Flatter is Better

Thomas Friedman is the author of “The World is Flat” (see below) which deals with the subject of the flattening of the globe and what it means to how we perceive the world and behave in it.

The concept of “flattening” applies to organizations too.

I am generally not in favour of hierarchal systems although dictatorship in a business organization does have its advantages in terms of quick decision making and implementing those decisions. It also seems logical that the entrepreneur who is taking the risk should have the right to make decisions and impose them on others who depend on him/her.

The Sunday New York Times Business Section has a weekly column “Corner Office” in which CEO’s are interviewed about aspects of their companies and their personal development and leadership strategies. They talk about delegation, hiring, qualities which make great employees, how to get the best out of their team, etc.

In late January, Corner Office did an interview with Cristobal Conde, CEO of a software and IT Services company.

The interview begins with a question and answer:

“Q. What are your thoughts on collaborative versus top-down management?


A. Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.”

Collaboration flattens the organization and flattening leads to collaboration. If you think collaboration is good, and I do for a variety of reasons, how do you promote it.

Though the inteview is short, Conde makes a couple of comments that, in my opinion, are relevant to managing a vibran, creative organization. He first mentions his twitter-like system which he calls Yammer, an intranet communication link which allows people to share what others are doing, share information, brag about successes – “that is what flattens the organization”.

He also describes how and why he moved from command-and-control management to delegation which involves choosing the right people, delegating to them and holding them accountable. I would add mentoring and fostering creativity as factors as well.  The interview continues with:

Q. Besides the endless travel of that year, was there something else that made you shift styles [from command and control to collaboration and delegation] ?

A. Yes, it was a huge disagreement with somebody who worked for me directly, and he ended up quitting shortly thereafter. And it wasn’t that the decision that we disagreed on was so big. It was more that, to him, it just wasn’t as much fun anymore. He felt he could do more, and I was in his way. I was chasing away somebody extremely valuable, and that is when I realized I never would have put up with that myself. If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave.


If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement. Eventually, they get chased away, and then you’ve got to invest in a whole apparatus of micromanagement. Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability.

Conde says, his new way of management is the way to “Get world class people and keep them.”

In a business environment and world in which people change jobs, homes, careers many times in their lifetime, it seems to make good sense to try to mould your organization to do just this.

I will be travelling over the next few weeks so am posting early.

Lawyers and Anthropologists - Something in Common?

I recently travelled to Merida, Mexico, to attend the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology at which my sister, Jean (Jay) Schensul, received the Malinowsky Award for lifetime achievement for her contributions to applied anthropology in writing, community activism, health initiatives, etc. Among her many achievements, Jay founded the Institute for Community Research (ICR), a non-profit society based in Hartford, Conn. Hartford has many diverse ethnic and cultural groups. ICR's mission is to collaborate on research projects with other community groups. The goal is to understand community issues and promote justice and equity in Hartford and elsewhere. Although the goal may seems ambitious, the projects are focussed, targeting very specific problems.

Over the years, Jay obtained grants for research projects on many primarily health related issues for projects in Mexico, Peru, Sri Lanka and India. Through her work, she changed the landscape of applied anthropology in the Western hemisphere. She was and continues to be a “maverick” (not quite like Sarah Palin).

While listening to Jay’s keynote address, what impressed me was her commitment to change and her insight into the systemic problems retarding change. My interpretation was that anthropologists have many skills but must learn to use them in a different way in order to effect change and stay relevant in a milieu where many disciplines compete for resources.

Staying relevant and effecting change are of universal application. Throughout my career I have frequently thought about the relevance of my work and the legal system generally and struggled to find some deeper meaning. But if you are a lawyer, until you determine the role law should play, it is difficult to determine your own part. Visionaries, like Jay, force their peers to confront the larger picture.

In her presentation, Jay pointed out the strengths of trained anthropologists, the systematic weaknesses preventing those in the field from utilizing their skills and abilities, and then described how to use technology to harness those skills and bring about change.

