Increased outsourcing of “decision analysis” is one of the breakthrough ideas for 2009 in Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, Feb. 2009 at 38. The authors predict that third-party providers will “structure decision alternatives, analyze data, and recommend or even take courses of action.” They give as examples assistance in significant…
While on vacation, and musing over my 20-year career consulting to general counsel, I nominate these ten management changes as the most significant. For the sake of the hot-stove league, I have ranked them in declining order of importance. Go ahead, e-mail me your critiques and your nominees! Financial accountability…
Many managers who believe in some practice find it almost impossible to imagine that another manager, equally smart and experienced, disdains that process and advocates the opposite. It is true, nevertheless, that defensible arguments lodge against every practice, that someone can devise reasons why any practice ought to prevail or…
Having previously gathered my posts that recommend how to do something, in fact 44 somethings, I realized I have not updated that collection since Dec. 3, 2007 (See my post of Nov. 27, 2007: how-to’s with 23 references; and Dec. 3, 2007: how-to’s with 21 references.). In the intervening 16…
I have skewered “best practices” many times, yet haven’t pulled together all my arguments against them (See my post of March 4, 2008: three thoughts against best practices.). My list of counterpoints now numbers seven. You can’t duplicate the context of someone else’s practice. All law department practices are embedded…
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) “marked a revolution in English letters by being descriptive rather than prescriptive.” Unlike the efforts of the Académie Française to fix meanings and pronunciations of French words, Johnson’s different goal was to describe the state of English as it was spoken then…
Having introduced my set-cost offerings for benchmarking projects and for unlimited phone calls, I recently added a third for law department retreats (See my post of Feb. 25, 2009: benchmarking; Feb. 26, 2009: phone calls; and March 8, 2009: retreats). This fourth offering, again on a fixed rate, is to…
Is there a way to compare whether Company A in telecommunications is better than Company B in energy on lawyers per billion of revenue? A reports a benchmark figure of 8.2 while B reports 5.6, but the industries have very different profiles of lawyers per billion (See my post of…
An earlier post explains how law departments can describe their management initiatives by combinations of two attributes portrayed on a scatter-gram (See my post of March 11, 2009: management initiatives on double axes.). Mere description of attributes has limited value to general counsel, however, so we need a way to…
We can describe management initiatives in law departments by various attributes, picking two at a time, and depict the intersection as a scatter-gram. Take mentoring programs. Two ways to describe a program would be duration and investment. In one law department the mentoring program has been underway for 36 months…