The Only Competitive Advantage in Professional Services

by Coert Visser 2006

from Managementsite, 2006

Let's proceed with a question about marketing. Many professionals don't seem to pay much attention to marketing. But you say marketing is of crucial importance for any professional. Why is that so?

RW: The better you are at marketing, the more control you have over your career. If you are really good at developing business, then you can work for only the clients you find interesting and can care about, and only on the type of work that you find fulfilling and challenging. The weaker you are at winning business, the more you are forced into accepting business from anyone who pays you, whether you respect them or not, and whether the work is enjoyable, developmental or meaningful to you. I don't ever want to be stuck in that situation. I don't think that having to work for anyone who pays because I am desperate for cash sounds like much fun!

People think that marketing is about getting more business. It's not. Marketing is about getting better business -- the work that engages your enthusiasm and allows you to serve clients you like. The better you are at marketing, the more you can afford to say no to things that do not help your career. Marketing is not something you do for your firm -- it's what you owe to yourself. If your readers want more detail on these points, I have written about them many times.

Alas, it is easier to get hired for things you already know how to do, so if you are not careful, you end up milking your existing skills instead of building them. You can have it all -- it is easier to get hired for things you care about by people you care for, and that way you are more likely to get premium fees, too! Your clients will treat you better and give you a better work experience if they think you care about more than just the money they give you. Recently, I wrote four articles which explore the themes of marketing as sincerity. I hope I have been consistent over the years!

I think you have. I like what you say about the essence of marketing. That it is not a matter of just getting more business and money but rather getting more of the right business. While we're on the subject of money, I'd like to focus a bit more on that. Writers like Alfie Kohn and Jeffrey Pfeffer have criticised the fact that many managers focus on financial incentives as the most important means to improve organisational and individual performance. This trend is more and more common, even in the not-for-profit sector. What role do you think money plays in improving individual and organisational performance?

RW: What Kohn and Pfeffer have to say is very important, and everyone should be aware of their work. Another important writer is Jon Katzenbach who recently wrote a book on the importance of pride in motivating people and getting things done. The trouble with financial incentives is not that they are weak tools -- the problem is that they are too powerful and distract attention away from any other factor or source of motivation. They are very blunt, unsophisticated tools that people rely on too much. If you say to someone "Do this and I will pay you" it always ends up coming across as "Don't do it for any inherent meaning, purpose or value, just do it for the money." And the minute people start doing things with no commitment other than to get paid, they do it less well, not better.

The trouble with financial incentives is not that they are weak tools -- the problem is that they are too powerful and distract attention away from any other factor or source of motivation.

The problem is compounded by the fact that it is impossible to include all possible outcomes in the incentive scheme. You end up being required to reward people if they achieve the things included in the incentive scheme, even if they have failed to do other important things that are essential for the organisation's success. An obvious and common example is having incentives for individual performance. Where these exist, people will always omit teamwork, but since you have promised an incentive, you have to pay them anyway. None of this means that you don't pay more to those who contribute the most. It just means that you must have a reward system which is based on qualitative judgments, not explicit quantitative incentives.

It is also important to note that reward systems ARE good at rewarding performance -- they are just not good at creating it. To help people achieve more, it is insufficient just to say "Get there and I will pay you." That assumes that the only barrier to performance is motivation. However, there are many other reasons people don't or cannot perform at a higher level. Maybe they don't know how. If that is the case, no amount of incentive will change things. As I tried to show in my article, you raise performance by managing people, not just by creating incentive schemes.

I think that is a great article. It is the one in which you talked about how, years ago, you had just started your final year at University of Southern Queensland as a student and felt you weren't really performing too well. You described how a senior professor walked by your room and talked with you informally for just a very short time and managed to really get you going in the right direction. Very impressive! What's the essence for you in what happened in that conversation?

RW: There were many lessons, but the key comes down to this: like a good parent, my senior professor was able to show both a disciplined commitment to standards like "Come on, you can do it" while simultaneously being on my side and actually helping me. This duality has often been recognised. The people who wrote the book back in the 1960s about The Managerial Grid called it having both a task focus and a people focus. The authors of Built to Last called it avoiding the tyranny of the either/or. My friend Peter Friedes wrote a book called The 2R Manager where the 2 R's stood for requiring and relating. It's all the same idea. The fact that it's a common thought does not make it easy to do. I used to think that I was getting the balance correct by being demanding on some days, and supportive on others, averaging out -- I hoped -- to a balanced approach. Of course, this is not the message. If you do it that way, all you end up with are schizophrenic people who never know how you are going to behave. The real art, which you have to learn with your kids as well as your employees, is how to be both demanding and supportive simultaneously. It's not that easy to learn if you are not a natural. It takes lots of practice.

Talking about being a natural ... a popular perspective in the field of human performance development is the strengths perspective. The people from Gallup for instance have argued and shown that focusing on strengths is critical for achieving career success. They say you have to identify your talents and complement them with skills and knowledge so that they become strengths. I understand you put the focus more on interest and passion, don't you?

RW: I like the Gallup material very much, and think they have made a significant contribution. To the extent that you are just comparing strengths and weaknesses, I think they are entirely correct that the focus should be on building on strengths, not on correcting weaknesses. However, they would be the first to say there are also other dimensions that determine career success.

My research -- and my own life experience -- suggests that if you were really to examine the difference between who succeeds and who only does okay, what you would find would not be a difference in abilities, strengths, IQ, interpersonal skills or any other kind of capability. Instead, my work suggests that the only competitive advantage is something variously described as energy, excitement, enthusiasm, engagement, passion, drive, discipline, determination or ambition. Those are not all the same thing, but I think they are all facets of the same glittering diamond -- a state of mind that says: "I'm going to try, and fail, and try again, and just get somewhere!"

If you accept that it is the lifelong willingness to keep trying that determines success, in spite of strengths or weaknesses, then it raises an interesting question. Are you just born with this frame of mind, or can good managers create it in others? I'm not completely sure of the whole answer, but I do know that bad managers can and do destroy enthusiasm, passion and excitement. I think the best managers can not only "get out of the way" but can also find a way to uncover and channel the enthusiasm that most people want to bring to their work. Finally, I think that good managers have to have the courage to ask employees or colleagues who do not feel passionate about the organisation's work to leave. There is nothing more certain to suppress energy and enthusiasm than being forced to work with others who do not show it. Because of all of this, management is not easy, but it is crucially important.

I guess this is linked to your point of view that management is mainly a matter of attitudes and principles, more so than a matter of knowledge, intelligence and experience. Why are attitudes and principles so important in your opinion?

RW: A key to my thinking is that whenever I am trying to think through what would work on other people, I always begin by asking "What would work on me?" In this situation, the question becomes "What kind of manager would have the most impact on me, and cause me to stretch, raise my game and perform at the highest levels?" My answer is that before I care about the manager's skills, I would want to know why he or she is trying to get me to do something.

If I believe he or she is trying to help me, then I will accept challenges, listen to input and, maybe, even accept some criticism. But first, I need to believe that the manager is on my side. If I believe that you, the manager, are not here to help me but are trying to get me to do more, or different things only to make you, the manager, look good, or to help the company, then I will listen a lot less, only grudgingly accept criticism, and will be unlikely to be excited. In spite of what many managers think, only a very few people will do things for the greater glory of the company or because I buy in to some institutional vision. It can happen, but it's not very common. So, above all else, managers must be able to convince those they manage that the manager has the right attitude -- that the manager is focused on helping the subordinate achieve more. Notice that this is not meant to be idealistic. The manager's goal is to get me to raise my game and perform more, so that the organisation can win and the manager can look good. There's nothing wrong with the manager having those goals, but that's not the reason I'm going to try hard.

The trick of managing is getting people to do things for themselves that turn out to help the organisation. And if I believe you motives are pure -- you are really trying to help -- I will forgive you some poor skills, some weak language or occasional wrong actions. When it comes to winning my co-operation, your attitudes as a manager matter more than your skills.

Many of our readers are interested in the topics of managing change and executing strategy successfully. These require buy-in from the employees. How do senior executives demonstrate leadership while still letting good initiatives bubble-up from the workforce?

RW: As I have written previously, you can choose to manage the WHAT, the WHY and the HOW -- what the organisation is trying to do, why it is a worthwhile thing to do, and how it can be done. The secret to effectiveness, I believe is that management needs to be very clear about the WHAT -- that means removing too many dreams, and setting do-able, achievable targets. If everyone is completely clear about what the organisation is trying to accomplish, then it is possible to delegate decisions and get hundreds or thousands of people to do the right thing as they do their work. If management has been vague -- or has exaggerated or misrepresented what it really is aiming for -- then what results is confusion. People need management to be clear, consistent and to practice what they preach -- otherwise they don't really know what they should be doing.

The second thing that management needs to be good at is providing a meaningful reason WHY the goals that have been set are worth striving for. Management must be convincing that there is a worthwhile purpose to what the organisation is trying to achieve. If people do not agree with the purpose, they will still come to work, but they will only act in "compliance" with the work rules -- what they must do. This is not enough. If the organisation is to excel at its purpose, people in the organisation must accept that there is a valid reason to struggle, to solve problems, to deal with difficulties, collaborate with others, and all the other little and big things that come up every day.

