Consider this counter-intuitive point made in Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Bus. School Press 2006) at 47: “Process improvement programs like Six Sigma and TQM [have] been shown to drive out errors and improve efficiency, but also…
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Bus. School Press 2006) at 178 offers advice on the four most important actions that a manager needs to take to change others’ behavior. Being a fan of mnemonics, I relabeled the…
A fascinating book, Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed (Penguin Books 2005) at 13, distinguishes between the proximate cause of an event and the ultimate cause. The proximate cause is the one you notice; the ultimate cause may be broader, more subtle, or take longer to…
Permit me a moment of snarkiness. Does everyone cringe when affronted with a platitude for management (See my post of Aug. 3, 2005 that savages “alignment with clients.”)? Here are a handful of other fortune-cookie pronouncements that sound sage but aren’t worth the thyme. Structure your law department to optimize…
Having heard of the winner’s curse (See my post of Jan. 14, 2007.), let’s keep cursing. Imagine a general counsel and her leadership team who craft a mission statement (See my post of Dec. 7, 2006 on mission statements and references cited.). The mission statement is replete with abstract concepts…
“Escalation of commitment is a widespread phenomenon and one that is hard to avoid or overcome,” states Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Bus. School Press 2006) at 175. This escalation might afflict law departments if, for example,…
Logarithms refer to exponents, the little superscript numbers that show that the base number is multiplied by itself the exponent times. Remember? 33 = 27. Logarithms are powers of 10, as as log3 is 103 = 1000. Logarithms are useful when you chart numbers that increase from tiny to very…
In Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Bus. School Press 2006) at 7, the authors criticize many benchmarking projects, which they deride as “casual benchmarking,” because the projects suffer from a pair of fundamental problems. “The first is…
Venn diagrams consist of circles that overlap other circles to a degree that indicates the two circles’ shared aspect. A circle that represents female lawyers in US corporations, for instance, would overlap perhaps 35 percent of a circle that represents all lawyers in corporations. In a three-circle Venn diagram, more…
Every year, the same basket of goods and services costs a bit more – retail price increases in recent years have run in the two-to-four percent range. Because of this trend, it’s misleading for general counsel to use nominal (raw) numbers to compare spending over a period of years (See…