She started with the benefits anthropologists [for almost all you can substitute “lawyer”, “doctor” or “educator” for anthropologist] can offer, for example:
- anthropologists work locally and globally
- Many anthropologists are motivated by social justice concerns.
- Some are artist/scholars
- Anthropology is interdisciplinary
- anthropologists see things as a whole

The systemic roadblocks which prevent real and effective changes to applied anthropology [again many of these all inhibit change to other professions] include:
- archaic rules governing promotion and tenure
- funders, policy makers and schools of public health do not institute training or encourage peer review opportunities for innovative products
- lack of cooperative research efforts between schools of public health and community organizations
- failure to support Community Based Research Organizations (CBRO) or link them to universities
- disinclination to publish innovative community-useful research methods and results which are meaningful but may not meet the standards of university peer-reviewed publications

According to Jay:
“In sum, the message for anthropologists is direct: further engaged action research from university bases, advance infrastructural changes, facilitate the development of CBROs and other forms of community competence in research with social justice objectives; join academy and CBRO forces with community voices to forge and to use new knowledge that makes a difference in reducing inequities and specific disparities in health education, culture and environment; and link with local, national and global networks.

We need to join forces with the action researchers of the north and the south, the sociologists, psychologists, feminists, disability researchers, and community based participatory research for health movement. By reclaiming action research, we forge alliances with researchers all over the globe in emerging networks … concerned with critiquing science, and with producing new community based knowledge in partnership with the communities who most need it.”

She suggests utilizing electronic tools such a national network of researchers linked through a wiki, communicating about their methods and results.

“Imagine a network of activist oriented applied researchers … among them anthropologists, communicating at any point in time and from any position on the globe about inequitable situations on the ground and steps required or taken to remedy them. This is now a technically achievable fundable vision.”

Jay is saying to her cohort group that to remain relevant, to contribute, to make impacts and to preserve their professional status, they must move beyond the confines of their particular expertise and make connections with other disciplines. This requires respect for others and intellectual curiosity. One has to be able to embrace new ideas, rather than be intimidated by them. Jay challenges us to act, seek, explore, understand and progress.

How does this apply to law? Lawyers by nature are drawn to and are comfortable in a world governed by rules (and frequently resist change). We are inundated with seminars and professional literature on how to use technology for the practice of law, research, accounting, billing etc., but are frequently too busy with the day-to-day applications of the law to examine the systemic issues in the law itself and the institutions of law. The universities, law societies and the law firm models that have been around for many decades and are, by and large, accepted but are becoming outmoded and may soon be obsolete. The power of technology is largely ignored as an instrument for the advancement justice in an active participatory manner.

I hope Jay’s work is of interest to a broader audience.

Myth and Reality

I am travelling to Turkey and I thought I should read about Turkey and its history beforehand. This brings me to the subject of myth and reality.

The term “myth” (Wikepedia):

… is often used colloquially to refer to a false story; however, the academic use of the term generally does not pass judgment on its truth or falsity. In the study of folklore, a myth is a religious narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form. Many scholars in other fields use the term "myth" in somewhat different ways. In a very broad sense, the word can refer to any traditional story.

We consider ourselves rational thinkers and, as such, prefer history to myth. The Turks created their own myth, denying the genocide of the Armenians since 1915 when the events occurred. While reading “Rebel Land” by Christopher de Bellaigue, I quickly realized that even defining who is a “Turk” is a difficult proposition (that, too, may be part of the myth). De Bellaigue’s book was reviewed in the New York Times

To me, the most interesting aspect of the review is that de Bellaigue, a foreign journalist, was seduced by the Turkish myth that the
Armenian genocide never occurred. From the review:

“Notable among these are the notions that the Turkish republic is a nation-state containing no subgroups with valid claims to ethnic or political differentiation, let alone autonomy; that the country has a European and secular essence and destiny; and, more emotionally, that the achievement of Turkish nationhood was an enterprise reflective of a righteous people who to this day remain victimized by the self-interested incomprehension of the West.

In the grip of such prejudicial ideas, de Bellaigue in 2001 wrote an article for The New York Review of Books containing a blandly pro-Turkish account of the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. To de Bellaigue’s somewhat surprising surprise [sic], this excited a furious response. The controversy led the writer to a searching, shameful examination of his sources and his soul: “I had been charmed by the Turks, and perhaps intimidated by their blocking silence” about the Armenians. “I had helped to keep Turkey’s past hidden.””

Seductions are dangerous. A recent one is the myth of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which produced deadly and far reaching consequences. The barrage of media reports, the United Nations address by Colin Powell, etc. all conspired to shape our thinking and make it more difficult to resist the Bush administration push to war.
Deconstruction of the text of myths is not a dismantling of the structure of the text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air. Deconstruction takes effort and time, but should lead to a deeper understanding of any subject of study.