And, of course, make money for the shareholders is a valid reason, but might fail the test of being a source of great motivation for the thousands who work in the organisation. It's a valid goal, but it's not a very motivating purpose. If you want me to do the things that make the shareholders rich, give me a reason that *I* can believe in to do those things. Tell me what it means to me. Because of this, the most effective managers are those who actually have ideals and principles that other people also believe in and want to follow.

For example, if you say you believe there is a morally correct way to treat customers, and I believe that you believe it, it is more likely to "get me on the hook" than saying it will make the shareholders rich. It turns out, from research that I have done, that the managers who are seen by their people to believe in something -- to have an ideology -- actually make the most money. If a manager has been effective in managing the WHAT and the WHY, he or she does not have to be too specific on the HOW. The rest of the organisation can be trusted to solve problems, and you can tap into the creativity and strategic problem solving of everyone -- and make a lot of money this way!

I'd like to get back to the word strategy once more. Some cultures don't seem to value strategy as much as others, leaving them to react rather than "pro-act". What is the value of strategic thinking in your opinion?

RW: I am not a fan of Grand strategic thinking either for individuals or for organisations. Too frequently, this just results in identifying dreams and visions which change nothing. However, I do believe that every person and every company must and should do something each and every three months, to build for the future. If we do not invest in our future, we will fail to adapt as the world around us changes. So, on a regular basis, it is necessary to ask "what can I/we try next, as an experiment that will make things better and get us more of what we want?" Most innovation fails, but individuals and organisations that don't innovate die. The key is to keep trying something new, making small incremental investments as a regular part of the way you live. It's the difference between strategic thinking (about which I am sceptical) and regular strategic behaviours, which I support.

I like that way of putting it. As a final question ... what are the small incremental steps forward you are trying to accomplish yourself right now. Would you like to share that with our readers?

Very slowly, after 10 years of focusing exclusively on professional businesses, I am experimenting with expanding my scope to other kinds of companies and organisations. I was frightened before about doing this, because I didn't want to become just one more generalist consultant who did a little bit of everything.

But, I calculated that, at age 34, I can afford to broaden out a little. So, I have just done my first piece of work with a non-profit organisation in the social sector, and also some strategy work with a manufacturing company. Luckily for me, my thoughts and ideas seem to apply in those new areas, but I am going to proceed with caution. No over-night revolutions, just steady innovation and continual learning -- I hope!

Coert Visser is a consultant, coach and trainer using a positive change approach. This approach is focused on simply helping individuals, teams and organisations to make progress in the direction of their own choice. Coert wrote many articles and a few books.

A Natural Manager (and Free Podcasts)

Today I have posted on my website my new article A Natural Manager, a description of Jerry Labbate, a young man who, without formal training, understands and applies the core principles of managing professionals.

Jerry's story is also the lead episode in my new free (audio) podcast series, which is made up 15 episodes (roughly 20-minutes each) entitled MANAGING PROFESSIONALS: ATTITUDES, SKILLS & BEHAVIOURS.

The first 4 episodes are now available on my website, and a new episode will be added each week.

The previous series of 14 podcasts on MARKETING PROFESSIONAL SERVICES is still available on the website.

New Free Podcast Series on Managing

As promised (or threatened) I have posted on my website today the first 4 episodes of my 15-part podcast series, entitled MANAGING PROFESSIONALS: ATTITUDES, SKILLS & BEHAVIOURS.

Each week, a new episode (approximately 20 minutes each) will be posted.

The previous series of 14 podcasts on MARKETING PROFESSIONAL SERVICES is still available for download.

Are Law Firms Manageable?

After spending 10 years saying that all professions are similar and can learn from each other, I'm now ready to make a concession: Law firms are different.

The ways of thinking and behaving that help lawyers excel in their profession may be the very things that limit what they can achieve as firms. Management challenges occur not in spite of lawyers' intelligence and training, but because of them.

Among the ways that legal training and practice keep lawyers from effectively functioning in groups are

• problems with trust;
• difficulties with ideology, values, and principles;
• professional detachment;
• and unusual approaches to decision making.

If firms cannot overcome these inherent tendencies, they may not be able to deliver on the goals and strategies they say they pursue.

The problem of trust

Much current practice in firm governance, organisation, and (not least) compensation comes from the fact that partners vigorously defend their rights to autonomy and individualism, well beyond what is common in other professions. There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

However, as major corporations consolidate their work among a smaller number of firms, domestically and internationally, they expect that firms will serve them with effective cross-office and cross-disciplinary teams. Firms are vigorously responding to this with a stampede of lateral hires, mergers, and acquisitions. Their goal is to create big organisations offering many disciplines, locations, and cultures.

The unanswered -- actually, barely asked -- question is whether these firms can shift from a managerial approach, based on partner autonomy, to new approaches that can create a well-coordinated set of team players. Is the tradition of autonomy at the heart of a partner's identity, or can it change?

In addition to fighting vigorously to preserve their autonomy, lawyers are professional sceptics: They are selected, trained, and hired to be pessimistic and to spot flaws. To protect their clients, they place the worst possible construction on the outcome of any idea or proposal, and on the motives, intentions, and likely behaviours of those they are dealing with. As Tony Sacker, a solicitor in the United Kingdom, says: "I am paid to have a nasty, suspicious mind."

Lawyers carry this view into their dealings with their own partners. It is hard to unbundle which is the cause and which is the effect, but the combination of a desire for autonomy and high levels of scepticism make most law firms low-trust environments.

Recently, I was advising a firm on its compensation system. They didn't like my recommendations. Finally, one of the partners said, "Richard, all your recommendations are based on the assumption that we trust each other and trust our executive or compensation committees. We don't. Give us a system that doesn't require us to trust each other!"

A former managing partner with whom I have discussed this says, "It's not that I don't trust my partners. They're good people, mostly. It's that I don't want to have to trust them. Why give up any degree of control over your own affairs if you don't have to?"

Actually, a low-trust environment has plenty of unfortunate consequences -- and they are readily observable in many law firms:

• Initiatives that depend on teamwork and joint efforts will rarely be implemented well, if at all. People may show up to a practice group meeting and help develop a joint plan, but they rarely feel mutually committed to or accountable for the group's decisions. When lawyers cannot depend on their colleagues to live up to commitments made in these meetings, they give themselves permission to have a similar attitude, and the situation spirals downward.
• When a firm's prevailing atmosphere is one of competition, not collaboration, partners rarely make sacrifices for the good of the firm. For example, they will be reluctant to take on managerial roles that might require them to limit their full-time practices, for fear that their partners will not treat them equitably when the time comes for them to re-enter full-time practice.
• There is low tolerance for ceding power or influence to practice group or firm leadership. The result is that even in the largest firms, executive authority can be so severely limited as to be meaningless. Decisions are made slowly, if not avoided altogether.
• Committees proliferate to address all topics, large and small. They are designed not only to ensure extensive participation, but also to put in place checks and balances intended to circumscribe the ability of any individual (or group) to decide anything on behalf of the firm. This may have the virtue of being democratic, but it is a primitive form of democracy that requires everyone to be involved in every decision. It both slows down decision making and unnecessarily distracts from other, more productive tasks.
• There is a drive to seemingly objective formula-based compensation systems. These serve only to entice partners into gaming the system through hoarding work and bickering over origination credits in order to look good in the official statistics. Partners constantly ask, "What's in the compensation formula?" and they do only those things that are. As a result, many behaviours necessary for the firm's success cannot be enforced, because they are not in the formula. Firm leaders have bemoaned this situation for decades, but few have found a way to solve it.
• Most important, absence of trust may be a significant contributing factor to the extremely short-term orientations of many law firms. If partners don't believe the firm will remember or value their contributions to future success, why would they make any investment that they may not ultimately get credit for?

As one of my clients -- a former managing partner at a high-profile firm -- observed about many law firms he knew:

"Most partners were recognised and rewarded for being the smartest person in the class or the most accomplished. They have rarely experienced or understood the power of succeeding as part of a larger group or team. Their focus tends to be selfish and self-serving, even narcissistic. The result is that the firm resources are squandered and poorly used, clients don't get the best lawyers assigned to their files, and firms are less profitable. This selfishness also leads to a short-sighted approach to decision making that inhibits long-range success because investments of time or money that don't yield immediate results are rarely made."

Scepticism about ideology, values, and principles

The single biggest source of trust in an organisation occurs when everyone can be depended upon to act in accordance with a commonly held, strictly observed set of principles. Examples of such principles are "Our clients' interests always come first; if we serve our clients well, our own success will follow" and "We have no room for those who put their personal interests ahead of the interests of the firm and its clients." (Both of these, by the way, are from Goldman Sachs.)

It is important to note that commercial benefits do not come simply from believing in or encouraging these principles but from actually achieving an organisation where partner behaviour is always consistent with them. When this is the case, less time is wasted in internal negotiations and posturing, strategies are implemented, and true teamwork results. Partners allow others to make decisions on their behalf or refer work to each other across the boundaries of practice groups and location because they can be confident that the other person will make decisions using the same values and principles that they would themselves use.

