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By Dan Heath So often, in both our work and our personal lives, we get trapped in reaction mode. We address emergencies as they come up, but we don’t dedicate the time and attention to examining the broken systems that cause the emergencies. In other words, we wait for problems to find us downstream instead of going upstream to understand where those problems came from. For example, in 2012 an executive at the travel website Expedia realized that after booking a trip,...
By Adam Grant Humans are creatures of habit, and our habits of thought are no exception. At work, these rote behaviors and “best practices” can facilitate efficient training and delivery of services, but when we hold too tightly to the comfort of what we think we know, we eliminate the possibility of change and growth. Being good at thinking — as so many bright lawyers are — can make us worse at rethinking because our certainty makes us ever blinder to our...
By Steven Johnson How do good ideas happen, and what can we do to help people have more of them? Steven Johnson examines how the innovations that changed the world actually happened, and reveals the pattern of behavior that often underlies them in his book “Where Good Ideas Come From”:
By Daniel Coyle Law firm leaders hear a lot about the importance of “culture” in recruiting and retaining top talent and creating a firm where lawyers can collaborate and solve problems in creative ways. But often the discussion treats culture as an elusive and even magical trait, as if some organizations are simply blessed with it at random, and others are out of luck. Where does a healthy firm culture come from? And what can leaders do to foster it? “The Culture...
By Mariana Mazzucato In taking a deeper look at law firm compensation models this month, we have been thinking about how firms define “value,” and how that definition drives their business strategy. Economist Mariana Mazzucato explores who really creates wealth in our world, and how we define value — yes, there is more than one way — in her book, “The Value of Everything: Making & Taking in the Global Economy.” Mazzucato claims that in our current stage of...