by Bruce | February 7, 2008 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
It’s been nearly a decade since McKinsey published the seminal article, The War for Talent, but many of its abiding observations remain true today and indeed are worth revisiting. What they found ten years ago started from the implacable demographic reality that...
by Bruce | January 29, 2008 | Articles, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, M&A, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Annually, Hildebrandt and the Citi Private Bank issue a "Client Advisory" and this year’s is just out. What will doubtless grab headlines (and already has at places like the WSJ’s Law Blog) is the downbeat forecast for 2008—the first...
by Bruce | January 21, 2008 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
On the wonderful landscape of economics, several highly visible landmarks are in the form of "laws:" The law of supply and demand, of economies of scale, of diminishing marginal utility, of the downward stickiness of wages, of decreasing returns to factors...
by Bruce | January 16, 2008 | Articles, Finance, Leadership, M&A, Practice Group Management, Strategy
I previously asserted that corporate America teaches that firms that treat recessions as opportunities rather than threats could steal a march on their more conservative brethren and emerge into the post-recession recovery as more powerful competitors. Today I’d...
by Bruce | January 13, 2008 | Articles, Finance, Leadership, M&A, Strategy
Regular readers, or simply those with good memories for the jovial Cornell University economist Alfred Kahn, who briefly served as Jimmy Carter’s czar over wage-price controls, as well as the last head of the unlamented Civil Aeronautics Board (where he...
by Bruce | January 9, 2008 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
Text #1: "He was recruited as a very senior director in a very large City law firm. His work went well but the thing that really bugged him was the pass he had to show every time he went into the staff restaurant. The words ‘non-lawyer’ were printed...
