Get Creative

Fast Followers

Over the weekend, I participated in the 2009 Futures Conference presented by the College of Law Practice Management at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.  It was a good program with some excellent and provocative speakers.  Most sessions focused well on the topic at hand:  "What is going on in the business of practicing law and how will it change?"

Perhaps because I tend to approach things with the Monty Python view of things ( "And now, something completely different!!") I was most intrigued by a concept of "Fast Followers" put forth by Harry Trueheart, Chairman of international law firm, Nixon Peabody.

 

It's an idea that has been around for a while.  In essence, it suggests that it is smarter to avoid the pain and heartbreak of taking a totally unique concept to the world, and instead, choose the strategy of making someone else's innovation better, faster, cheaper and thereby taking advantage of their hard start-up work and learning to surpass them. Sort of like winning the auto race by "drafting" in the pull exerted by the front runner.

There have been strong opinions on both sides of this. You can read management consultant Jim McGee's explanation of the theory's flaw.  And you can read Constantinos Markides and Paul Geroski's 2004 book, Fast Second: How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets to learn all the ins and outs.

I like it, however, in the context of the business of practicing law.  In a world where anything without precedent can be viewed as toxic, the "Fast Follower" approach allows the determined innovator to say "YES, someone else HAS done this before!!" to calm the critics then move forward in a way that is frequently impossible in a law firm if it is a brand spanking new concept.

Something to think about, anyway

Over the weekend, I participated in the 2009 Futures Conference presented by the College of Law Practice Management at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.  It was a good program with some excellent and provocative speakers.  Most sessions focused well on the topic at hand:  "What is going on in the business of practicing law and how will it change?"

Perhaps because I tend to approach things with the Monty Python view of things ( "And now, something completely different!!") I was most intrigued by a concept of "Fast Followers" put forth by Harry Trueheart, Chairman of international law firm, Nixon Peabody.

 

It's an idea that has been around for a while.  In essence, it suggests that it is smarter to avoid the pain and heartbreak of taking a totally unique concept to the world, and instead, choose the strategy of making someone else's innovation better, faster, cheaper and thereby taking advantage of their hard start-up work and learning to surpass them. Sort of like winning the auto race by "drafting" in the pull exerted by the front runner.

There have been strong opinions on both sides of this. You can read management consultant Jim McGee's explanation of the theory's flaw.  And you can read Constantinos Markides and Paul Geroski's 2004 book, Fast Second: How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets to learn all the ins and outs.

I like it, however, in the context of the business of practicing law.  In a world where anything without precedent can be viewed as toxic, the "Fast Follower" approach allows the determined innovator to say "YES, someone else HAS done this before!!" to calm the critics then move forward in a way that is frequently impossible in a law firm if it is a brand spanking new concept.

Something to think about, anyway

Chris Rock, Esq.?

Well, you're right.  It does require quit a feat of mental gymnastics to picture comedian Chris Rock at home in the practice of law.  But he uses a technique that most law firms could profit by using.

In his world, one where the successful comedian's stock in trade is new ideas - emphasis on "NEW" - he has found a means to give new jokes and routines a test run or two before betting his career on them.  Take a look at Harvard Business Journal's Peter Sims' discussion of Rock's creative process.

Many law firms reject opportunities to launch profitable innovation because they perceive there is too great a risk.....or that they must entirely throw out the old before bringing in the new.  How might a firm try something new at an off-off-off Broadway venue before betting the farm on it?  Well, how about one client at a time?  You might even tell this client it is an experiment and recruit them to advocate for your attempts at service improvement by pledging to give you honest - perhaps even painful - feedback.  You'll be surprised how many corporate clients see innovation as a good thing!

The truth is, much innovation in law firms occurs this way.  Some lawyer or practice group slips under the radar with a concept so weird it would NEVER be approved, if approval was sought.  Over time, this idea takes root.  Someone notices a sizable blip in profits.  An inquiry is made.  Ah HA!  Suddenly that weird little idea becomes "the way we do things around here."

Get Innovative! Get Famous!

Anyone who has mastered that uphill battle to do something new, better and different in a law firm deserves recognition at the very least.  Now is the time to get it!

Each year, the College of Law Practice Management presents "InnovAction Awards" to a few noteworthy law firm management innovations and their creators.  If you click here, you'll read about some of the past winners.  If you click here, you can enter yourself, your firm, or just someone else's innovation that you admire.  Or just click on the "Friend of InnovAction" graphic in the right-hand column of this blog to learn more about the awards and the College.

Can't wait to read about you in the media!

Fear is the enemy of innovation?

