Core Values

Danny Miller is the author Managing for the Long Run: Lessons in Competitive Advantage from Great Family Businesses.




Danny and I met some years ago and he and I email on occasion. His book is replete with examples describing why Family Businesses are successful. These reasons include;

- inspiring ideals
- a passion for the substantive over the pecuniary
- patience and perfectionism
- religious unorthodoxy
- Spartan parsimony
- permanent tenures
- systemic role ambiguity
- a host of other qualities almost totally ignored in traditional texts on management

The qualities he identifies as measures for success are the 4 C’s – command, continuity, community and connection.

You will recognize the names of these great family companies – Michelin, Estee Lauder, Hallmark, LL Bean, Levi Strauss, Coors, New York Times, Timken (of ballbearing fame), Microsoft, Apple, HP, Toyota, etc.

Take the New York Times, for example. It seems relatively easy to create a mission statement and core values for a great newspaper, though far more difficult to consistently apply them. Once a great company has created the mission statement and developed leadership, attracting and motivating the employees and managers is going to be a lot easier. In fact, unless a business can motivate its work force, it is not going to be “successful”. Note that “successful” means more than simply profitable.

Law firms are often created as “family companies” but usually after a generation and the original people retire and as they grow in size, they are no longer family companies. Where are the Blakes in Blakes or the Davis’s in Davis.

Nonetheless, a law firm can try to emulate the characteristics that have distinguished family companies and made them great places to work.

Law firms are curious creatures. There are some law firms that specialize in products which can inspire their workforce. For example, they may do aboriginal work, specialize in labour (either management or union), class action tort against law corporations (tobacco, breast implant, etc.), merger and acquisitions, environmental work. But in fact, most law firms don’t specialize so narrowly and many that do still look to the bottom line almost solely as a measure of success. They are also very difficult to manage for other reasons, including the independent and risk-averse nature of lawyers.

In a law firm there is little personal inheritance to pass on to the next generation – your name may remain on the door (though that too is unusual) but once you leave, you are no longer associated with the product, This is unlike great family companies which are passed on to the next generation.

Some law firms do have mission statements and personal codes of ethics and do believe in personal growth. Some have sabbatical programs, take on pro-bono work, participate in legal clinics and legal education, encourage partners and associates to do community work, etc.

For an interesting example, see Talent Without Borders

This is a story in the Globe about a law firm which has given its associates paid time off if they use their own vacation to participate in an aid program by participating in CIDA sponsored projects in non-industrialized countries. The associates mentioned went to Botswana and Vietnam.

The firm allocated $40,000 for participation in Leave for Change, …. In the end, seven employees participated, including Ms. Ghislanzoni, who volunteered in Botswana late last year, and her Edmonton colleague and marketing specialist Jenn Muir, who returned from a three-week post in Vietnam in January. (The eighth staff member became ill and could not travel.)

The result (apart from the actual work done abroad) was:

Like Ms. Muir, Ms. Ghislanzoni's experience left a positive impression of her
employer on her. “It reinforced the fact that the firm recognizes that different experiences all have different values and they all have a place in the firm,” she says. “It shows quite a bit of forward thinking and it makes me feel loyal to the firm because they supported me in something important to me.”

This is a hot topic for those who are looking for a work environment in which they can help others, enhance their own professional and communication skills, and enrich their personal lives.

I am convinced that every law firm should be looking at these issues through a different lens and discussing what can be added or changed to make working for it a truly unique and rewarding shared experience.