Law firms appear unable to achieve this level of ideological consistency. They will buy into principles -- firms can have very high ideals as long as they remain ideals -- but they have difficulty with the concept of enforcement. Firms are seemingly willing to adopt strategies and statements of values and mission, but are usually unwilling to specify what the penalty would be for non-compliance. Not surprisingly, that rarely results in effective implementation.

There is a reason for this. As a partner in an eminent U.S. firm points out, "Lawyers raised in the common-law tradition are trained to have a deep suspicion of overarching principles. The essence of the common-law approach is that decisions are made incrementally, always leaving open the possibility that the next case could be treated completely differently."

In my consulting work I have repeatedly advocated a system of help and coaching for partners who fail to meet the firm's standards. If coaching fails to bring a partner up to the firm's standards after a fair and reasonable amount of time, the partner is asked to leave. This is, in fact, close to the system that firms employ with respect to partners who fail to hit financial targets such as billable hours.

However, the point I keep trying to make is that if a firm wishes to excel in other areas, such as client service, collaboration, or associate supervision, the same process should apply. The response is predictable. Most law firms say that the idea of tackling a rainmaker on these "soft" issues is unrealistic, idealistic, uncommercial, and suicidal. In vain I point out that these standards are what firms already preach in their client and recruiting brochures and claim as their values.

While a majority of firms will vote to proclaim standards, they will usually not vote to enforce them. Indeed, the signs are that they vigorously prefer the opposite: Law firms have a proliferating plethora of rules, not functioning principles, because they don't or won't trust that their partners will adhere to the values, standards, and principles that they agreed upon. So firms end up with a mishmash of bureaucratic red tape in the hope that mandatory processes will achieve compliance when adherence to common values does not.

Professional detachment

In their legal training, lawyers are encouraged to be dispassionate. They have been schooled to leave their personal feelings at home. One lawyer told a consultant friend of mine that when he hung up his jacket on the back of his door in the morning, with it went his personality, both of which he put on at the end of the day as he left the office.

As many researchers have shown, lawyers score very low in the areas of intimacy skills and sociability. They tend to prefer role-to-role interactions with people, inside and outside the firm, rather than eagerly seeking out person-to-person connections. This doesn't mean they don't like people. It just means that, statistically speaking, lawyers prefer focusing on the job at hand rather than investing in relationships with those they are working with (other partners or associates) or for (clients).

This can have unfortunate, if unintended, consequences. Consider this e-mail, which I recently received from Marein Smits, a Dutch lawyer:

"At your recent seminar you made fun of me because I laughed at the idea of being genuinely interested in the industry and business of the people who are my clients. Rightly so: My laughing was cynical ... The first thing you learn when you become a lawyer is not to care. The legally sound judgment, the intellectual sparkle, that is what counts. The personal, the emotional, what is right: Throw it away, because it will taint your professionalism. 'Do not get involved' is the credo."

A major rainmaker once pointed out to me, "I can't convince my partners that this is all about human beings, that you market most successfully by showing an interest in the client as a person. My partners really don't want to express that level of intimacy with anyone at work." This lack of intimacy affects not only marketing and client relations, but also the way in which partners deal with each other and how firms are managed.

Rather than describing a highly interpersonal approach to coaching and helping each other succeed, the term "management" has come in many firms to mean a cold, detached, analytical approach to business. Financial scorecards are put in place, and everyone is told (implicitly or explicitly), "Here's what you will be measured on; see you at the end of the year!" They are not helped to achieve, merely rewarded if they do, and they live in fear of what might happen if they do not. This can achieve the goal of getting everyone to work harder, but it comes at a significant price in terms of partner morale and cohesion. Help, teamwork, and mutual support are often absent, since they depend on personal interactions. Instead, there is a system of measures and rewards.

While this approach is the one preferred by many partners (and many firms) it inherently limits creation of a strategically responsive organisation. In these days of ever-accelerating partner and associate mobility, a firm tied together only by measures and rewards will be inherently unstable.

There are signs that a few firms are recognising the importance of this issue. Says one managing partner: "The idea has slowly taken hold in our firm that one should deal with people as people, show warmth and empathy, and build personal relationships with others in the firm ... My leadership style has evolved over the years from trying to be comprehensive and logical to relying more on developing personal rapport and trying to motivate people." This insight might be gaining ground. But the behaviour inside many law firms has yet to catch up.

Approaches to decision making

When it comes to discussing their firms' affairs, lawyers have peculiar ways of conducting discussions and arriving (or not arriving) at decisions. The essence of lawyers' training and daily practice is to contest with other lawyers. While winning arguments against non-lawyers (such as consultants like me) is mere sport, winning them against other lawyers is a deadly serious business -- a challenge to their core ability.

In a room full of lawyers, any idea, no matter how brilliant, will be instantly attacked. Lawyers are expert loop-hole finders, trained to find counter-examples of or exceptions to any proposition. Accordingly, within a short time, most ideas, no matter who initiates them, will be destroyed, dismissed, or postponed for future examination.

Frequently, this leads managing partners, committee chairs, and practice group leaders to substantially over-invest in decision making. They want to be armed in advance with a lengthy memo about every decision so they can dump it in the lap of the complainer as part of fending off the attack.

Another common management strategy is to keep all proposals ambiguous, so that there is nothing specific to be attacked. As a result, law firms have a remarkable propensity for half measures, launching poorly specified programs with minimal chances of success. A common law firm dialogue is as follows: Let's have client service teams! (All agree.) What do we mean by such teams? (We don't want to say yet.) What shall their responsibilities be? (That's to be worked out.) What are the obligations of team members to each other? (We'll let them figure it out.) Combine all this with the obligation to resolve issues through committees, and you have a recipe for business constipation.

This is not necessarily a problem for lawyers. My own solicitor pointed out, "You are taught in law school that there are no right answers. We are actively trained to be non-decisive and are comfortable with a lack of closure."

When lawyers reason with each other, the primary objectives are not necessarily logic, consistency, reasonableness, or fairness. In their professional practice, whether in trial or deal-making, many lawyers are more frequently rewarded for persuasiveness, rhetoric, verbal agility, and point scoring. These habits of a professional lifetime readily spill over into internal firm discussions.

Lawyers also have a strange view of the concept of risk. In any other business, an idea that was likely to work much of the time would be eagerly explored. This is not necessarily the case with lawyers. If one partner says, "This works in the vast majority of cases," you can be sure that another will say, "Maybe, but I can construct a hypothetical scenario where it will fail to work. That makes it risky." Probabilities do not seem to influence the discussion, only possibilities. There is no greater condemnation in legal discourse than to describe something as risky. Contracts, deals, and court cases must be bullet-proof, not risky.

In other businesses, innovative thinking and action are considered a primary requirement for success. Companies eagerly search for strategic ideas and initiatives that their competitors have not discovered.

Lawyers are usually different. Presented with a new business idea, the first thing they ask is, "Which other law firms are doing this?" Unless it can be shown that the idea has been implemented by other law firms, lawyers are sceptical about whether the idea applies to their world. If everyone has these problems, they can't be so bad, the thinking goes. As long as we are no worse than anyone else, we don't need to change! It's hardly a recipe for a strategic advantage.

What can be done?

If lawyers deal with each other so poorly, why do they do so well financially? My answer is only partly humourous: The greatest advantage lawyers have is that they compete only with other lawyers. If everyone else does things equally poorly, and clients and recruits find little variation between firms, even the most egregious behaviour will not lead to a competitive disadvantage.

A persuasive case can be made that lawyers will not change, because times are good and partners (and associates, for that matter) earn a lot of money. However, the question always arises as to how the money is being made. Many law firms have discovered that you can truly make a lot of money if you work everybody very, very hard and really slash your costs and don't care about how people -- partners, associates, or staff -- feel about their work lives.

While that's one approach to riches, it can be shown (as in my articles) that it is not the best or most sustainable approach to riches. "Let's succeed by working more hours with ever-decreasing amounts of support" is not the most sophisticated piece of business thinking I have ever heard. The answer, for firms that choose to pursue it, lies not in ever-more-sophisticated (and tough) business management tools, but in a head-on confrontation with the issues of trust, values, interpersonal behaviour, and decision-making logic that I have explored here.

If firms are to deliver on the visions they have set for themselves, they must address such issues as what behaviour partners have a right to expect from each other, what the real minimum standards and values are, and how common values and standards can actually be attained, not just preached.

I have written about these topics extensively before and will not repeat either the arguments or the advice here. (My past writings are available on my website, vistageconsulting.com.) Suffice it to say that unless law firms undergo a cultural revolution, not just minor changes, most will not be able to achieve their ambitions. Dysfunctional behaviour by partners, currently not only tolerated but vigorously celebrated, will prevent firms from functioning as they desire.

There is some hope, because what has been reported here are common tendencies, not iron-clad laws. There are firms that are exceptional, singular counter-examples to the propositions explored here, and they are tackling head-on the core issues of culture, trust, and partner behaviour. On the other hand, many other firms are doing the very things that will prevent them from creating the truly collaborative organisations their lawyers say that they want.

One of the central things we know about trust and collaboration is that they come mostly from repeated interactions between people who have not only a history together, but also the certainty of a future together. Trust comes from relationships and the expectation of continuing relationships. Over time, as they interact with each other, they as partners, practice groups, and offices may actually come to trust each other.