I'll admit that it's hard, indeed, to get focused on business innovation when every management conversation seems to be about downsizing.  But consider for a moment that some of the best ideas - and most exciting businesses - came out of hard times.

Both Apple and Microsoft were founded in the 1970's. . . in the middle of a big economic downturn.  In the early 90's, when the dot coms took a dangerous dive, little Palm computing jump started an entire industry within a matter of months when they made the revolutionary switch from software maker to hardware company in the race to "pen computing."

My favorite story of the week concerns Champagne.  Apparently it was the Brits, as early as 1675, who accepted and enjoyed the bubbles in their effervecent vino at the same time that Dom Perignon, the merry French monk from Hautvillers, was struggling to remove the blasted things.

Perhaps there's a step in one of your processes that, once skipped, would produce something even more desireable than you've got now?

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. If you're downsizing staff and cutting back on things, you probably ought to open your mind to the possibility that the changes you're making actually eliminate the erroneously assumed limits you'd been placing on things all along.

Technology, of course, comes immediately to mind.  Which jobs have you been protecting out of concern for the health and happiness of your people?  Might now be the time to automate some human processes and add a little health and happiness to your firm's bottom line?

Don't be afraid to entertain new ideas just because money is getting tight.  Use the advent of tightening purse strings to eliminate the assumptions that have prevented innovation in the past.

Was it IBM who taught a generation of sales people to "eliminate the excuses?" 

Don't Panic!!

  Spending too much time watching the stock market and not enough time getting on with it?  If you've been wondering what - if anything - you should be doing in your law practice to respond smartly to the currently slippery state of the global economy, click here and take a look at a brilliant (she said modestly!) roundtable discussion recently facilited by my friend, Dennis Kennedy.  You're sure to find some creative inspiration.

Flop heard 'round the world

It's impossible to watch the track and field events of these 2008 Olympics without pausing to wonder again at Dick Fosbury and his audacious - and innovative - conquest of the high jump event at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. 

Under nearly any circumstances, improved athletic performance is a game of hundredths of seconds, of hairsbreadths, of fractions of an ounce.  But something in young Richard Fosbury prompted him to improve his performance by leaps and bounds (no pun intended) in a single stroke that year.  One has to imagine this fledgling engineer from Medford, OR grew impatient with gradual and subtle improvement and so turned the whole concept of high jumping on its head.  (Okay, that pun was intended.) 

At the time, jumpers took off from their inside foot and swung their outside foot up and over the bar. Perhaps it was the hard sandpit landings that were required before the advent of deep foam matting that prevented jumpers from even considering a reckless head-first leap.  Or maybe it was just Fosbury's savvy redefinition of the task - from jumping over to getting over - that cleared the way for his disruptive and revolutionary innovation.

Whatever it was, it was fascinating.  Even those of us ordinarily uninterested in track and field sat glued to the TV screen in the hope of catching another view of this weird gangly kid and his goofy method.  Instead of running straight at the bar and then leaping, jumping or stepping over it, feet first and facing forward. . . Fosbury approached at an angle and threw himself headfirst and backwards over it!! While the coaches of the world shook their heads in disbelief, the Mexico City audience was absolutely captivated, shouting "Olé" as he cleared the bar each time. Fosbury cleared every height through 2.22 meters without a miss and then achieved a personal record of 2.24 meters to win the gold medal.

"Can he do that?" we'd ask.  Surely there's a rule . . . .

Well, there wasn't a rule.  But there were certainly centuries of precedent.  Is it wisdom or naivete that allows us to sweep aside centuries of "doing it this way" long enough to see a better way? 

By 1980, 13 of the 16 Olympic finalists were using the Fosbury flop.

Dream deferred

I've been exploring the possible sources of innovative thinking in law firms. Wondering where the good ideas come from. . . .why some firms can make amazing things happen. . . what causes and supports the challenge of change in an inhospitable environment.  Here's one possibility -- and why in some cases it doesn't work.

On the staff side of things, in many instances, the marketing director or CMO is best situated to drive innovation in a law firm.  It's a combination of things. 

• By nature, a good marketing person is creative and driven to avoid precedent -- it is his job, after all, to help a law firm differentiate, not conform. 
• Strong marketing conversations almost always touch on product development or packaging of services.  Both fertile breeding grounds for new thinking.
• Unlike nearly all other staff positions, the marketing executive works shoulder to shoulder with the firm's leading decision-makers. . . . working on the promotion, characterization and amplification of the very legal work they do.  Speaking truth to power on behalf of the clients' needs and market trends.
• No one keeps an eagle eye on the competition like a CMO driven to help her firm compete.
• Nearly every job description or hire order for a law firm marketing executive contains language like, "strong leadership skills," or "creative and innovative," or "capable of leading change with and through firm leaders" and the ever popular "catalyst for change."

