Archive for year: 2012

High Altitude Leadership:  What the World’s Most Forbidding Peaks Teach Us About Success (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership)

By Chris Warner and Don Schmincke

 

High Altitude Leadership, published in 2007, draws on observations made during mountaineering expeditions (including Mount Everest ascents).  Through teaching stories, the authors identify eight dangers that climbers and business leaders face.  Although the observations are phrased in business terms, they’re certainly applicable to legal practice as well.

 

1.  Fear of Death. You might understand immediately why a mountain climber would fear death and how that fear could create paralysis and, ultimately, cause exactly the feared result.  In business (and in the practice of law), fear stops action.  To avoid falling victim to this danger, accept the prospect of failure and act anyway. I envision this as the action that allowed some law firms to avoid the worst of the Great Recession by seeing the problems early and moving to mitigate those circumstances rather than becoming paralyzed by the fear of what might happen.

2.  Selfishness. The authors analogize business selfishness to the precarious situation created when a climber eager to make an ascent ignores warning of danger and by doing so threatens the safety of an entire team.  In business terms, the authors explain that selfishness produces DUD behavior:  Dangerous, Unproductive, and Dysfunctional.  The solution?  Crafting a compelling saga that speaks to purpose and mission and creates the passion that will overcome selfishness.

 

3.  Tool Seduction. Tools – whether ropes and oxygen to assist in mountain climbing or leadership and business development systems – are important.  Overreliance on tools, however, produces people without the foundational skills necessary to survive.  When I was a child, my parents made sure I could tell time with an analog watch before permitting me to wear a digital watch.  The principle here is similar, as is the solution:  learn the underlying skill and how to use the tools wisely. Social media, for example, is just networking with the use of some new tools.

 

4.  Arrogance. Although more than 13,000 people have attempted Mount Everest, 73% failed to reach the summit and 208 died in the process.  Warner and Schmincke claim that arrogance always lurks behind failure, showing up in poor planning, poor execution, or the belief that ordinary rules are inapplicable.  Humility tempers the ego and avoids failure. Where have you observed arrogance vs. humility in the legal field over the last five years?

 

5.  Lone Heroism. Those who refuse needed help, who really believe that “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself,” are suffering from lone heroism.  Warner recounts the story of a climber desperately wants to make an ascent the purist way, without oxygen, even though his body was shutting down.  In business, lone heroes refuse good advice and hamstring talented team members.  Developing partnership and allowing partners to take the lead when appropriate avoids lone hero syndrome.  (As a sidenote, lone heroism — which I call “long ranger syndrome” — slows the progress of would-be rainmakers who refuse help and guidance.)

 

6.  Cowardice. Just as fear and failure / death stops forward motion, cowardice keeps climbers and business leaders stuck in place.  They may unenthusiastically continue work on a project knowing it’s doomed, or they may fail to uncover a weak or arrogant member of the team because someone might criticize them.  The solution, of course, is developing a sense o bravery, which is encouraged by an atmosphere in which everyone is expected to speak the truth and to admit to problems as step one toward correcting them.

 

7.  Comfort. The best climbers and the best leaders are comfortable being uncomfortable.  Sure, it’s easier to climb a mountain or lead in rosy times.  But strong leaders know how to persevere even in unfavorable circumstances — and they know that sometimes perseverance means stepping back when changed circumstances make a strategy infeasible.  Choosing to step into calculated risk may be uncomfortable, but it’s also how progress gets made.

 

8.  Gravity. Even carefully laid plans sometimes fail due to erroneous assumptions, brand new obstacles, or others’ failure to adhere to commitments.  Bringing skill to climbing and to business will avoid many problems, but challenges are sometimes unavoidable.  High altitude leaders recognize the role of luck: sometimes you can do everything right and fail anyway.  Just ask those who suffered through the law firm layoffs o 2008-2009.

 

 

The analogy of mountain climbing is surprisingly applicable to business, as the authors note:

 

“On big peaks, we tell clients that the first mistake they made was joining the expedition.  They are now in an environment where things can go terribly wrong very quickly.  If they are going to make it home alive, they have to be more disciplined, more giving and more humbled than ever before.  Everyone has to scan the horizon.  Everyone has to examine themselves and each other for signs of weakness.  Everyone is responsible for their own safety and the safety of everyone else.  They have to prevent the small mistakes from adding up to a catastrophe.”

 

 

High Altitude Leadership is a compelling book with a strong business message. We’ve all seen the pull that business places on the practice of law in recent years, and High Altitude Leadership will be helpful for lawyers who are seeing the business side of practice in a new light.

Newsletters offer a way to stay in contact with a large number of contacts easily, consistently, and productively. Newsletters focus on substantive information, and assuming you’ve defined your areas of practice carefully enough, your content will be valuable to recipients and therefore welcome. Better yet, if your topics are timely and if you include an appropriate call to action, you may even receive requests for assistance on matters related to your writing.

