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,...
It can be easy to remember the past Golden Era for BigLaw: Say, the decade preceding the 2008 Great Financial Meltdown. And you would not be wrong to recall it that way. No indulgence in nostalgia is required; that decade constituted an unheard-of run of economic...
Michael Lewis’ 2004 bestseller, Moneyball, subsequently made into a movie in 2011, has entered the vernacular. We have Moneyball for government, Moneyball for writing (and awarding) grant proposals, and, yes, Moneyball for lawyers. And its basic premise is hard to...
“Failure to attract and retain top talent” was the number-one issue in the Conference Board’s 2016 survey of global CEOs—before economic growth and competitive intensity. In more complex jobs, this will continue to be true as baby boomers (and their long experience)...
Something of a detour from our regularly scheduled programming, but we are not living in “ordinary times.” In the immediate wake of announcements from President Trump that he was ordering the end of the policy of separating children from their parents at the border,...
