It might not surprise many UK professionals that the longest hours are worked by the most qualified. And all too many professionals will be familiar with ironically named ‘magic roundabout’.

Lockdown Three has eclipsed the shot in the arm news of the roll out of multiple Covid vaccines. For now, running a business is like driving a Formula 1 car racing under the safety car.

Fundamentally a law firm’s culture is created and influenced by behaviour. A positive culture results when good behaviours are reinforced, and bad behaviours are called out and dealt with in a timely and appropriate way.

Our new book is out…

Doubtless you’ve been missing our posts! We aren’t being rude or idle…. Damian and I have been writing a book.

Don’t worry, this blog isn’t another Brexit paean (or do I mean pain?).

There is a single attribute that takes many a highly intelligent and highly qualified individual to the top of the professional services world. And it’s far from obvious given the power, money and glory they command. It isn’t which school they went to, or which university they graduated from. Nor is it their social status, or lack of it.

In his recent book, ’12 Rules for Life’, author Jordan Petersen discusses the drivers behind men’s need to succeed and prosper in ‘male regulated dominance hierarchies’. One of those drivers, he suggests, is to attract a female partner.

There is nothing management gurus like better than rubbishing the theories of their fellow gurus. One debate that encourages the taking of entrenched positions more than most is how we best structure the workplace.

Good news or bad, triumph or disaster, there is one thing you can guarantee; a lazy reporter shoves a microphone towards their interviewee/victim and asks, ‘How do you feel?’ As often as not they get the supremely unhelpful answer, ‘I’m lost for words.’

In the Sixties, social scientists were shocked to discover that labour-saving devices were a con.

Washing machines and tumble dryers worked. But they didn’t save labour. Research showed that American housewives were spending as much time on domestic chores as housewives in Bulgaria. This led to much scratching of heads, given the lack of labour saving devices behind the Iron Curtain.

Eventually the scientists thought they had found a culprit. Advertising.

We’re brand mentoring for a London law firm at the moment. And during our research we came across a fascinating insight into the psyche of lawyers.

Professor Martin Seligman and his team; ‘tested the entire entering class of the Virginia Law School in 1990 with a variant of the optimism-pessimism test.  The pessimists outperformed more optimistic students on the traditional measures of achievement, such as grade point averages and law journal success.’

In other words, pessimists make better lawyers.

Apple and Nissan have a business fundamental in common. They both recognise that in a consumer society, durability is bad for business. Of course, this doesn’t mean their products are unreliable, rather that they focus on innovation. Nissan’s ad slogan Innovation that excites, roughly translates as we excite the consumers desire to replace their three-year-old Nissan with the new updated model.

Which is why the death of Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA gave me pause for thought.

Many of us will, at some stage in our careers, have found ourselves involved in proving the business ‘law’ that, ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.’

The law was devised by Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson, who started life as a naval historian, but found fame with his humorous observations on the world of business. He launched his theory in 1955 in the Economist, as an observation on the ever-expanding nature of bureaucracy, the continually rising headcount and related costs.

Marshall McLuhan is famous for the observation that, ‘the medium is the message.’ In other words, the role a medium plays in culture can change the meaning of the message. For example, the BBC is believed by many to be a more credible source of information than Fox News.

The phrase became something of a cliché in the hands of Sixties Mad Men, but it’s worthy of a reappraisal in the context of the digital revolution and social media.

NPD is a minefield. It’s often entered because senior management has spotted that the innovation pipeline is empty, or bunged up with sure-fire flops. And once you’re in the minefield, if the stats are to be believed, you have a 9 in 10 chance of failure, so its good news that minefield is metaphorical!

Problems are by definition difficult to solve. If they were easy there would be simple answers.

And it’s often the case that the harder the problem the more failed solutions they accumulate around them, which in turn add to the apparent complexity of finding the answer.