Unfortunately, in many of today's firms that have been cobbled together from lateral hires and newly merged practices, the personal history that forms the basis of trust is often missing, as is the confidence that everyone will be practicing together for a long time. In many firms, even solidly successful partners live in fear that they will be among the next group of partners to be "let go."

In such an environment, the natural evolution of trust may be difficult, if not impossible. Instead, what firms need, literally, is a constitutional convention where their lawyers draft the explicit, basic law that is going to govern their firms -- the precise behaviours, rules, and principles that will determine what partners have a right to expect from each other.

When thought of as aspirations (which is usually the case), firms' values are usually explicitly articulated and remarkably similar. However, if a value is seen as a minimum standard of behaviour that all members agree to live by, then the true values remain ambiguous in most firms and vary immensely among firms.

Firms have historically flourished without constitutions that spell out minimum partner behaviours. For many, profits and revenues keep rising. What then will be the force that might create the need for change? Most likely, it will be client pressure on firms to act as firms -- delivering seamless service, practice areas that have depth (and not just a collection of individualistic stars), and true, cross-boundary teamwork.

Many firms have collections of great lawyers. The time may be coming when clients will expect them to go beyond this and become effective organisations. Without a prior, explicit agreement on minimum standards, and the resolve to enforce them, many law firms will not function well as firms but will remain what they are today: bands of warlords, each with his or her followers, ruling over a group of cowed citizens and acting in temporary alliance -- until a better opportunity comes along.

The Art of Blogging

by Coert Visser 2006

from Managementsite, 2006

Richard, how come you're so productive now?

RW: As I briefly mentioned in my article, I had a period of two or three years of extreme tiredness, just after working 80-hour weeks for three years. I did not know the cause, but it turned out to be a medical condition called sleep apnea, which basically meant I had not had a good night's sleep in that time. The treatment is to sleep every night with a breathing mask and to lose weight. I lost 30 pounds and suddenly, I had the energy of a teenager!

As I always do, I turned the personal experience into a business and management lesson, which became my article which has been my most well-read piece for many years. This all happened at a time when my wife and I decided that we did not want to do the same amount of national travelling as in the past, cutting back to about 50 percent of the previous level. (As a natural performer, I still need audiences from time to time!)

So, I decided on a strategy of trying to serve my national audience by really committing to the internet. Realising that people like to receive information in many different ways, I tried to offer alternative ways of absorbing my messages: traditional articles, audio podcasts and videos. Interestingly, the video is the least visited portion of the site so-far. I think it's because video command your full attention, while you can multi-task with an audio (listen while you are driving) and an article can be printed out to be read at any time. However, I will keep experimenting.

There has not been a problem with material. In my 2-to-3 year "sleepy time" I had still done consulting work. It was only the writing that I had stopped. So, I had years' worth of ideas that I had been thinking about while lying on my couch. I also discovered the fun of blogging. At first, the thought of putting something relatively new or fresh down many times a week was scary, but now, three months later, I find it exhilarating. It's a perfect place to share "smaller" thoughts that do not yet deserve an article, and quite frequently, you get really helpful and stimulating reactions from people around the world. I am learning a lot.

There's an old writer's joke that says "You don't know what you know until you write it down." I am finding that to be true. The mere act of committing to writing on a regular basis is forcing me to think more clearly, and also more deeply about my work experiences. I am now writing at least once a month, and posting a blogpost four or five times a week. Readers can subscribe to these at no cost by registering on my website. I'm having a wonderful time! And I'm healthy!

It's interesting that you mention your blog. I wanted to ask you about that. It seems like blogging is exploding! Even I have one now :). What do you think about this trend? Is it the next hype? Do you think it will last? And what are your thoughts on how to make a blog really successful?

RW: I must rush to say that any advice I have about making blogging work is the result of a great deal of advice I have received from other bloggers, and from my own technical advisors (including Shaula Evans.) I only began in January of this year, less than four months ago. As with everything in life, there are a few key principles to bear in mind.

First, you do not get half the rewards by showing half the effort. If you want to make something work, you must really commit serious effort. Don't just try things a little. I now post new thoughts four and five times a week, in order to make it worthwhile for people to come to my blog on a regular basis. That's a serious commitment, but as I pointed out in one of my posts entitled Is Blogging Dead, blogging, like everything else, is about relationships, not quick hits.

Second, it must be recognised that, at this stage, blogging is an act of faith. There is just not enough time and evidence to show whether consultants can get a return for the effort. I published an article with Steve Rubel, the master blogger, who has won a lot of business that way, but he is in the business of blogging about blogging. His audience is likely to be reading blogs.

For general management consultants (or other professional advisors like lawyers, or PR advisors, or accountants) it's not yet clear that the customers and clients you want to reach are watching and reading. However, here's why I think it's a good idea, even if they are not. You get the chance, as I have pointed out, to capture your thinking in writing. Putting it in a blog is not the final use of the material. I fully expect that I will turn small blogs into articles, and maybe (perhaps one day) turn collections of blogs into books, probably e-books. Blogging helps me make progress.

This is not a new thought. I have always argued that the benefit of writing articles was not just the initial publication, but the fact that you had readily available things you could reprint and give to new and existing clients. I am already finding it very helpful (when I get an enquiry from a prospective client who asks about me) to be able to say: "Well, actually, I just wrote about that topic last week and you can go, right now, to see what I had to say."

I think you raise some very interesting points on blogging and I'd like to ask a bit more about it. Thanks for mentioning Steve Rubel, I did not know him. This makes me curious: who are some of your favourite bloggers? What makes their blogs fascinating to you?

RW: I will confess that there are very few bloggers that I read every post, and few bloggers that cover the full range of my interests. But, I think that's the point about the "blogosphere". It's very fluid, constantly changing. The "feeds" that automatically come into my Outlook email program (using the Attensa add-on program which costs US$30) include Guy Kawasaki (who has written many terrific books about entrepreneurship), AccManPro (or Dennid Howlett) who writes about the accounting profession, John Sviolka from consulting firm DiamondCluster who is thoughtful about the future of technology, Brian Sommers (blogging under the name Services Safari) an ex-Accenture partner who is good on consulting.

You can find all these people listed (with easy quick-through links) on my blogroll (the listing on the right hand side of my blog.) These are only a tiny fraction of the blogs I monitor -- I actually look at about 100 per day, just to see what's there. It's like quickly flipping through the index and content pages of a lot of magazines before deciding whether to stop and read.

What I have found useful are the emerging attempts to provide guidance. There are so-called carnivals (one on marketing, one on capitalism, one on law) where someone lists the interesting links for the week. I watch out for those, in order to get an early indication as to where to go and new places to discover. It's hard work, but the whole point of the blogosphere at the moment -- it's wonderful, wonderful attraction, is the ability to hear new voices from around the world and engage them in conversation. So, I try NOT to stick to the same old places.

Like everybody else, once I find an interesting blog, I click on THEIR blogroll links (the people THEY like) to see if the philosophy that "I will probably like a friend of a friend" is true. It's a bit hit-and-miss, because there are so many people playing reciprocal blogroll games "You list me and I'll list you, and we'll both go up in the automated rankings." I hate that, and do not play that game. I only list other blogs that I actually visit regularly myself, and the list changes frequently.

At the moment, there is no choice but to hunt a lot and find you own favourite "magazines" to read.

What are your thoughts on how to write a good blog message? What helps well to get many readers' responses?

RW: I think there is a danger in asking the question that way. This is a little silly, but many people know that I love popular music and I love to make analogies from my personal life. In this case, the analogy I would make is "why are you making music?" There are two possible approaches. One is because you just have music in you and would pour it out even if you didn't have a place to perform. (Let's call that the "Artist" reason.) Then there are those, equally "noble", I think, who are "Entertainers" -- they do not pretend to be making art, but are just trying to give the public what they want.

I don't think one approach is more noble than the other, but I would point out that it is, in fact, easier to be an artist than an entertainer. Worrying about whether or not people are going to "like" you, and constantly changing your music to catch fashion is actually (if pop music is any guide) a very, very difficult thing to do, and one that usually gives you an immediate lack of credibility.

For me, the only viable approach to blogging is the same approach I give as marketing and career advice -- "figure out who you want to serve, find out what they need and start trying to help." The only way to find out what they need is to try something, and listen carefully.

So, I guess my real answer to your question is that I am not entirely sure what causes people to join in conversations with me. I don't go out of my way to be provocative, but I do try to tell truths that I think are being ignored. I have a personal point of view and I am not afraid to let it show. As I said in one of my blog posts, there is a quote from Confucius that all is well if the good people like you and the bad people do not.

I have seen that, everyone likes to join in discussions about what THOSE GUYS are doing wrong. You'll get lots of response if you criticise bosses or big companies or traditional media. However, I think that's too easy and not very enjoyable. I may get fewer responses, but I try to create conversations where we learn something that we can use personally.

I am also told that there are "tricks" like making lists. Apparently, there is some evidence that people love lists (so do I) and respond to "top 10 reasons why ..." I think that's true, but personally I do not want to be too self-conscious in the way that I write, and only write, to be referenced or quoted. That's a little too planned for me. So, I use that approach sparingly.