Myths also abound in science. Take for example the “myth” created during the 1800’s and debunked about 1890 that light was propagated through ether.
Richard Feynman, beloved by his acolytes and probably the only physicist to make major achievements in theoretical physics in each of 6 decades, reworked every aspect of physics from the basics. From “Richard Feynman: A Life in Science” by John and Mary Gribbin:

“There was another way in which Feynman lacked respect (in the best possible way) for authority, linked to his love of problem solving. He wanted to work out everything for himself, from first principles. That way he could be sure he had got it rights instead of, perhaps, wasting valuable time developing someone else’s ideas, only to find that those ideas had been wrong in the first place.”

Feynman’s most startling and amazing advances in physics derived directly from this framework of thinking. There is an excitement associated with thinking for yourself and being certain (at least as certain as you can be) of the result.
The same applies to journalism and I suggest the same applies to law and the purposes it serves. Slavish application of law without such reflection denies the possibility of a much richer approach to law, to achieving client satisfaction and understanding and to law firm management.

One problem is that we are too busy living (and sometimes to lazy) to think everything through. Not many of us can afford the luxury of deconstructing everything around us. Also this type of examination can challenge our comfortable notions about life – challenge us to change things. On the other hand, have we got our priorities right. If you are person for which the richness and texture of life is the result of creative thinking, can you afford not to focus more on why?

To be continued.

Who Needs Work?

The question of who needs work and what do you do when it eludes you should be on everyone’s mind. The intrinsic value of work is so ingrained, it is almost a part of our essential identity. Without work, what is the meaning of life?
I will leave the value of work for another blog.

In this blog, I want to look at the consequences of not having work or not having enough work and how it affects us.

We have always endured fluctuations in the economy and the resulting impacts on the employment market. From the beginning of the recession in 2008, over 8.2 million jobs were lost in the US (some say more and the new jobs coming on stream were temporary, lower paying or in service sector) bringing unemployment rates close to 10%. In Canada there has been a similar experience although not so dramatic, except for Ontario where the manufacturing industry, particularly car manufacturing, has been decimated.

Unless you or someone in your family has experienced the pain of lay-offs, redundancy, early retirement or not being hired back, this all may seen a bit theoretical rather than personal but you should not be deceived. There are and will be long term effects from this recession, as there have been historically from other recessions.

The impacts have been discussed by Don Peck in his article in The Atlantic, March 2010 – “How a New Jobless Era will Transform America”.

There are many ideas in this article worth exploring. As Peck points out, young people who either lose their jobs or are unable to get into the labour market for a period of time following graduation suffer lifetime earning losses and face more severe difficulties because they must compete against fresh graduates who don’t have to explain why they have been out of work for a year. There is also downward pressure on salaries as the unemployed pool expands.

Experienced workers holding prestigious degrees are accepting unpaid internships, cutting out the new graduates from even this source of work. There are other long term consequences such as heavier consumption of alcohol and more incidence of depression throughout lifetime even for those do get jobs.

People are diminished by loss of work. Men out of work struggle to find a place in their marriages, probably to a greater degree than women.

The recession has had serious negative repercussions on law firms. Work has declined. There is downward pressure on fees. Some clients have financial problems and cannot pay or cut back on legal services, etc. These problems are simply a mirror image of the overall economic situation. Law firms, like other employers, want to protect their bottom line and the simplest way to do it, in the short run, is cut staff or implement a hiring freeze. Individual lawyers who, for the most part and despite express declarations to the contrary, “eat what they kill” ie are paid on their billings, are very disinclined to share work or reduce their take-home pay.

Law firms cannot solve the problem of unemployment or the economy. However, they must protect and foster their vital resource, their people and in order to do so have to appreciate firstly the negative impacts on their people of a recession and secondly that they must carefully examine alternatives based on both short and long term planning.

According to Jordan Furlong in an article which appears in the Canadian Bar Association website:

“It’s time for something new — a law firm that takes organizational commitment seriously and recruits people not just for skills, which are abundant in the talent pool, but also for their willingness to work, share, build, train and innovate as a team.”

I think some of the answers may be found in developing strong management and a firm culture which will promote and implement the following:
Ø proactive approach which recognizes the onset of economic problem and plans for them
Ø giving the young lawyers training and mentoring in client development – this is not an inate skill
Ø training the young lawyers to live with the stresses of the new environment
Ø promoting work sharing and demonstrably requiring it both with financial incentives and monitoring with the intent of carrying this forward as the economy improves
Ø making long term decisions to keep those young lawyers who have superior talent with the commitment by the more experienced lawyers to get in more work or to work share
Ø use time and talents of underutilized lawyers for education and community work
Ø acculturate the partners to the need to modify their financial expectations for the betterment of the firm because of the positive benefits of retaining employees over the long run