At the same time -- or, actually, because of this charge to innovate - the marketing function is also the clearest and biggest target when it comes to resistance. Few people like to be challenged to think differently, even fewer if they happen to be lawyers.  A marketing director talking about "better, faster, cheaper" in the context of the marketplace can - if not careful - be seen by those who are quite satisfied that what they're doing is the very best, thank you very much, as an irritant at best and an in-firm terrorist at most extreme.

Ouch!  It takes an extremely self-confident -- perhaps pathologically so? - person to throw their "really great ideas" into the maw of criticism time and time again. 

So where does this wildly creative and innovative thinker turn when this situation flares?  When the CMO feels beat down and devalued by the resistance to his ideas - the very ideas for which she's paid the big bucks by the thinkers in the firm who know that fresh ideas are needed?  When the firm's leadership shuts him out for fear of criticism of themselves?  Where do you turn to salve your wounds and renew your energy to try again? 

Easy answer:  Elsewhere.

We've all seen it happen.  A law firm hires a "water walking" CMO, pays so much money it hits the internal grapevine like a bomb and then, writing a blank check for great and new stuff to happen, steps back.  Two to three years later, the CMO is:

• Spending more time building her own credentials than promoting the firm,
• Appearing in articles, pod-casts and interviews as an expert at least as frequently as the firm's lawyers,
• Cranking up firm travel expenses on the speakers circuit,
• Being photographed with movers and shakers,
• Taking. . . .mmm. . . . perhaps a little too much credit for the firm's success, and
• Launching their own independent business activities on the side.

Then begins the doom loop.  Talk in the hallways focuses on "What does she do, anyway?" and "Who does he think he is?"  While firm leadership naively scratches their collective head about the fact that it seems the exterior world values their CMO more than they do.

The CMO starts to itch.  Her willingness to invest time (personal as well as the firm's) in outside activities brings greater and greater industry recognition - a situation so out of kilter with the internal negativity it becomes intolerable.  Headhunters start to call.

Oh, did I mention few CMOs enjoy the kind of coaching from a firm leader playing the supervisor or collaborator role that would help dodge or at least pull out of this nose dive?  Meanwhile, the important driving force for effective business innovation within the firm is essentially neutralized.

Whose fault is this?  Oh, it's different in every case.  But in all likelihood, it's shared:

• The CMO has failed to bring the necessary skills and patience to the table to provoke new thinking AND enable it through firm leadership to become a reality.  The firm's reality.  Great ideas just aren't enough for success in an environment with no hierarchy and a passion for precedent. "Telling" isn't all it takes to cause great change.  You've got to "work it," build confidence in your capabilities, build alliances, demonstrate small successes if that's what it takes to get to the big ones.   
• Firm leadership has been unrealistic about what it takes for a creative person to succeed in their firm and have been too focused on "not getting anything negative on themselves" instead of digging in and taking risks to ensure success for the program into which they originally invested so much of the firm's money. Too much managing partner time is spent neutralizing partners' complaints instead of working to improve a bad situation.

As in all situations, there are extremes.  Some marketing executives are untalented self-promoting opportunists.  Some law firms are poorly managed, short-sighted and foolish in how they spend their money and their people.

But in the end, the possibility of a great catalyst and investment for innovation. . . .for improvement. . . . for energy and enthusiasm . .. and for firm success and profitability. . . is spent. And if everyone involved is lucky, one of those headhunter calls will result in a chance to try again.

Perhaps next time we'll all be a bit smarter. 

Overdue for innovation

You don’t have to look far for opportunities to apply creativity in a law practice. If you’re itching to put your risk-taking abilities to the test and try on something totally different, start by focusing on one of these 8 pressure points. You know they are already creaking at the seams. Why not charge them up with a totally
new approach before they totally collapse?

Don’t wait. . . .innovate!!
Your desk. Just look at it! If you’re like 99 and 44/100ths of the legal profession, you have either piles of files or carefully filed piles all over your office. Do you long sentimentally for the forgotten color of your carpeting as you wade each morning through the shallows of your office? How do you even keep track
of what’s going on at your desk, let alone in your client’s business? Isn’t there some other way. . . .some elegantly simple solution to this catastrophe? Who might you involve in helping to re-invent it?

