by Bruce | February 12, 2016 | Articles, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Strategy
Collins’s (and our) third stage, “Denial of Risk and Peril,” is, yes, about denial, but it’s really about how to decide whether to go forward in a world of ambiguity, incomplete and contradictory information, and inconsistent advice. In other...
by Bruce | February 9, 2016 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
At the most straightforward (superficial?) level, the “undisciplined pursuit of more”—Collins’s stage 2 in his framework of decline—would seem to follow logically and almost inevitably from stage 1, “hubris born of success.” The logic is...
by Bruce | February 5, 2016 | Articles, Business Models, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
Jim Collins has authored or co-authored six books that have sold over 10-million copies altogether. Good to Great may be the most famous (published in 2001, still the #1 best seller on Amazon in “Strategic Business Planning”), but Built to Last is also...
by Bruce | January 23, 2016 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Strategy
Late this past week my partner Janet and I had the opportunity to participate in a panel at the 23rd annual Thomson Reuters Marketing Partner Forum (held this year in Orlando) on the “rise of the Big 4″—and, we took it to mean, all other species of non-law...
by Bruce | January 11, 2016 | Articles, Client Relationships, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
With the release last week of the Annual Report from Georgetown Law’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, the “Big Three” annual reports—Altman-Weil’s Law Firms in Transition, Citi/Hildebrandt’s Client Advisory, and...
by Bruce | December 30, 2015 | Articles, Leadership, Strategy
Year-end is often seen, understandably if somewhat arbitrarily, as a time for reflection. Actually, in my book there’s never a bad time for reflection, so I’ll take an arbitrary peg over no peg. I hope you share my core belief in the power of standing back...
by Bruce | December 25, 2015 | Articles
by Bruce | December 22, 2015 | Articles
Herewith a seasonal column (we employ editorial license in so describing it) from Janet Stanton. I know this “tis the season to be jolly,” but I suspect more than a few of you feel more like the Grinch than Frosty the Snowman. All the fa-la-la-la-la-ing making you...
by Bruce | December 16, 2015 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
It has become a commonplace—I have bowed to convention and endorsed the notion myself—to observe that law firms are labor-, not capital-, intensive, and that (here’s the dangerous and subtle segue) therefore there would be no benefit to them in taking on outside...
by Bruce | December 10, 2015 | Articles, Compensation, Finance, Recruiting
This will not be a lecture. However. In the course of navigating published analysis and coverage of our beloved industry, I can rely on regularly coming across pat assertions displaying such frightful ignorance of basic economics that I’m forced to conclude the...