You mention that making blogging successful is hard work. Do you think there will be a big shake out soon?

RW: As with everything in life, I think hundreds of people start things, and only a few finish them. But in the case of blogs, the cost is so small that blogs won't disappear -- their authors will just stop adding new posts. It's not like real-world magazines where you go bankrupt or the cost of distribution gets too high.

However, eventually, I think that the "neighbourhoods to hang out in" will become a lot clearer than they are now, and only a few groups of blogs will make up the interacting community where people with a special interest go. But note, that event is still a long way off. I don't think that at the moment there are any clear neighbourhoods to go to if you are interested in things like consulting, or strategy or management. There is still a lot of room for individuals to turn themselves into the "hub" around which a network of other people concentrate. It's still very early days.

To be continued ...

A Natural Manager

Dyelry (Jerry) Labbate is the manager of an exercise gym in downtown Boston with four full-time and four part-time personal trainers. What follows is his description, given in March 2006, of his managerial approach, along with my comments on the lessons that managers can take from Jerry's experience.

I never wanted to get involved in business. Born in Brazil, I have lived in the USA since I was 12 years old. I remember coming on the plane, not speaking a word of English, and asking the cabin attendant for some agua (water) and she brought me some Sprite. I thought to myself: "This is going to be a great country: you ask for water and you get Sprite. Wow!"

I got my undergraduate degree as an exercise physiologist, went to work at a major chain of gyms, and then moved on to the place I work now.

After only two or three months here, my family asked me to come and run their Brazilian ethnic food manufacturing business selling to the Boston Brazilian expatriate community. My brother had been running it for my parents, but he did not seem to be on top of things. At the time, three years ago, my Dad was 75, my mother 66, my brother 29, and I was 25.

It soon became clear to me that we could do a lot more if we had the proper tools. The bottleneck was the fact that everyone was still making items like the cheese-bread by hand, so I flew to Brazil and researched how it was made there. I bought the right machines and had them brought back to Boston.

I also noticed that we were distributing our product in a truck that broke down a lot, so I bought a new freezer van, which increased our capacity to do deliveries from 10-15 per day up to about 30 per day. It was simply a matter of investing in becoming more efficient.

I always thought of it as just common sense. My brother didn't see it because he was focused on getting the orders out the door, and he wasn't really looking for ways to improve the operation. He wasn't focused. When he tried to change things, he didn't know where to start.

At the time, we had about 80 stores that we sold through. My brother wanted to expand that to 120, but I said, "No, let's just sell more to existing customers."

We asked our customers (supermarkets) to track their sales of our products on an inventory sheet, so that we could forecast when they would run out, and we could make sure we had production scheduled and ready to go when they needed it. We arranged for deliveries every week instead of every 15 days, and our sales to existing customers went up by 35 to 40 percent.

We also offered different sizes of the frozen cheese-bread, so it could be baked in the store. Another way I increased profits was in the way I bought flour. We had been buying it by the bag from the back door of a Chinese grocery, which made it very expensive. I contacted an importer and made a deal with him that if he imported a container (40,000 pounds), we would buy from him as we needed, but contrary to normal practice, we would pay him up-front for our purchases, instead of the usual wait for 30 days that he had to endure with his other customers. The cost of our flour went from 65 cents per bag to 24 cents per bag.

I also arranged to pay the guy we bought our cheese from with our products, so we could save a lot of cash. Unfortunately, that only worked for a month because I did not do my homework on whether our products could be sold to a different market segment.

After a couple of years of doing this, the owner of the gym where I had worked for two or three months approached me to come back. I sat down with my parents, and we decided to sell off the business. My dad and mom retired, and in May 2004, I went full-time with the gym. By June 15, they had made me the manager.

When I took over, the staff was dissatisfied with their hours, how they were being treated and cared for, their scheduling, or their pay.

A trainer would typically work from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m., with some hours off during the day. Even if you didn't have a client, the owners wanted you to stay on the premises until quitting time. They would do things like make an appointment without telling you, so that you had to change your personal plans.

I've always believed that this is a business that is run by the trainers -- if they do things right your business will flourish. So to make money, I had to increase the level of service to the clients, and the only way to do that was to improve the quality of the job for the trainers. I had to change the environment they were working in.

Before I came here, the owners did all the hiring of the trainers. I went to them and made my case that I couldn't really manage the business well unless I could choose the people I believed in, people I thought could meet my standards, and people who would operate the way I wanted them to operate.

I didn't want to insult the owners, but I put my case in terms of improving their bottom line. I told the owners: "You're not in the centre of all this -- I am. I know everyone's personality. I can figure out who will communicate well with the other trainers and who won't."

Anyway, the owners, to their credit, accepted my argument and let me do my own hiring.

When I first came in, all three of the existing trainers were just in the process of giving their notices of resignation because of the way they had been treated. I persuaded two of them to postpone their departure so I could do some new hiring.

Actually, the first new hire after I came in was someone whom the owners had selected, but I could see that he had what it took to do well. I liked him straight away. The owners then told me they had hired a second guy. When I asked him about what he wanted to do with his career, it was clear that our gym was obviously just a transitional job for him.

I told the owners it wasn't going to work. The owners said, "Give it six to twelve months." I did work with the guy, and he did become a good trainer. I supported him in getting his certification, knowing that it would only speed up the day he would resign to move on, and that's exactly what happened.

I had two part-timers I could use, but I knew I needed to begin hiring.

In this industry there is a lot of "bait and switch" with employees. They are told one thing before they are hired, but then discover that the reality is different once they begin work. For example, people are promised 40-hour work-weeks, but the reality is that it is almost always closer to 60-hour weeks. It's common for every single person on the staff to feel cheated within weeks of coming to work.

Trainers are a special kind of person. They have strong personalities, they are athletic, they play sports, and as a result, some of them can be a little rough around the edges in dealing with clients.

I only wanted to hire people who shared my philosophy of personal training. Some gyms and some trainers are just out to get clients to sign up for more classes, but I'm committed to passing on the knowledge I have about exercise, fitness, the body, and health.

I believe you train because you want to help educate clients for their lifetime. You want to give them things they can and will do on their own and use for the rest of their lives. A lot of competitors in this business just get caught up in the fitness numbers (percent body fat, etc.), but it's not about numbers. It's about helping people integrate new things into their lives. I always ask myself, "Can this client do this repetitively? Let's make him understand that it's a commitment he has to make."

When I hire people, I look for this attitude. I ask them, "If you were not doing this, what else would you be doing?" I'm looking for people who feel passionate about all this. The body is so amazing, and the more you learn the more you want to know. The adaptations it goes through as you stress it and develop it are really fascinating, and when I hire I'm looking for people who share that fascination. When I ask an interviewee a question, I can always tell if I'm getting a rehearsed answer.

I require that every new hire has a bachelor's degree in physiology, not just a certification. Many other gyms will only require trainers to have a certificate. Not here.

I knew that I had to set out to make my gym the best, and that wasn't going to be defined as the most operating sites -- a common goal -- but by achieving the highest levels of client satisfaction.

My first full-time hire was someone who had heard from a friend that we were becoming a great place to work. It meant a 45-minute drive each way from his home-town, and I asked him if he could handle that. He said, "No problem," he really wanted to come to work here.

I began by laying down my expectations with everyone. I was very clear on the hours expected. I showed everyone exactly how to clean the locker room, how to set appointments, how to talk to clients, and how to resolve conflicts. I created an evaluation form, which I went over in detail with everyone.

It contains five categories: Punctuality, for example. My inflexible rule is that the trainer must be there before the client, so if it is a 3 p.m. appointment, I expect the trainer to be in the gym ready by 2:45pm. I asked everyone: "Is all this clear? Do you understand my expectations?"

The other performance categories are "Floor Performance," "Team Orientation," "Technical Skill and Knowledge," and "Administration."

I don't have a problem monitoring performance. If something is not being done to my standards, I come to them and I ask: "Do I have to show you again how to do it? Do you have any questions on how to do it? If not, then I expect you to do it. It's black or white."

I devised a training program for the trainers. For two weeks, they have to be "clients" of the gym and be trained by the existing trainers. I want them to have a healthy dose of what it feels like to be a client, and to think about how you like to be talked to, recognised, and responded to. Then the new people have to guide one of the experienced trainers through their fitness routine, so the experienced employees can help the new people and give them feedback on their training approach and style.

While they train each other, a bonding takes place. They come to respect each other and support each other, which makes for a better workplace and a more smoothly functioning operation.

I talk to my trainers a great deal about their self-growth. I ask them what their vision is for themselves and for their career. I ask them where they think our profession of personal training is going. Among other reasons, I do it to learn more myself. The people I hire are usually straight out of college and they have heard the new things the schools are teaching, and I want to know.

To get a new person started, I ask one of our regular clients if they would be willing to be the guinea pig and have the new person train them. I promise the client that if they don't like the new person it will be a freebie, I won't charge them. I've never had to invoke that -- the client always accepts the person and pays.

The essence of training is getting people out of their comfort zone, and that's not only what I do with my clients physically, but it's what I do with my trainers in their jobs. I have failed sometimes here, because not all the trainers want to grow. Some of them just want to train.

