Why important matters

I am chair of trustees of a mental health charity in South East London. I spent part of yesterday morning with our Strategic Development Director, reviewing how we are taking our strategy forward. In the course of our discussion, I talked with her about how I see my role as chair. We agreed that a key part of it is encouraging the executive team to remain focused on the Important.

The demands of everyday management are such that it is all too easy to allow the Urgent to push the Important to the background. We all do this. There is always firefighting and the natural reaction is that the Urgent has to take priority.

Well, yes and no. Yes, because small fires have an uncanny knack of becoming bigger ones; and no, because without that focus on the Important, the risk is that the organisation stalls, and that strategic issues drift*. 

The trick is to strike that necessary balance - easier said than done, perhaps, but all the same essential. 

*And, in case you are wondering, in the charity we are all focused - trustees and executive team - on the Important. Yes, there are any number of Urgent matters - that's the nature of the services we provide - but we want to go on being able to provide them, and that means that the Important is important. 

Why conversations?

I asked one of my daughters to look at the final draft of my last post.

With rather too much honesty, she emailed me,

"Also perhaps a little too much use of 'conversation': why not consider substituting 'communication' or 'discussion' in some cases?"

Well, that is not quite all she said, but, for the purposes of this post, all I need to tell you. 

Did I use the word 'conversation' too much? I don't think so. As I explained to her, conversation is what it is all about.

Conversation, true conversation, is not just talking, nor is it telling someone, or being told, what to do. And it isn't simply a means of giving or receiving information - though that is often part of conversation.

It involves trust and respect. For participating in a conversation is to be open to the possibility of being wrong, of having your ideas changed, or of changing someone else's ideas. And so it involves proper interaction: listening, reflecting, responding, asking and answering questions, adjusting your position if necessary. There is a purpose to conversation - and a conversation requires work and, as often as not, preparation.

And it may neither be easy nor comfortable.

A last word from Theodore Zeldin, interviewed* by Matthew Taylor in the last RSA Journal

"There is no genuine conversation when people speak but ignore or misunderstand what others say."

*Tomorrow's Work, RSA Journal Issue 3, 2014

Variations on a theme

My time and attention has been on family, not work, the past few months. After some 40 years of it being the other way round, this has been both instructive and novel. Whether I had wanted to or not, I have stood back from the day job. Instead my priority has been settling my frail uncle safely in to a nursing home and getting to grips with his affairs - his bank accounts, tax return, subscriptions, bills, receipts, direct debits, standing orders, council tax, community alarm, flat, neighbours, the rest of the family.

And I have found myself standing on the edge of his life and that of my aunt, now dead some 10 years. Going through their papers (my uncle has kept everything) I found a cutting from The Guardian, a short piece, Little boxes of past lives, by Peter Preston - about how the memorabilia stored in our garages and lofts will mean little to those who one day clear them.

My uncle is still alive, but clearing his - their - flat, I have been doing just what Peter Preston and his siblings and step-siblings did when his stepmother died. And as I have gone through my uncle's brown cardboard boxes, files of papers, treasures and bric-a-brac I have travelled the years of their lives, 40 before marriage, 40 married, and my uncle's last lonely 10. And I keep thinking not just about my uncle's prescience in keeping that article, but that his plunge into dementia has robbed me of the opportunity to have the conversations we might otherwise have had - not just to fill the gaps in his life but in those of his wife's. For it is just the bare bones of those two lives in the boxes; the remainder - their real lives and the life they lived together - is now for ever locked up in his head.

So, conversations.

When I set out on 1 August, my aim was to help lawyers and marketers understand each other. To bridge a gap that I experienced first hand in my two years as a Director of Marketing. 

But time with and for my uncle has allowed me space to reflect on the challenges that law firms, law firm leaders, and lawyers have to meet - and the need for honest conversations about them. For sure conversations are held in law firms, but for all those that are, there are as many that aren't. Worse, there are those worthless conversations which convince us we have had them, when we haven't.

And in all of them it is as much about what is not said as what is.

Over the next few weeks this website will change, to reflect a widening of the focus. No longer just conversation about where lawyers and marketing meet, it will be much more about how best to have that much wider range of conversations - and in particular the ones lawyers would prefer to avoid.

Not quite starting again - I already have three projects on the go, each at various stages. Listening to clients, to learn what they are really thinking; a project to find out why law firm leaders and partners avoid discussing what may happen next; and a project to look at why, even now, we don't feel able to talk about mental heath and wellbeing in law firms.

But a change of direction.

The rearview mirror

Why am I not surprised that lawyers prefer to stick to what they have done before? A lot of people do: it's a known quantity, it requires less time, and it costs less. Lawyers are comfortable with precedent, and that is what it is all about.

And at one level that's OK. Why reinvent the wheel?

But there is a caveat.

For all their talk of innovation (one of the most used words on law firm websites) lawyers aren't very good at "the new". For a number it simply means finding a slightly different way to bill you. And as for marketing? Lawyers shrink at the thought of anything too novel. At one of the firms I worked for, a partner told me, "The last thing we want to be is first", adding, "and anyway, why do we need to change anything? What we had was fine by me."

I left Ashfords LLP as Director of Marketing late yesterday afternoon. My P45 was in the post - the last time I had one of these was nearly 30 years ago. Today I go out on my own as George Wilkinson Consultancy.

And on what is for now, although I hope not for long, a rather clear desk, I have this quote,

We  should spend more time thinking about the future and postulating possible outcomes, rather than relying on the past.

History is important for all sorts of reasons but, as my team became very tired of hearing, the future is not going to be more of the same. That will be as true of law as it is for all the professions, and how law is sold and marketed is going to change.

All I know is that this is going to be an exciting time. 

Note: the quote is by Karl Sternberg from his review in Christ Church Matters of Jerome Booth's Emerging Markets in an Upside Down World.  

Some thoughts on branding

Back in 2005 I read Good companies are from Venus, a piece by Richard Tomkins in the Financial Times. I still have the index card on which I copied out a quote (I have a number of these, all now somewhat dog-eared). This is one I often refer to. For in less than 100 words Tomkins catches what “brand” means (and in doing so highlights the particular challenge for law firms when thinking about brand, if indeed they do).

A high quality product is just the price of entry to a market. Beyond that, what companies are really selling is the thing they can use to differentiate their products from their A high quality product is just the price of entry to a market. Beyond that, what companies are really selling is the thing they can use to differentiate their products from their competitors: the set of emotions, ideas, and beliefs their brands convey . . . The most successful brands and companies are those that establish a relationship with consumers based on communicating with them, understanding their needs and empathising with them.

Although Tomkins was writing about companies, much of what he said is equally applicable to professional service firms.

Law firms, by and large, accept that to succeed in today’s legal services market they need to establish differentiators (see my last post Futurology sucks). Not least, as in terms of legal expertise there is often very little to choose between good law firms and good lawyers.

Where lawyers have difficulty, is in articulating their brand, and communicating it. Lawyers don’t really do emotions, ideas, and beliefs - well, not in business. What they do is “law” - but then so do any number of other law firms.

Asking law firms to think about the intangibles of "brand", rather than what they do, is not always a very rewarding exercise. But it should be, because this is the first step for a law firm and its lawyers in identifying and then realising their brand. And in helping them to use this to build those long term relationships with clients which are so necessary to the success of the law firm.