Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Outliers and the Professions


Last week’s post looked at Malcolm Gladwell's latest book.

Interestingly, Gladwell has previously also provided guidance on what types of factors may be of interest to the professions as the foundations of the time billing business model continue to be subject to intense scrutiny.

In particular, in Gladwell's book Outliers (see - http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930), he analysed the 'perfect storm' that allowed the legendary New York legal firms to seemingly come from nowhere and become arguably the western world's most famous and successful law firms.

The analogies given the current changes facing the time billing professions should be clearly identifiable, given the wave of innovative business models enjoying exponential rates of growth across a myriad of industries.

The key factors identified by Gladwell as the criteria for the successful New York lawyers were as follows:
  1. be born in 1930 (40 years of age in 1970 when the revolution first began and a 15 year period of experience in takeover work while others were ignoring it); 
  2. be an outsider; 
  3. have parents who did meaningful work; and 
  4. have a strong dose of ingenuity and drive.
As mentioned previously, we began the journey to address many of the challenges of redefining the professional services firm business model over 10 years ago. In this regard, it is exciting to have been selected to present at the 2016 ALPMA Summit, A Blue Print for Change, 7-9 September in Melbourne – see - http://www.alpma.com.au/Summit

For many, the journey has started more recently and we believe it important to share our learnings. Our upcoming July roadshow will be a full day example of this.

For your limited opportunity that lasts less than 2 weeks to access special early bird pricing for our Roadshow, download the brochure here.