Once a month, I get all the trainers together around a table. I give them the big picture of what's happening in the business, what's going well, and what we need to improve. I try to light a fire under them, telling them what the competition is doing, and I remind them that in this business you must re-earn your reputation every day.

I ask them to contribute to the meetings. I ask them to bring a new theory of training, or a new idea for an exercise, or a way to deal with a specific client training challenge. We discuss client problems, physiology, and the administration of the business. For example, we had a big discussion last week about sit-ups, with everyone sharing their views about which muscles were really involved, the best way to develop the complete set of muscles, and so on.

At the meetings, I hand out responsibilities for the things we need to get done: cleaning, renewals processing, etc. I ask for volunteers for each task (everybody has to do something above and beyond the training) but I'll assign it if no one volunteers. I try to rotate tasks so people don't get stuck with one thing.

I always ask them: "Is there anything I can do as the manager to make your job better? If you don't tell me what's wrong, I can't help to fix it." Last week, at a meeting that the owners attended, I told the group that I was going to leave the room so they could discuss my performance, and give me some feedback when I came back in. The owners were amazed I would do that, but it worked very well.

The main thing the part-time people said was that they wanted more help getting more bookings with clients. So I walked them through the difficulties (their part-time schedule might not match the weekly schedule the client has, so matching them up is difficult) and I told them I would do my best for them, but I could not promise to make the problem go away completely.

The part-time staff is one of my areas of weakness so far. I should spend more time and creativity with them, to make them feel more a part of the team we have created.

In 2004, the owners realised they had to do something about compensation. A normal target for a trainer is to have 32 appointments per week, plus eight hours of "coverage," i.e., other duties in the gym. I presented an idea of a bonus structure if the trainer saw more than a certain number of clients per week. It was modified a little, but it was accepted and it has really pleased the staff.

I don't have control of salaries here, so it's hard for me to discuss them with the trainers. I tell them "if you want more, then show me the extra performance that I can tell the owners about. Help me create the reasons, make the case, so I can go to the owners on your behalf and fight for you."

I had one trainer who just wasn't a team player -- he didn't share his load in cleaning up after himself, and so on. He was very knowledgeable, but he wasn't doing what I believe in -- sharing his knowledge with his clients.

I told him: these things have to be improved or we will have to part -- I don't compromise my standards. He said, "I can't do that." So we sat down and explored his options. I said "I don't WANT you to leave, I like you. But if you can't meet my standards, you're not going to fit in around here." I continued to work with him, because I wanted to make sure everyone gets a fair chance.

After four months, I stopped assigning him work. He didn't take it well. He said, "It's not fair, I'm a great trainer." I said, "Yes, you are. But you're not a great employee."

I want all my trainers to become great employees so that if they leave here and go to work somewhere else, the next employer will say, "He (or she) was well trained." Eventually he got it, and he left with no bad feelings.

I think with all of this we have created a welcoming atmosphere for our clients. We think we have created something they want to be part of. It's very professional and we don't fool around with our training, but it's not an intimidating place.

It's not a complex process. I have a rule that every trainer must know every client's name within two or three days, whether they work with that person or not. (We have about 100 clients.) I want everyone to watch what other clients are doing in their training. That way, if the client's regular trainer can't make it, any other trainer can pick it up and know the exercises and the levels that the client is used to.

I also changed the health history and chart system, so that if we have to substitute a trainer, there will be no problems knowing the special needs of each client. I am constantly in touch with all of our clients, making sure that if they have even the smallest concern, it is easy and comfortable to talk directly to me about it.

I am now being asked by the owners to train the trainers and managers in the other locations.

I'm personally doing about 30 client appointments a week, and then, on average, working an additional 30 hours managing the business.

We now have four full-time and four part-time trainers, 107 clients, and 159 appointments per week. That's 33 percent more business than the same time last year. And it is growing still. The owners are very happy with the turnaround.

The Lessons

As a consultant, it has been my job to teach people how to be effective managers, and how to build successful businesses. Jerry seems to have figured it out on his own.

Here are some of the management principles commonly taught or advocated, to which Jerry implicitly refers. (I won't catch them all -- which ones did you spot?)

• To improve efficiency in any operation, start by looking for the constraining factor -- the bottleneck.
• Never get so busy earning today's income that you fail to look to make improvements in how things could be done better.
• In looking for improvements, research how other people do what you do -- find out demonstrated best practices.
• Invest in the right tools -- don't be afraid to spend if it makes you more efficient or productive.
• Focus on improving business with existing clients before you chase after new clients.
• Focus on getting better, not on getting bigger.
• Help your clients help you by making their lives easier.
• Look for waste and inefficiency -- ways to cut costs without affecting quality or production.
• Find ways to do deals that benefit the other person, so he or she wants to help you.
• Fail fast. Don't be afraid to experiment with unconventional arrangements, and be prepared to drop promptly the ones that don't work.
• The key to giving your clients a great experience is making your people want to give that to them.
• You can't delight the clients with unhappy people.
• Hiring people who share your philosophy, values, point of view, and approach makes managing them a lot easier. Be very clear about what your philosophy is.
• The key to successful management is in the hiring: If you don't get the right people "on and off the bus" right up front, you won't be able to implement your strategy.
• Hire for passion and attitude.
• Never compromise hiring standards just to meet a volume need. Set high minimums in entry qualifications.
• To get the best out of people, have clear, enforced standards together with an empathetic, supportive style. One without the other won't work.
• Even if people are going to leave, take the high road in dealing with them. All your other people are watching.
• Never misrepresent, exaggerate, distort, or lie just to get something done, or to get someone to join you. People will find out the truth sooner or later, probably sooner, and there will be no benefit if they think you have misled them.
• You must help your people learn that there is more to serving a client than being technically skilled at what you do.
• If you focus on being the best, the revenue growth and profits will come, and your people will enjoy it more.
• Don't be soft -- have very high operating standards that are clearly communicated and strictly enforced.
• Then give people the freedom to meet the standards without being micro-managed.
• Work at helping people actually experience what it is like to be a client -- they will do a better job as a result of it.
• Work at creating team bonding by finding ways for people to work together, as well as get together to discuss common issues.
• Learn from your people -- let them teach you what they know and what they are discovering as ways to improve your operation.
• Commit to helping your people grow professionally: don't let them cruise.
• If you want people to be accountable, go first. Let them evaluate your performance, and let the results be publicly known.
• No one expects you to solve everyone's problem as a manager: All people want to know is that you're prepared to work with them to help them overcome the barriers and obstacles.
• For all of the emphasis on working with your people, you must never lose contact with your clients. Make sure that you have made it easy for them to talk to you and to raise any concerns they might have.
• Even though you are a manager, keep practicing your profession to some degree. It will help you to understand and relate to both your people and your clients.

* * *

Now, how's that for a quick and really helpful MBA course?

And, of course, it's all generalisable. All these lessons apply in other workplaces, even among highly paid people with advanced degrees in glamorous professions (though they don't always like to admit it).

Adventures in Modern Marketing

A few months ago, I was having dinner with an acquaintance, a world-famous professor at one of the most eminent business schools, who asked me: "What's a blog?"

I was, at first, surprised. But then I realised that it was really only nine months or so since I had first learned the term. The world is moving fast, and we all have to both learn and teach simultaneously, doing both at an ever-increasing speed!

(My professor friend is now up and blogging, but as a possible service to others, I will include a few definitions in this article to assist those exploring the topics for the first time.

Two features set apart a blog, or web log, from other kinds of websites: ease of publishing and reader interaction. Blog software is designed so that people with no computer experience can easily put their writing online, in their own blog or by adding comments to those of other people.

The conversations that arise can be both lively and informative. If you aren't familiar with blogs yet, you can start by taking a look at the blog on my website.)

This article is about some of the lessons I have learned (or re-learned) about marketing in an Internet world, through my own recent marketing activities. I hope others will benefit from my experiences at what (for me, at least) feels like the frontier.

Among the topics I will address are:

• Helping busy people search
• Online tracking systems
• Nurturing the core community
• Helping people help you
• Gathering input
• Becoming a more valuable resource
• Word of mouth
• Website navigation
• Serving multiple constituencies
• Participating in the broader marketplace
• The role of traditional off-line marketing

The Question

Along with every other enterprise, I face the challenge of creating awareness of my activities. I often describe my reputation as being like the measles -- spots of great inflammation, surrounded by vast areas of untouched territory.

A large part of trying to build my reputation is thinking through how to bring my free materials -- articles, newsletters, and blog -- to the attention of a broader audience who might find them useful.

Since I'm not selling these things, and I'm a consultant who gives professional advice anyway, it should all be obvious and easy, right? Not necessarily.

As my experience in past years with published books proved, you can know a lot about how to get hired as a consultant for many thousands of dollars, and still know absolutely zero about how to get people to part with $20 for a hardbound book. Even though I've had some sellers, I still don't know how to market books. I'm not sure anyone does!

Having put a lot of effort into making my resources available online in a variety of formats (so that people would have a choice as to how they preferred to access new ideas and information) I still had the task of making busy people (many of whom were not heavy Internet users) aware that all these new resources existed.

So, I wrote about this on my blog, asking: "Many of you 'discovered' my work somehow. The question now is how to make it easier for others to do so. Are there things I can do to encourage people -- and make it easier -- to tell more of their friends about my materials? Advice, please. What's an effective, but classy, way to do this?"

