The ten most important management concepts chief legal officers should understand were unveiled earlier (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: ten most important concepts: client, risk, quality, productivity, talent and then structure, information flow, decisions, value and objectivity). Here, in order of priority, are the next ten on the…
If you want to know which of your lawyers will be content to modify existing practices and which will propose to overthrow those practices for something new, have them take the Kirton Adaption-Innovation (KAI) Inventory. Additional background on the KAI is at a website. After your lawyers respond to 33…
Landscapes set out plants; hardscapes array stonework; so an “ideascape” describes how we organize our mental verbal resources. An ideascape for general counsel is one of my blog ambitions. This blog can help to organize and refine how managers of corporate legal groups describe their task. The words they use,…
Depressing as it may be, I keep finding examples of how homo sapiens has less sapiens than we might hope. In the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, Feb. 2009 at 62, the authors trot out two more cerebral slip-ups (See my post of March 15, 2009: cognitive traps with 21…
Grid Analysis (also known as Decision Matrix Analysis, Pugh Matrix Analysis or MAUT, which stands for Multi-Attribute Utility Theory) is a useful technique to use for making a decision. I have paraphrased the following description from the excellent MindTools website. Grid analysis is particularly powerful where you have a number…
I paraphrased this method to generate and ponder ideas comes from the MindTools site. http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_89.htm Managers in law departments could find many circumstances in which to use it. Step 1: Before convening as a group, tell the members about the task or problem. Give everyone sufficient time to think about…
Having laid out in prior posts ten ways our thinking fall short of rational objectivity, I was interested by seven more in Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Penguin Press 2008) at 345 (See my post of Jan. 18, 2009: two traps — availability…
Memory Loss & the Brain, Vol. 8, Winter 2007 at 4, points out that “some studies suggest that you can improve your own learning abilities by 20 to 30 percent, just by choosing the right time to do your learning.” When you feel most wide-awake and alert, tackle your tough…
An in-house mind is a terrible thing to waste. On this I cogitated, ergo I blog (See my post of Jan. 24, 2006 about the half-life of law department knowledge; and (Sept. 22, 2006: factors that erode the rationale choice of a law firm.) Attorneys who work for corporations start…
“Humans have biases that underlie how information is filtered, interpreted and often bolstered.” That summary, from an article in the MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Winter 2009 at 43, provides a three-part framework for my posts about cognitive distortions we all face. For general counsel and indeed all lawyers,…