by Bruce | January 30, 2019 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Ineffable, Just Plain Interesting, Leadership, Strategy
My title for today steals literally from Ronald Coase’s legendary 1937 paper of the same name, which gained Coase the Nobel in Economics in 1991. The paper, barely over a dozen pages long, asks the question, childlike in its simplicity, “why do firms...
by Bruce | December 28, 2018 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Ineffable, Leadership, Partnership Structures
The lawyer personality type scores notoriously high on “autonomy.” Certainly compared to average citizens, but even to average white-collar professionals, lawyers are driven to do their own thing their own way. You see it all day every day if you hang...
by Bruce | November 16, 2018 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
We don’t often write purposefully on the topic of leadership, if for no other reason than it’s hard for most people to get past, “I know it when I see it,” but more substantively because we think it perfuses so much of our writing and...
by Bruce | November 5, 2018 | Articles, Business Models, Client Relationships, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy
There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer. –Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York,: Harper, 1st ed. 1954); Routledge, 2012, at p. 37 Urban legend has it that a Harvard Business School professor (who is never...
by Bruce | October 7, 2018 | Articles, Client Relationships, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy
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 Bruce | October 1, 2018 | Articles, Branding, Business Models, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Strategy, Technology strategy
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...