Managers in law departments might want to avail themselves of a decision-making method known as the Delphi technique. Cass Sunstein in Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford 2006) at 208, outlines the three key aspects of the technique, which is sometimes called the nominal group technique (See my post…
Marc Firestone, the General Counsel of Kraft Foods, said a few words at the InsideCounsel SuperConference about the pressures of being alone at the top. “It is important,” Firestone said, “for the General Counsel to have a mentor outside the company whom they trust – a wise head.” He has…
The probability that a group of people will arrive at a correct answer to a factual question increases toward 100 percent as the size of the group increases. This is the Condorcet Jury Theorem, as explained in Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford 2006) at 25,…
We have all heard about and maybe even taken part in post-mortems. What about when something good happens? Does any law department systematically celebrate success and examine why it happened? Let’s call such a positive look back a “post-vivo” and thank the Harvard Bus. Rev., April 2011 at 72, for…
Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford 2006) at 55, discusses research about the shortcomings of groups when they deliberate. For example, members tend to become much more confident about their judgments after they talk together, but they are not any more likely to be correct. Second,…
Social scientists have long recognized that most of us just naturally believe that the people around us look at the world as we do and behave as we would. We take for granted that we are normal and others travel to the beat of the our drum. This assumption academics…
“Decision-makers can digest only so much information, and only so fast; still, executives tend to request much more information than they actually use.” This observation from MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Spring 2011 at 57, resonated with me. It is so easy to send minions to mine data. As they say,…
Hard on its explanation of “good failures,” an article in the Harvard Bus. Rev., April 2011 at 54, summarizes why organizations struggle to analyze failure constructively and learn from it. One reason is “because examining our failures in depth is emotionally unpleasant and can chip away at our self-esteem.” From…
Nine reasons for “failure” are listed in the Harvard Bus. Rev., April 2011 at 50, and three of them are commendable. This seeming paradox has strong significance for managers of in-house lawyers. We can praise failure if someone deliberately and thoughtfully tried something new and it didn’t succeed (referred to…
A general counsel faced with twenty candidates for an open position, or two dozen firms of which one can be retained, might despair at the time drain. Do you have to see them all or is there a golden number? Cheer up! Mathematicians have figured out how many you should…