by Bruce | July 19, 2017 | About the Site, Articles, Latin America
With the addition to our team of Antonio Leal Holguin, our Director based in Bogota, it was time to add a Spanish language version of key pages of our site. They are: Our services and what we do (this also links to case studies in Spanish); Bruce’s background;...
by Bruce | July 17, 2017 | Articles, Branding, Client Relationships, Marketing
A parable of client service in four acts. The wireless providers’ market in the US (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile) has achieved saturation. Subject to rounding errors, every American from age 10 to age 90 has a smartphone. Among the providers, it’s a...
by Bruce | July 12, 2017 | About the Site, Articles
Dear hyper-connected readers: “Due to popular demand,” as they say, we have now incorporated a magic LinkedIn Share button in the footer of every article and column we publish. It appears at the bottom of every page of multi-page articles, not just the...
by Bruce | July 10, 2017 | Articles, Business Models, Partnership Structures, Question of the Month, Strategy
Over the past few decades, every other sizable sector of the professional services industry has switched wholesale from being organized as partnerships to being organized as corporations. This includes: Management consultants, such as McKinsey, BCG, and Bain;...
by Bruce | July 7, 2017 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Ineffable, Leadership
Unknown to me was that Chief Justice John Roberts’ son has been attending, and just graduated (9th grade) from Cardigan Mountain School in New Hampshire. Dad delivered the commencement address. An excerpt: Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish...
by Bruce | July 4, 2017 | About the Site, Adam Smith Himself, Articles, Just Plain Interesting
“You have a republic, if you can keep it.”—reliably attributed to Benjamin Franklin, at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. With that as our text in mind for this parlous and yet inspiring Independence Day celebration, two threads tying our...
by Bruce | June 29, 2017 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
Coming to the fore more prominently these days across a large portion of firms we work with and the industry overall is the issue of succession planning. It comes up in one or both of two contexts, (a) transitioning key client relationships from incumbent partners to...
by Bruce | June 25, 2017 | Articles, Business Models, Leadership, Strategy
A brief follow-on to the earlier column on Amazon, GE, and Whole Foods. The typically worthwhile Greg Ip, writing in The Wall Street Journal on “The Economy Needs Amazons, but it Mostly Has GEs”, gives us the following chart: The point? For 20+ years,...
by Bruce | June 22, 2017 | Articles, Question of the Month
This column written by Janet Stanton, Partner, Adam Smith, Esq., Quick reprise: Earlier this month we launched a new feature on Adam Smith, Esq.: The question of the month. The inaugural question was: Is “origination” just a nicer term for “sales commission?” If so,...
by Bruce | June 19, 2017 | Articles, Business Models, Leadership, M&A, Strategy
Jeff Immelt’s stepping down as head of GE after 16 years was the odds-on favorite to be the big business story of the week until of course the Amazon/Whole Foods acquisition sucked all the oxygen out of the building. Any lessons in here for Law Land? Bear with...