Within a very few days, I had a flood of comments from readers including clients, competitors and professional marketing advisors, all offering insight, lessons and practical advice. (My original query and all the comments may still be found on my blog.)

Helping Busy People Search

Jeff Merrifield, who works at a global accounting firm, helped me grasp the first key point: "Unfortunately, most people are just too overwhelmed with electronic input and filter out everything that is not urgent or from a trusted source."

This perspective was reaffirmed by someone who identified himself only as "Peter," who observed: "Your topical (important and urgent) blog posts are my favourites."

Topical, important and urgent! Of course! Suddenly, the core task of modern marketing became a lot clearer.

We don't best communicate information when we want to convey it. Instead, communication is most effective when we ensure that what we have to offer is accessible and useful right at the point when someone in need starts looking for it.

We tend to assume that people will search for what we have to offer. They will, but only if we make it really easy for them to find things!

For me, as for organisations of all kinds, the single most important marketing topic that exists is understanding, implementing and taking advantage of new Internet search tools that enable clients, customers and other audience members to seek out our information and materials.

And the topic extends much more deeply than the much-discussed "search engine optimisation" which attempts to ensure that people seeking information find our websites.

I learned through the company that designs and implements my online presence that having a well-indexed and navigable search system within a website not only helps people find what they were seeking once they were on a site, but is also one of the essential ingredients in attracting traffic to the site through external search engines.

I discovered that I had work to do here. I have always been averse to "pushing" things on to people, so I had not wanted to try to "cross-sell" my various offerings. However, it was now clear that I had leaned way too far in the opposite direction.

The company had argued forcefully that I should invest in a sophisticated "traffic tracking system," which allowed them to monitor activity on my site in fine, granular detail.

(Website traffic systems can deliver a range of information, including: how many unique visitors your site receives per day, where they come from, and how often they visit; which keywords people use to find your site through search engines; and which external websites refer visitors to your site. By monitoring, for example, which links readers click on, and where they exit the site, we are able to identify the most popular site areas, and the under-used pages that need more support from navigation, indexing, and cross-promotions.)

I also had not quite appreciated what a high percentage of executives, professionals and other business people are barely active in accessing the web as part of doing business.

I realised that if I was to serve my community, I needed to make it easier for people to discover other relevant materials.

In all of this, I had to make sure that my team understood that even though they were working for me, their task was to make things easier for my audience.

Since I was their client they sometimes (especially at the beginning of our relationship) slipped into a thought process of "Let's make Richard look good here." I, too, had to beware of the same trap ("Let me show off a little here.")

We all had to keep each other honest and remind ourselves (and it took conscious effort and vigilance) that it would only serve the business if it served the audience first!

Next, I had to make it easy for people to subscribe to my various offerings. This wasn't just about "cross-selling." It was about trying to remove the frustrations of having to register three times to sign up for my articles, blog or newsletters.

Why not make it easy for people to choose how much of my material they want to receive, and in what format?

Right now, my site presents the following options to readers and listeners:

1. They can come to my site, making use of the resources there.
2. They can "save materials for later," by printing out blog posts and articles, or downloading articles -- so they can use materials later, disconnected from the website.
3. They can sign up to receive articles and blog posts by email, so that information can be delivered to their inbox without returning to the website. They can also sign up to receive email notification of new comments on a blog post discussion that they want to follow.
4. They can subscribe to my blog and article RSS feeds so that information can be delivered to their desktop without needing to return to the website.

(RSS feeds allow you to see when sites from all over the internet have added new content, so you can get the latest headlines and articles (or even audio files, photographs or video) in one place, as soon as they are published, without having to remember to visit each site every day. Subscribing to your favourite RSS feeds takes the hassle out of staying up-to-date, and can be a real time-saver and productivity-booster.)

The goal is to make it easier for a broad range of readers to enjoy content in the way that they like best, removing readership obstacles, and thereby reaching a broader audience.

Putting all of the subscription options in one place is important but is quite a complex technical task. As of the time of writing is still a work in progress, but I began to get my technical team working on it as a high priority.

Nurturing the Community

Many of my correspondents reminded me of the same marketing principles I have long advocated in the "real" world: begin by working on current relationships, avoid the temptation to reach for "quick hits" and implement a strategy of patiently building new relationships and reputation by a focus on helping.

For example, Joseph Thornley (ProPR.ca), a leading PR counsellor in Canada and an active blogger, had this to say: "A passionate core community can help you achieve your objective. For example, I recommend your books to others, buy them for my employees and frequently link to your blog."

Charles Tippett went further. He said, "You should ask us (on a regular basis) whom we've shared your work with. You provide a lot of material on your site for free and we, as subscribers, should feel some obligation to give back. We just need to be told what's expected of us. This is a slower growth strategy but, like your books that never hit the best seller list, it might be the better approach in the long term."

Karen Love (pkftexas.com) suggested that some people would consider it a privilege to be a part of an inner circle (she used the term "Vistage Advocates") and that I should think of ways of formalising (or at least structuring) membership in my community.

Now, I'm not so foolish as to think that everyone who knows me and my work feels this way, or even perhaps a majority, but it finally sunk in that some people feel this way, and that the core of my "marketing" (or whatever word you want to use) would need to be nurturing this group.

The notion that many people would welcome the feeling of association that comes from being part of a community is not new. Decades ago, American Express ran a hugely successful campaign using the slogan "Membership has its benefits." Many marketing authors have commented on (and suggested that other businesses learn from) the loyalty of Harley-Davidson owners.

However, what was becoming clear to me, was that I did not appreciate enough before, was that it could apply to me. It turned, out, to my wonderment, that there were people out there who wanted to help me!

The power of community (and the power of blogging in creating it) was further noted by Duncan Bucknell (DuncanBucknell.com) who asked: "Isn't it interesting that of all of the interesting, thoughtful (amazingly useful) blogs you have posted, the one which attracted the most comments and dialogue is the one in which you asked for help?"

He's spotted something that I wrote about in my article Young Professionals: Cultivate the Habits of Friendship. As I reported there, my wife has found that people are often friendlier when you ask them for help than when you are trying to help them!

Some of my long-standing clients are regular volunteers who read and critique the early drafts of my articles. I always feel like they are doing me a huge favour, but apparently, some of them do not see it as a burden, but as a compliment (or more) that I give them the chance to influence my work.

I am still working on developing additional ways to "reward" my most loyal readers, blog contributors and subscribers. I do try to thank readers publicly for their comments and trackbacks, but now realise I must go further. I am contemplating such approaches as special advance access to materials, invitations to private meetings and conferences, and honoured guest memberships.

While I must be careful to do things in this area with some taste, I must not take for granted those who are (or are willing to be) evangelists for my work. I must figure out some way to recognise their support.

Gordon Gray (gordongray.info) pointed out that, with today's technology tools, it is possible to make it much easier for people to help me (and help their friends) by passing on the word about my work.

It wasn't just a matter of using links and hints like "print this," "email to a friend," "tag in del.icio.us," and so on. I also needed to provide options to provide feedback, to rate my articles, and to help evangelise for me.

(del.icio.us is a free, web-based system for storing and sharing bookmarks for individual web pages, including comments. By saving and "tagging" links to your favourite websites/articles/blogs in del.icio.us or other social bookmark systems, you are helping bring that material to the attention of other people looking for the same kinds of information -- a great way to help out your favourite authors and websites.)

Gathering Input

In order to preserve, nurture and build my community, Joe Thornley urged me to "be even more proactive in understanding your community." He recommended that I conduct regular and systematic surveys of the current subscribers to my articles, blog and newsletter series, which, as I have learned, are not always the same people.

Joe suggested that I needed to work to understand better why they subscribed, what they are looking for and how they would like me to evolve and adapt my content and the features of my website.

Once again, this is not new news. The tools for collecting information on those who access and use my material may have been transformed by the development of Internet tools, but it still comes down to the simple statement about clients' needs that I have fervently preached for years: never speculate when you can ask!

The feedback I had asked for was so helpful, and people were so generous, that I vowed to find more ways to do this.

Becoming More Valuable

Bill Peper suggested that I could serve my community by expanding the materials on my website beyond those I had authored myself. For example, if I really wanted to serve the audience's interests, I could usefully review other people's books in related fields and provide guidance and links to other websites and blogs that I thought my audience would like.

What Bill and others were saying was that with a little more thought and effort, I could truly be more useful as a guide through the disorganised mess that is the Internet and the blogosphere.

I have plans under way to implement his advice, but it's really nothing more than what we all should be doing in the real world.

If you want the world to think you or your organisation is a helpful expert in your subject, then you must always try to act as a filter, facilitator and advisor on the best, most relevant and most timely information of value to your audience.

What the Internet allows us to do, with its links and search capabilities, is to work toward this goal more easily, more thoroughly and at a cheaper cost.

Word of Mouth

Many of my correspondents referred to the first time they had discovered my work. Some had first seen a book, an article, a blog post, an in-house speech or a public seminar. But by far, most people had first encountered me and my work by being told about it by another person. "Word-of-mouth marketing" may be a hot topic right now, but the phenomenon itself is not new.

