Knowledge

Nothing Beats a Strong Business Case

Imagine you are asked by the partners in a multi-niche firm to help them with their strategy. Let’ say this is a medium-sized firm with four practice areas: real estate, intellectual property, social security, and professional liability disputes. The partners of the firm have the feeling that they are not truly “sharing a project” and would like some help to get one. More specifically, they ask you to come up with some brilliant ideas and awareness-enhancing approaches on vision, mission, shared values, and similar enlightening matters. They think that this mix of philosophy (mission, values, etc.) and psychology (how to better communicate in the partnership) is what they need to make their partnership truly unified. They are shopping around for the ultimate group dynamics guru and want to put you on their short list. How would you approach that?

Increasingly, my instinct is that talking about values, brand, vision, mission and other metaphysical matters can be very effective, but subject to one condition: there must be a strong underlying business case. It is pointless to advocate team spirit if there is no business case for team work. In the case of the firm with its four practice areas, I bet that the lack of cohesion among partners is not the result of a lack of interpersonal skills or other philosophical shortcoming. It is not a psychic problem, it is a strategy and market positioning problem: what is the added value on today’s market of a multi-niche firm with such unrelated practice areas? If there is no added-value in your structure, why should partners care about the governance of this structure?  If there are no clear, win-win synergies among the practice groups, why on earth should they “share a common project”? You can’t build a strong firm without a strong strategy, that is a coherent and convincing answer to the questions, “In what business segment do we want to compete?”, and “Is our organisation (including our list of practice areas) in line with that vision?” A mid-size firm with practice areas in unrelated fields (different clients, different legal issues, different business environments, different pricing habits, different networks, different competitors, etc.) will not naturally produce synergy among partners, simply because there is no reason for them to work together: they are in different businesses. It's not a firm, it is a conglomerate. Team building efforts will be helpless. If you want to build a strong, cohesive partnership, don’t limit yourself to the psychic dimension of being partners. Make sure there is a strong, shared business strategy. Your shared values will not mean much if they are not built on a shared (and solid) business-proof strategy. A firm without a common strategy and a consistent market positioning will inevitably remain or evolve towards a mere cost-sharing structure (“association de frais”), and even the most inspiring leadership guru will not change that. 

Antoine Henry de Frahan | 4 December 2007 |