A piece the ACC Docket, June 2010 at 18, strains a bit (pun intended) to compare weight lifting to practicing law in-house, but most of its points head in the right direction. Except one. The author says that athletes shouldn’t try to lift absolutely as much as they can, an…
Research into what people feel is a just outcome suggests that people are concerned not only with the perceived fairness of the outcome in a particular situation, but also with the perceived fairness of the process that determined the outcome. These two concerns are referred to as distributive and procedural…
Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate in Economics, explains in The Idea of Justice (Harvard Univ. 2009) at 6-7 et seq., the difference between what he calls “transcendental institutionalism” and “realization-focused comparison.” Fancy words from a philosopher, but they boil down to the difference between describing ideal justice (or any aspect of…
Quite fittingly, just after I wrote about software that shields users from interruptions like email, instant messaging, and online networks, I was distracted by an article in Wired, June 2010 at 116. The article compellingly argues that the cognitive effects of information overload and interruption from the Internet cause significant…
“Contrary to popular belief, performance is not determined solely by the nature, scale and disposition of resources, important though they may be.” Instead, argues an article by three Bain partners in the Harvard Bus. Rev., June 2010 at 54, it is “the organization’s ability to make and execute key decisions…
I look down on mere lists of reasons for or against something if the lister does not rank the reasons in some order, such as of their persuasiveness. It isn’t good enough to throw out a whole bunch of arguments that could range from trivial to determinative without the additional…
With my most recent collection of posts about novel approaches to management issues, I have reached the point where my metaposts deserve to be pulled together into a hyperpost. Well-run legal departments constantly change for the better, even though the improvements (aka innovations) are mostly at the margins, modest, not…
What’s new and shiny catches my eye, even though I believe that tortoise-like incremental improvements hold more promise for legal departments than do hare-racing radical changes. I also believe that opportunities to do something new, even if small potatoes, surround around everyone in a law department, all the time. Many…
An article about stability and change in an organization, and specifically about how those two concepts are a duality not a dualism, explains how “mindfulness” is one of three ways variability enables stability. Writing in the Acad. Mgt. Rev., April 2010 at 210, the author runs through a list of…
Hundreds of management practices thrive in the ecosystem that is legal departments. Some of them stay local, others take root everywhere. Academics refer to the spread of a management practice as “diffusion.” A thoughtful article in the Acad. Mgt. Rev., Jan. 2010 at 67-92, frames an understanding of diffusion. Take…