One marketing director in a UK law firm reported that my materials were already "successfully being passed from one person to another without too much effort on your part, it seems. I don't think there is a better way than word of mouth and doing all the things you are already doing."

David Lorenzo (careerintensity.com) offered the similar view that "positive word of mouth -- is the most effective and powerful form of advertising a business or a person will ever have."

He was careful to stress, however, that word of mouth derives principally from offering a service or product that users can and do feel passionate about and are moved to tell others about because of the value they derive from it. No amount of marketing (ancient or modern) can substitute for the reality of serving one's audience.

Word-of-Mouth marketing may actually not be a marketing concept at all, but an operational one. Word of mouth occurs when you give your clients, customers or audience such a good experience that they go away and talk about you. The outcome may be a marketing benefit, but the activity is operational -- enhance the experience!

What's the Message?

One of the biggest (and most embarrassing) lessons to come from asking for the feedback was receiving some candid opinions about how I appeared to others.

Lou Brothers (LouBrothers.com) said: "Your marketing message is somewhat lacking. The overall site structure of your website really doesn't lead a reader to any particular theme or message. You cover a lot of ground in your writing, and there are ways to handle that effectively, but unfortunately you don't do it so well."

Shaula Evans brought the message home to me, when she said: "Mr. Brothers' point is valid. The website has been designed to (generously) share a huge amount of free resources with readers. But ultimately, the focus of your website is still about you and your work. We need to make it about your audience. What does the website do for them?"

(Why does the shoemaker's child always go unshod? Why did it take a web technical expert to have to instruct the management consultant on these ideas?)

What these comments made me realise was that, even if I wasn't trying to sell anything, I still lacked a "customer focus." I write about a variety of topics, but I had not paused to think about the different needs and interests of the different people who encountered my work. As individuals, each of them would probably be interested in parts of what I had to offer. Sad to say, but maybe only I was likely to be interested in all of it.

As a result of all this, we redesigned the search and navigation system around my website (and associated materials) so that a person interested in just one perspective would find it easier to follow that thread and line of enquiry.

We have begun to put ourselves in the shoes of different audience members and ask, "What kinds of needs would they have, and what specific kind of information might they be looking for?"

It all seems so basic in retrospect, but originally I had organised my materials by type of media, as in "Go here for my articles, go here for my blogs." We changed that to "Go here if you're interested in marketing, go here if you're interested in managing."

As the subsequent tracking of the site statistics showed, the resulting topic-driven resource libraries were immediately popular and intensely used.

Getting Out and About

Many of my contributors reaffirmed the advice I had received when I interviewed Steve Rubel (Setting Knowledge Free). He, and many others, had pointed out that in today's blogging world, the way you build attention is not just to focus on your own materials (e.g., your own blog) but to seek out other hyperspace conversations that are taking place, and join in those other conversations.

One more time, this turns out to be merely a minor translation of a real-world lesson: if you want people to be interested in you, you don't succeed best by trying to force them to come to you. ("Yoo-hoo! I'm over here!") Instead, you first go where they are, get to meet them, and join in their conversations.

By making it easier for people to converse across the Internet about your topic, using trackbacks and linking you in, you'll draw their traffic, in part, when they find you interesting. That's a sure way to broaden an audience.

(Trackbacks are a courteous practice peculiar to the blog world that makes a conversational link between blogs, similar to comments. When bloggers link to another blog, they can send that blog an alert saying, "Look! I'm talking about your ideas and linking to your site." The blogger who receives the trackback can publish it on his or her site so readers can follow a conversation as it moves from one blog to another.)

On simple reflection, this is nothing more than the real-world tactic of attending a client's industry meeting and finding out what they are already talking about. The effectiveness of the tactic hasn't changed. It's just that nowadays, attending a client meeting can be as simple as finding other people's blogs and joining in their conversation, letting people judge your worth and merit by the quality of what you have to say. I have been trying to do more of that from the beginning!

Other Recommendations

My readers made many other intriguing, specific marketing suggestions worth passing on to others.

Duncan Bucknell (DuncanBucknell.com) said: "My suggestion is to look for high-quality channels, online and offline, that will distribute your content to the audience you want to reach. You may have to pay for some of this distribution, but I strongly suspect it will be worthwhile."

There is great wisdom in this. When I have been asked how start-up companies can attract people to their "real-world" seminars, I have always recommended that they find established organisations that hold regular meetings and offer your services. They are usually hungry for speakers, and as long as you don't engage in a hard-sell, they would be delighted to offer their platform if you can provide value to their audience.

It is clearly cheaper and more effective to use established channels than build from scratch. Using other channels lends the credibility of a third-party endorsement to readers finding your work for the first time. So, as always, I have to apply my own lessons to myself here in hyperspace!

Many people extended this thought and suggested I apply the marketing concept of "co-branding" -- joining in with others to help each other and take advantage of each other's network. This could be as simple as inviting another blogger to "guest" for me when I am away, or teaming up with a client to distribute an article of mine to their audience in such a way that it serves all concerned.

As other people do, I am considering hosting webinars (online seminars) or conducting interviews with other prominent people in my field, so that I can serve my audience by bringing additional insights to them.

Lou Brothers had an intriguing and powerful idea: "By offering PDF downloadable books as well as providing excerpts and related articles on your site you reinforce your ideas. 'Here's an article on XYZ -- and here's a 100-page treatment for $10 on the same topic that brings together several articles with additional commentary and detail -- click here to buy it right now.' By providing context and immediacy you allow your readers who want more information to get it (and to your benefit)."

(PDF stands for "portable document format." Unlike other file formats, PDF files preserve layout and formatting information so that a document looks exactly the same no matter what computer you view it on, or where you print it. Therefore, it has become a popular format for downloadable books, also called "e-books." For example, I always make articles like this one available on my website in a downloadable, PDF version.)

Among many other ideas, Bill Peper recommended that I help readers find their way through the plentiful handouts and questionnaires already on my website by highlighting a different form (or video) every week, and providing a "leader's guide" -- an explanation of what purpose it serves and how to use it effectively.

The marketing director of an elite UK law firm stressed the importance of "repackaging" material to serve the needs of different, specific audiences.

Going Offline

Many of my readers reminded me that no amount of online marketing can exist in a vacuum. If my goal was, for example, to drive people to visit my website so that they could sample my wares, I had to include in my targeting people who did not regularly use or visit the web, and try and tempt them to do so.

Mark Gould said, "The best way to communicate the message (that your thoughts and materials are available to top executives) is surely to step into their world -- the journals that they read and the conferences they attend."

Jean-Claude Brunner made a similar point: "Your core audience of CEOs or managing partners has, in my opinion, not really discovered the value of the Internet. (You should) enlist quality print media by writing op-ed columns with a blog byline."

These remarks reminded me that no one marketing approach ever works in marketing and creating awareness. There are many online and offline actions that must be managed as a portfolio, all working together. I've been including in my speeches and consulting for a decade the metaphor that you build relationships by inviting people to take one small, next step toward you. This can be both effective and tasteful -- "If you like what you've seen so far, here's a low-risk next thing you can do."

Of course, figuring out the sequence of activities can be a little frustrating if one's thinking is too linear.

When I wrote a book and asked "How to I promote it?" the answer came back, "Build a website." But then I had to ask, "How do I get people to my website?" They said: "Give lots of speeches." "But how do I get on the speakers' circuit?" "Write a book, of course!"

While annoyance at the interconnections is understandable, it has always been the case in creating awareness (as in all relationship building) that impatiently aiming for an immediate home run with only one approach will almost certainly fail. What was, is, and always will be needed will be a well-balanced, interconnected package of activities.

In my blog, I offered the view that the best single "broadcasting" tactics included collecting and publishing data of interest to your audience, seminars, speeches and article writing. The relative effectiveness of these broadcasting tactics remains roughly the same. It's just that, nowadays, you can and should do BOTH the online and real world versions as part of your mix.

Moving Forward

As will have been seen, many of the sensible, powerful initiatives recommended to me are merely translations of old concepts into a new world: you succeed by patiently building relationships, focusing first on serving the interests and needs of those you hope to attract to you, soliciting feedback from your loyalist customers and acting on it, and keeping the faith that you will attract a response from that subset of the world that likes what you have to offer.

You may not appeal to everybody -- not even everybody you would have liked to form a relationship with -- but when your community forms, it can be an immensely powerful (and gratifying) outcome. It certainly has been so far in my case.

The good news is that this "conversational marketing" works very well on the web, in the sense that there are many tools to support it. The less great news is that it doesn't scale up very quickly, and it takes a significant investment of time and energy to nurture those relationships.

None of that is new. What's newly emerging are the tools to be able to pull it all off! These new tools may appear simple, but making them work effectively has proven to be a matter not only of creativity, but of hard work and finely-judged timing.

The online culture is truly a "culture" and my support team has invested a great deal of research time in understanding the optimum form and appearance of my website, and the right moment to use various web marketing tools to try and catch the attention of a fast-moving and busy audience.

I am also pleased to report that I am seeing the implementation of these strategies pay off.

I appreciate the contribution of my blog readers and their generous advice to this success.

It's all a work-in-progress, but that's the report so far. I hope you got something out of it! Watch this space!