A recent book explains a half dozen ways to goose your creativity. The book is Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works (Houghton Mifflin 2012) at 30-44. Lawyers practicing in companies need all the creativity they can muster, so here is my thumbnail of each method. Spend time on a problem,…
With the surge of research on the neural underpinnings of cognition, you can’t help but project that as we learn more about the electrical and chemical exchanges in the brain, we will put more of the extraordinarily complex pieces together. Given time, research, funds, better equipment, and the resulting insights,…
Managers in legal departments will do better to the degree they apply the lessons from these related disciplines. Art Markman, Smart Thinking: three essential keys to solve problems, innovate and get things done (Perigree 2012) brings out differences between psychology and cognitive science. As he describes the two fields, psychologists…
I like some rules promulgated by Nick Jarrett-Kerr of Edge International in the firm’s latest Communique. Written for law firm managing partners, the advice holds true for general counsel. “Rule 1: not many decisions are very important. Rule 2: the most important decisions are often made by default.” [Jerrett-Kerr doesn’t…
My sense of the term “strategic planning” has been an exercise by a legal department to look ahead a couple of years and try to anticipate evolving needs for legal services and skills. What might happen in the future and how can we best prepare for it? My recent posts…
What are some of the beliefs most lawyers in the United States take for granted, rarely consider or even notice, regarding corporate law departments? We are all blind to our own habituated views that we do not observe, to say nothing of articulating or even less questioning, what is “the…
An article in Atlantic, Dec. 2011 at 67, proposed this distinction: “[I]deological differences stem more from differences in people’s beliefs about how the world works than from differences in their basic values” It is hard for me to distinguish the two views in the context of a legal department. Basic…
At a recent conference run by ALM, the general counsel of Rockwell Collins spoke about Six Sigma principles applied in his department. One of his slides addressed processes to determine alternative fee arrangements, and it mentioned “design decision-trees for process.” Whenever a law department does some set of steps repeatedly…
John Maynard Keynes, eloquent and acute as always, offered his view on the study of economics and its tenuous link to practical applications: “The theory of economics does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of…
The fast-function part of our brain, that which Daniel Kahneman refers to as System 1, operates mostly in three parts of our brain. Strategy + bus., Spring 2011 at 47, describes each of them briefly. These emanate from deep, primal parts of the brain that evolved relatively early. One is…