Most firms have multiple newsletters tailored to their various areas of practice, often with multiple contributors. Whether you’re responsible for coordinating the content for your firm’s (or team’s) newsletter or you’re a sole practitioner with soup-to-nuts responsibility for the newsletter, you’ve probably had more than a few hair-raising moments wondering how you can possibly get it all done. (And if your firm doesn’t have a newsletter, I can virtually guarantee that fear is the top reason why not.)

So, let’s make newsletters simple. These five tips and resources will reduce the time and angst required to produce a newsletter that delivers results.

1. Repurpose presentations and articles you have written for publication elsewhere into newsletter content. Shorter articles tend to be more useful, especially in electronic newsletters, so you can often get several issues of content from a single article.

2. Keep a list of generic questions your clients ask and turn the responses into newsletter articles. You must make certain that no one interprets your article as legal advice for them (check your local ethics rules to be sure you’re in compliance) but with appropriate language, you can easily create useful information based on frequently asked questions.

3. Use social media to “listen” for topics you should cover. You may find news or op-ed pieces you’d like to address, and by catching hot topics, you’re increasing the chance that your readers will be interested.

4. Include the “so what” for news. It’s hard to offer unique breaking news that isn’t being covered by journalists, bloggers, and other newsletters, but you can one-up many other reports by including some analysis and commentary of the news. In other words, let others handle the details of who, what when, where, and how. You focus on the why and so what.

5. Source your content from a good outside vendor. In the past, I would not have recommended using pre-written articles because they’re generally easy to identify a mile away. Generic and often not written for the audience to whom they’re sent, bad pre-written articles that are simply dropped into a template will not help your marketing efforts and may indeed inflict terminal damage.

But I recently learned about a content provider that offers well-written articles that can (and really should) be edited so that they offer good information with your unique voice and perspective.

Insight in Motion, an offering from Amicus Media, offers articles written by lawyers on topics currently including estate planning, family law, bankruptcy, immigration, and personal injury. (I’ve urged them to include intellectual property soon — we’ll see!) I’ve reviewed the articles and I’m impressed with the information presented and the way the content is presented.

Offering two levels of subscriptions based on the number of legal articles you need each month and number of practice areas, Insight in Motion provides a “keep it simple” approach at a reasonable price. Even better, the company will create a customized newsletter template and send your newsletters if you’d like. The content can even be published on your firm’s website or blog.

I took a thorough tour of the system and asked the same questions you likely would, and I’m impressed. If your practice falls within the areas that Insight in Motion covers and you’ve been holding off on creating a newsletter, this may be your golden opportunity.

For more information on Insight in Motion, visit this page.

And in case you’re wondering: no, I will not receive any affiliate fees or other incentive if you enroll in Insight in Motion.

Which of these tips can you use to make your newsletter strategy simpler?

Tactical Transparency:  How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media To Maximize Value And Build Their Brand
By Shel Holtz and John C. Havens

In 2008, musician Dave Carroll was waiting to deplane from a United Airlines flight when he heard another passenger say, “They’re throwing guitars out there!” He looked out to see baggage handlers tossing expensive musical instruments, breaking his $3500 guitar. After getting runaround from United, he finally decided to put his story to music and release a video trilogy on YouTube and his website. After four days, over a million people had watched the video. United’s stock declined 10%, losing about $180 million in value, and the company finally paid Carroll’s claim for the damage. (For more on the story and its aftermath, see this article from Fast Company.)

 

We’ve probably all seen the emails, watched the videos, or heard the audios in which a clueless or uncaring company drives a customer to fury — fury that produces a social media backlash. In the old days, we’d have been limited to telling a few friends (studies show that on average we tell seven others about negative experiences and tell only three about positive ones), and they’d tell a few friends, and the word would get out…Slowly, and in limited distribution. Today, though, as Tactical Transparency describes, feedback can spread like wildfire, and corporations’ only choice is to how to handle that feedback.

Tactical Transparency opens with one story about Sony’s having launched a blog purportedly written by a boy named Charlie who wanted to help his friend Jeremy get a PSP for Christmas. Readers quickly discovered that the blog was the creation of a marketing agency and lambasted it as lame and offensive, though Sony denied the deception until it finally had to own up to it. A second story describes a blogger who wrote a series of posts describing his problems with Dell’s computer service and technical support. His odyssey was followed by hundreds and Dell’s reputation (and stock price) suffered, until Dell saw the light and launched its own blog, Direct2Dell, which talked openly about problems and worked to resolve them. Unlike Sony, Dell’s reputation improved as a result.

 

The message: people — your customers and clients and those considering doing business with you will talk, and you’d better listen and respond. Though the facts are considerably different, this message is illustrated in the legal community through the many blog sites and posts that tracked layoffs last year and accused firms of conducting “stealth layoffs”. It’s continuing now in discussions about which firms are cutting salaries and how much. There’s been much speculation that some firms will be impacted by reduced loyalty from lawyers who watched colleagues sent packing and from law students who take the lessons of the last two years as an indication that they’d better keep their options open and trust nothing. And it goes both ways, as witnessed by lawyers and summer associates who’ve left their own career-tanking tracks in unflattering emails that can be sent around the world with just a few clicks.

