The book, “How Will You Measure Your Life” by Clayton Christensen is filled with valuable life and business lessons. The one I’ll focus on today is the difference between deliberate and emergent strategies, and how they can ideally come into play in a firm. Christensen illustrates this point by summarizing Honda’s entry into the North [...]
How many times have you reflected back on a firm retreat and thought “wow, that was money well-spent”? I worry that we’ve become far too comfortable with the underwhelming performance of one of the most expensive management tools a firm will ever engage in. Most professional service firms have held a retreat before and are [...]
Business success requires evolution, and that means new strategic and marketing programs. This can be difficult to roll out in firms at the best of times – but it’s almost impossible when the first attempt was a failure. Professional services organizations exist for the delivery of a service to clients and a living to professionals. [...]
I write (and preach) frequently about the value of different kinds of plans that would benefit professional service firms. This post will focus on how all of those plans would ideally work together. You’ve probably heard of “top-down” planning, as well as “bottom-up” planning. Each is a valid approach but the best firm planning includes [...]
The key to many successful businesses is that they manage their activities around specific goals determined through some kind of strategic planning process...except for law firms. For a variety of reasons, over the years law firms have been one of the last professions to adopt what many consider to be standard business processes, including marketing, [...]