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CLE Leadership & Management
Ideas, Resources, and Techniques for
CLE Professionals
A periodic e-newsletter
By Chuck Bingaman - chuck@chuckbingaman.com
#15 July
2004
Leadership  General Electric’s CEO Jeffrey
Immelt took over an enormous, successful company three years ago with the
advice from his predecessor to “blow it up!” The
same advice, incidentally, that his predecessor had gotten when he
took the job. Immelt’s “blowing up” the
company has involved a turn away from acquisitions to a focus on tech-related
innovation and an accelerated sales. Last
September, frustrated with progress in those fields, he assembled his 10 top
people and charged them to “put growth on steroids”. He gave them 60 days to return with five new
ideas each for growth businesses, “imagination breakthroughs” he called them,
that could generate $100 million in three years! When the leaders recovered from the shock of the task and brainstormed
with their people, they returned with 50 ideas, 35 of which have been “greenlighted” for
development and projected for potentially $5 billion (that’s BILLION!) in revenue
by 2006! Could we CLE leaders try a similar
approach in our organizations to break out of old ruts and to seize the opportunities
around us? (BTW, Immelt has charged his
people with coming up with 50 more such
ideas by the end of the summer! I’d hate
to be competing with GE in the next few years!! ) Sue Lynch, Massachusetts
CLE
Program Attorney for Criminal and Family Law, is leaving August 1 for a six-month
tour of reserve duty in Kosovo as Senior Defense Counsel for the 154th Legal
Support Organization. Sue, whose Spanish
101 for Lawyers course has won an ACLEA Award of Excellence in 2004, is in
her first year in CLE and expects to return to Mass CLE in February, 2005. During her time in Kosovo, she’ll be representing
American soldiers in criminal and other difficulties as lead
defense counsel. You can communicate
with Sue in Kosovo at sjlynch87@yahoo.com.
Management
Are
all of your advertising communications focused where they SHOULD be?
On the wants and needs of your recipients and potential customers? Several recently received advertising pieces
from CLE and related vendors were far off that mark, completely
self-focused. To succeed at all, CLE
direct mail pieces should ALWAYS address their recipients’ wants first and
foremost. Certainly they need to incorporate
benefits of his or her service and his or her qualifications along the way, but
the headline, the subheads, the theme, lead sentence and every other part should
relate to the wants of the potential buyer. Focusing on your recipients’ wants should
head your checklist for evaluating all of your advertising. Maybe all of our business communications,
period. When
you attend the upcoming ACLEA annual meeting—or any other
conference—do so with an action plan including your own supplemental schedule
of coffee meetings, lunches, dinners, etc. for making the most of
it! Next, prepare with the proper tools,
including an ample supply of business cards, PDA with “beaming” capability, cell
phone, and even digital camera to shoot pictures of products, etc. that you can
analyze once you’re back home. At the meeting, program your hotel room’s answering service with
your personal message so people will feel comfortable leaving messages for
you—not Room 2134! Choose the sessions
you’ll attend with care, but do not hesitate to move on should a session not
be
fulfilling your needs. And remember that
much, maybe most, of the value of the conference comes from the people you sit
next to or meet in the refreshment/exhibit areas. Your real work and value gained may be in the breaks! A
quick, to-the-point source of inspiration to upgrade our CLE marketing is found
in A Manifesto for Marketing: What Ails the Profession and How to Fix It by
Prof. Mohanbir S. Sawhney of the Kellogg School of Management in the current
issue of Chief Marketing Officer Magazine. See www.cmomagazine.com/read/0701/04/manifesto.html.
Resources Want
to multiply your searching power on the ‘Net? Instead of just using Google, try www.queryster.com to search across multiple
search engines. The default puts
your search in the ten most common engines, including Google, Wisenut,
Yahoo, Ask, etc. You can also customize it for specific types of searches
such
as legal searches. For an
enjoyable, practical and intellectual experience with direct relevance to everyday
living and problem solving, I strongly recommend Destructive Emotions: How
Can We Overcome Them? A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama narrated by Daniel
Goleman (Bantam Books, 2003). A great opportunity to learn more about
how our emotions operate, and a fantastically interesting opportunity to learn
how Buddhists look at these things from their perspective! The chapter on the Dalai Lama’s childhood
and training alone is worth searching out the book. While
I’ve
mentioned it before in this space, it’s worth mentioning again. Check www.ceoexpress.com as
a simple, quick source of links to all kinds of daily usable information. The Sawhney article cited above is this
week’s featured CEOexpress article. If you
need to hone your
management skills but straight management books aren’t your thing, you might
try
the blog called Management by Baseball by Jeff Angus at http://cmdr.scott.blogspot.com. Sort of like taking your medicine mixed with
Cracker Jacks, at least for baseball enthusiasts. In it Angus discusses all manner of management challenges, strategies
and issues as illustrated in baseball teams around the country. Quite good!
I
welcome your feedback! Please keep in touch! CCB
Following 20 years as Executive Director of a major CLE organization
in the USA, Chuck now consults on strategic planning, marketing and management
challenges with CLE and other legal organizations, law firms, law schools and
others. He is currently advising on
new strategic directions with a national CLE provider, helping orient a new
CLE marketing director, and advising on marketing strategy for a new private
bank and an investment company. He welcomes your inquiries on projects designed
to enhance your organization’s effectiveness. You can contact him at chuck@chuckbingaman.com, at 603-756-9268, or
at
P.O. Box 390, Walpole, NH 03068. Past
issues of this newsletter are archived at www.chuckbingaman.com.
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