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 28, 2012 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
By what follows I may reveal a curiosity sufficiently wide-ranging as to border on the suspicious, but so be it. When I was in college I took all the introductory-level, and many intermediate-level, science courses I could get into. Math through multivariate...
by Bruce | June 2, 2012 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
Of the founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton has always been my favorite—and not because of the arcane fact that my uncle, Robert Ward McEwen (variant spelling), was the 14th President of that well-regarded upstate New York liberal arts college named for you-know-who....
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)...
