A thoughtful article in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 85, March 2007 at 115, describes a framework of 23 human capital management (HCM) practices. A two-page questionnaire asked individuals to rate their organization on a scale of 1 to 5 for each practice. The authors, Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer,…
A journalist, writing for InsideCounsel, June 2006 at 70, ruminates that Charles James, the general counsel of Chevron “might have one of the toughest GC gigs in the nation.” James himself modestly disagrees, as he thinks the general counsel at Microsoft or Merck might deserve that unwanted sobriquet. The article…
Every now and then it sneaks into my consciousness how my blog posts are so US-centric. I refer almost entirely to US dollars, assume readers know US law firms, speak naively of “international operations” as self-evidently outside the US, and just generally give short shrift to law departments beyond the…
Consider a point made by Mike Evers, a recruiter for attorneys, in InsideCounsel, June 2006 at 92. When a general counsel wants to fill “staff attorney” role, which Evers describes as a junior level lawyer, the title may turn off good candidates. “Worse yet, your HR department may fight your…
As I run across oddities of in-house careers, I pluck them out and put them on display (See my post of Aug. 7, 2005 on a lawyer who spent 70 years with one law department; of Dec. 22, 2006 #3 on a general counsel who served for more than three…
This blog has used the phrase full-time equivalent several times, but has not defined it nor delved into its importance (See my posts of June 28, 2006 and July 31, 2006 about how to translate non-lawyer staff into lawyer equivalents.). It’s easier to explain the term by examples than to…
DDI, the human resources consultancy, surveyed 600 executives and professionals around the world. Nearly 60 percent of them rate the anxiety and stress of the transition to a new leadership role as second only to the trauma of divorce or marital separation. My thoughts turned to the psychological burdens on…
At one of the consulting firms where I was a partner, we had a three-partner Executive Committee. The rest of us partners were once asked to complete an online evaluation of those three. The questions on the survey inquired about our views as to their integrity, fairness, creativity, productivity, and…
MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Winter 2007 at 8, has a provocative article about how best to allocate base pay, merit raises, and bonuses to motivate employees. Based on research on about 700 employees who worked in the US operations of a large diversified corporation, the author – Michael Sturman of…
Law departments that have lawyers stationed all over the world (See my post of April 17, 2007 about J&J with its 35 lawyer locations; Oct. 19, 2005 on Goldman Sachs and its 90 lawyers out of the US.) sometimes look at the compensation of their lawyers in terms of relative…