that today “discussion of incentives often begins from the false belief that only cash can influence behavior.” This remark—the heart of the piece in as few words as possible—prompted a regular reader to offer a...
by Bruce | July 25, 2012 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures
ITN (a British-based independent news service) recently published a poll finding trust in the financial sector is at an all-time low, with just 10% of respondents believing bankers tell the truth. This puts bankers even lower than journalists and politicians. Yet if...
by Bruce | June 25, 2012 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Globalization, Leadership, Strategy
The one question I’m asked most frequently these days, in the aftermath of Dewey, is "Who’s next?" Even if I had an answer to that—which is, as one apocryphal job applicant replied when asked his greatest weakness, "for me to know and...
by Bruce | May 25, 2012 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
The conventional wisdom has quickly coalesced around how all right-thinking folks ought to view Facebook’s IPO: It was a disaster. Some reasons for this view (NASDAQ’s humiliating meltdown, three shareholder class actions are already pending against FB)...