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 | December 24, 2018 | About the Site, Articles
A warm and joyful Christmas, Boxing Day, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, etc., to all of you, faithful readers, as we prepare to turn the page on the calendar. For me, the surpassing Gift of St. Nicholas this past year has been the responses you have provided to our...
by Bruce | December 16, 2018 | Articles, Innovative Managing Partners, Leadership, Strategy, Technology strategy
AI in law is the new Innovation. The industry press can’t write enough about it, law firm leaders and GC’s have to be seen as in the vanguard, vendors (of course!) can’t tout it enough, and no one, it seems, can worry about what it means for their...
by Bruce | November 29, 2018 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Leadership, M&A, Strategy
According to the self-assured analysis of McKinsey, there are only six types of successful acquisitions. Cutting directly to the chase, they are: Improving the target firm’s performance; Removing industry excess capacity; Creating market access for services;...
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 18, 2018 | Articles, Business Models, Leadership, Strategy
Sometimes when a corporation fails you could have seen it coming decades ago and so it’s not news. But rarely you could have seen it coming decades ago and it’s still news. Thus with Sears’ bankruptcy filing. “Attention, attention must...
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...
by Bruce | September 21, 2018 | Articles, Finance, NewLaw, Strategy, Technology strategy
For those of you who may not have spent years as I did in and around Wall Street, “don’t fight the tape” may be an obscure phrase but its meaning is essentially self-evident. If the market (the “tape”) is strongly headed in one...