(sigh) that e-mailbox. How many hours do you spend each day scrolling through the detritus in order to find any messages that really matter? How many aerobic points to you rack up each week through the mere act of sighing repeatedly about that pile of . . . . um . . . spam that has become your inbox? This is not an unsolvable puzzle. But it’s going to take some real smarts to outfox it – the kind of smarts you bring to the table.

Client communications. How can you ensure that your clients feel they have timely and ample access to you while, at the same time, staying in control of your own life? What new mechanism can you put into place that will carve out some peace. . . as well as peace of mind for you? Explore every assumption ‘til you hit on the one(s) that no longer apply!

Collections. Well, actually. . . . maybe this area isn’t so much crying out for innovation as it is for improvement. Develop a rational process and STICK TO IT with no exceptions!! Eureka, there’s an innovation: Consistency!

Meetings. With clients. With your partners. With the lawyers you supervise. Your assistant. Admit it: they are a catastrophe. A mind- and money-suck in every day. No one arrives on time. The people who show up are the wrong ones. There’s tons of talking but nothing is ever really accomplished. There has to be another way, right? Figure it out. Or, better yet, hold a meeting to figure it out. ☺ Your last!

Fees. Beyond the Billable Hour: An Anthology of Alternative Billing Methods. Win-Win Billing Strategies: Alternatives that Satisfy your Clients and You. It seems as if someone has already innovated in this area,
doesn’t it? (His name was Richard C. Reed and he wrote the book(s).) Well, if he truly had. . . successfully innovated . . . would you still be using the same old 1-hour = 1-price routine? Take the problem apart and start from scratch. For you, there must be a more right answer.

Support Staff. Perhaps we’re still thinking wa-a-a-ay too far inside the box on this one. What sort of support are we talking about? Who does what? How much of that is necessary and how much is just traditional? Is it necessarily a staff responsibility? Must he/she be physically in your office? Must *you* be physically in your office? Who says you have to have support staff at all? Oh. Yeah. That same guy who said you have to charge for your work by the hour. I see.

Business Development. Chances are, you’re over thinking this one. Nearly everyone does. Stop assuming that the best answer to the question “How can I get more work?” is the most complex one. It’s simple. Just find people who pay lawyers to do the kind of work you want to do. Better yet, (and more innovative!) find something people would LOVE to pay a lawyer to do, but they just didn’t know that lawyers did “that”. Now you’ve really got something: A lock on the market!

And now for the hard part

Maybe it's just me.  Maybe it's just the tone of the reporter and the event wasn't actually like that.  But Zach Lowe's report on the recent innovation forum held at the New York offices of Allan & Overy makes it sound like just another episode in the continuing saga of lawyer bashing.

Mr. Holman, my high school principal, was fond of sharing the classic definition of "expert."  "Drip under pressure!" he'd roar, then laugh while we figured it out. It also brings to mind the HR classic, "Don't motivate 'til you educate lest you frustrate!" All too often the law practice pundits seem to take a little bit too much glee from the opportunity to bully and bash lawyers. . . . to shame them into buying the services of this or that consultant who brandishes the latest "all-ya-gotta-do. . ." answer to what ails them.  Just pushing. . . just shaming. . . just criticizing and mocking. . . . doesn't get the critical changes made.  But it does raise the temperature in the room and set partner against partner when they get back home.

I'm here to tell you that getting the great new ideas isn't the hard part of business innovation in a law firm.  Frankly, great ideas are a dime a dozen -- as are consultants who lob them at self-selected audiences of lawyers eager to self-flagellate for business practices that obviously aren't functioning. 

The hard part comes in implementation.  We don't stand in awe of DLA-Piper's concept of world-wide pro bono.  We stand in awe - actually breathless - that such a firm could convince itself to donate the millions and millions of dollars necessary to launch and maintain New Perimeters' effort to do good in parts of the world that haven't seen "good" for a really long time.

When the College of Law Practice Management's InnovAction Awards judges bestow this year's awards it won't be because some particular creative genius thought of something really cool.  It will be because that genius and the rest of the firm saw its value, resisted the temptation to pick it apart and did the hard work to get it past the naysayers and into the world.

P.S.  You've got four more days.  The deadline for entries to the InnovAction Awards is Monday, June 2.

It's not too late - yet.

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June 2 is the absolute deadline for submission of entries for the 2008 InnovAction Awards.  If you, your law firm, or someone you know has been doing something extraordinary -- something never been done, or been done in quite this way -- go to www.innovactionaward.com to learn more and to access the simple entry form.

If selected for an award, you'll join some awesome company -- DLA Piper, Mallesons, Holland & Hart and more.  While you're checking out the entry information, click on "Hall of Fame" to read about winning entries and enjoy some helpful Q & A about how these pioneers got it done.