 

The authors of Tactical Transparency suggest that the new reality of transparency has arisen thanks to the twin trends of declining trust in “business as usual” and the rising public scrutiny of business due to social media. Tactical Transparency goes to the heart of the matter, examining the practical steps a business can take to be “sincerely but prudently” transparent with its stakeholders about its leaders; its employees; its values; its culture; the results of its business practices; and its business strategy. The authors identify four characteristics of transparency, which may be applied in varying degrees to meet varying needs: Objectivity, Purpose, Esteem (for your stakeholders and your customers) and Navigation, which neatly form the acronym OPEN.

 

Tactical Transparency discusses transparency in a variety of contexts, many of which are applicable to lawyers, but I’d highlight one as being particularly critical: relationship orientation. In other words, at least in part due to the rise of social media, business must look at the clients or customers in the context of relationships rather than one-off transactions. This is certainly a key concept for lawyers whose clients may have more than one legal need that they (or their firms) might meet. Tactical Transparency recommends eight steps to design relationship-focused marketing:

1. Get specific. Make sure your comments connect with this potential client and ensure that you understand his or her specific situation.
2. Make small talk big. Lawyers sometimes wonder how much to ask in the context of growing a relationship.  Small talk is the starting point.
3. Make your pitch interactive. Don’t tell a potential client how you’ll solve the problem.  Have a conversation about possible approaches and solicit input.
4. Give a call to action. This is marketing language for requesting a next step, and it can be as simple as offering to sit down and discuss how some event or legal development might impact your potential client’s situation and how you might help.
5. Write down a connection point. The authors suggest that you demonstrate that you listened and tried to help with something not directly connected to a sale.  If that’s not applicable (because sometimes your conversations will be quite sharply focused on the legal needs), simply demonstrate that you listened intently and how you’ve connected your background or approach to the potential client’s needs.
6. Practice good timing. There’s an art to finding how to move a conversation forward without pushing it.  Learn and apply that art.
7. Follow up.
8. Partnering versus closing. Think of working together with a client to achieve identified objectives rather than landing a new client.  The distinction may be subtle, but the transparency you demonstrate in placing your focus on the service to this specific client will bolster your relationship.  Moreover, in my experience, it’s also likely to increase your willingness to engage rainmaking activities.

Although the key lesson I draw from Tactical Transparency has to do with business development, the book is wide-ranging in its discussion of social media and its applicability to business. If you participate in any kind of social media or if you’re considering stepping into the world of social media, this book will provide plenty of brain candy as you think about building your reputation with new social platforms.

Clients often tell me that they socialize with friends and acquaintances who would make wonderful clients and/or referral sources. And yet, no one wants to be that awful person who’s always shilling for business from social contacts, missing the “leave me alone” vibes.

But what a waste to nod along with a zipped lip when you might be able to benefit your contact and yourself by bringing business into the conversation. We’ve all had the experience of wishing we could turn up some help with a thorny issue, and if you can offer the help, shouldn’t you?

The truth is that it’s easier to stay silent and avoid any chance of giving offense. But what if you could briefly share what you do and suggest that you might be able to help, then turn back to pure socializing?

Mastering that art will benefit you, in getting a new opportunity, and benefit your contact, in finding a useful resource. So, how can you talk business at a social gathering without risk?

 

1. Discover the opportunity. When you hear something that makes you think you might be able to help, listen for whatever your contact is sharing.
2. Share your observation. Whether you’re talking to your best friend or a complete stranger, there’s a good chance that she doesn’t know or hasn’t realized that what she’s discussing has any overlap with your practice.
   
   Your comment can be as quick as, “You know, I handle issues like that for my clients all the time.” Or in a referral-related setting, perhaps you’d say, “It sounds like there’s some overlap in the kinds of clients we serve (or issues we address).”
3. Watch the reaction. You may get an unmistakeable “tell me more” signal that invites you to proceed with business conversation right then. Or you might get a polite, “Oh, is that so.”
4. Offer to meet at another time to talk about your shared interests. Even if the person with whom you’re talking wants to go into a deeper business conversation on the spot, I suggest that you make an appointment to meet at a later time for that conversation.
   
   By doing so, you’ll separate business from social conversation, avoid having someone overhear a private conversation, and eliminate the risk of offering free, off-the-cuff advice. Even if you agree to step outside the party or to move to your host’s home office, be sure to create a physical separation.
   
   A simple invitation is sufficient, such as “This isn’t really the time or place, but I’d love to talk with you and see if I might be able to help with that.” You’ll gauge your next steps (exchanging cards, setting an appointment to talk again, or moving to another location) based on your contact’s response.
5. Approach the business conversation as an extension of a social relationship. Even though you’ve moved to separate the business context from the social, your conversation will likely retain some familiarity. At the same time, your business relationship must exist apart from a social relationship, and it’s likely up to you to set the appropriate professional boundaries.

As you move into summer socializing (whether that’s now or in six months from now), look for opportunities to spring from pure social contacts into business, and look with a light touch. When done deftly, you’ll find that all of your relationships benefit as a result.