CLE Leadership & Management
Ideas, Resources, and Techniques for
CLE Professionals
A periodic e-newsletter
By Chuck Bingaman - chuck@chuckbingaman.com
#30 July/August 2006
Leadership  The July Business 2.0 cover story titled “The 50
Who Matter Now: The Most Influential Players and What You Can Learn From
Them” pays for the year’s subscription! If your CLE mix includes
publications, you might give serious thought to 2.0’s pair of innovators
and their creations that are tied for #23 in their most influential list:
Kevin Rose of www.digg.com and Jimmy Wales of www.wikipedia.com. The note
on them, The New Media and Why It Matters, explains, “Old media is
all about reinforcing the importance of the institution as the editorial
filter. The new media is all about the importance of the reader as the editorial
filter. Tens of millions of users can create a collaborative intelligence
that’s far smarter than any one editor could ever hope to be. But the
right technology’s the key—and that’s where Rose and Wales
have made their mark. Rose created a news aggregator where readers submit
articles for consideration and “vote” on which stories should
receive prominent placement; the readers’ picks automatically create
Digg’s ever-changing front page. Wales’ Wikipedia is user-researched
and user-edited, combining timeliness, breadth, and accuracy in a way that
traditional encyclopedias simply can’t match. Taken together, they
symbolize the revolution that’s taking place in the way that news and
information [and maybe CLE reference information--CCB] will be compiled in
the years ahead.” Seems to me that this development, so well nuggeted
here, suggests vast potential for CLE publishers to explore new and valuable
content through user contributions that we can incorporate into older media
or mash up in new CLE media. The MOST important player on the 2.0 list? YOU! “They’ve
long said the customer is always right. But they never really meant it. Now
they have no choice. You—or, rather, the collaborative intelligence
of tens of millions of people, the networked you—continually create
and filter new forms of content, anointing the useful, the relevant, and
the amusing and rejecting the rest. You do it on websites like Amazon, Flickr,
and YouTube, via podcasts and SMS polling, and on millions of self-published
blogs. In every case, you’ve become an integral part of the action
as a member of the aggregated, interactive, self-organizing, auto-entertaining
audience. But the You Revolution goes well beyond user-generated content.
Companies as diverse as Delta Air Lines and T-Mobile are turning to you to
create their ad slogans. Proctor & Gamble and Lego are incorporating
your ideas into new products. You constructed open-source and are its customer
and caretaker. None of this should be a surprise, since it was you—your
crazy passions and hobbies and obsessions—that built out the Web in
the first place.”
Management
Jack
Welch, former General Electric CEO, observed recently that “The
budgeting process as it currently stands at most companies does exactly what
you’d
never want. It hides growth opportunities. It promotes bad behavior—especially
when market conditions change midstream and people still try to “make
the number.” And it has an uncanny way of sucking the energy and fun
out of an organization. Rather, he says, budgeting can be a wide-ranging, anything-goes
dialogue between the executives, the board and the customers about “gutsy
what-if” market opportunities and from that talk can spring growth scenarios
that cannot really be called budgets at all. They’re operating plans,
filled with mutually agreed upon strategies and tactics to expand sales and
earnings, not all of them sure bets.” Does your CLE budgeting process
surface new growth scenarios or does it straitjacket you into plodding through
same-old, same-old ways that have long since atrophied? Almost
any CLE service can be strengthened once it's viewed from the lawyer-user’s
perspective. And most lawyer/customers will respond favorably to services that
score high on a list of six service attributes: differentiated service, strong
perceived value-to-fee ratio, flawless delivery, mitigation of risk, creates
user capability, demonstrable results. Web
2.0 is a fuzzy new buzz phrase you hear more often these days. Beyond the fuzz
is an important set of evolving ideas about where the Web is going that, as
noted above, involves much more interaction with users and much that those
managing CLE operations can exploit. E.g. sending detailed problems with discussion
questions to course registrants in advance to enhance discussion at the programs
(and before and after), building online training around user responses to such
problems, creating interactive wikis for faculty members, authors, etc., creating “mash-ups” of
materials in your various CLE publications. Make Web 2.0 a phrase you listen
for and seek CLE applications!
Resources Want
a “daily fix of entrepreneurial ideas”? That’s the
promise of www.springwise.com, a site that highlights clever new business
ideas from around the world, some of which may be translatable into CLE
innovation? It also publishes, based on a global network of 8,000 trend
spotters, a FREE monthly newsletter that is archived on the site. Have
you tried www.skype.com? Skype is a rapidly growing Internet telephone
service that provides FREE service in the USA and Canada and very inexpensive
service internationally. And it can include picture phone service too!
It’s VERY simple to set up and the price is right. You can even
do FREE conference calls. How about adding a picture to your calls to
your CLE board members, teaching faculty and authors? (BTW, my Skype
phone number is Bing390 and, as scary as this may sound, my camera is
usually on when my computer is on. So Skype me and check it out!) I will
be doing a free hour-long webcast for Premiere Global at 1:00 p.m. EDT
Thursday, September 14 on drafting dynamite sales letters for seminars
and conferences. You should be getting detailed information soon. I just
completed two assessment/futures planning sessions for consulting
clients using new planning techniques that got rave reviews, and I’m looking
forward to several more such engagements in the fall. Now’s the
time to book your staff assessment/futures planning retreat for dates
toward the end of 2006 or very early in 2007 where there may be a lull
in your schedule. I’d be glad to talk about the possibilities and
to share references with you!
Please
keep in touch! CCB
Following 20 years as Executive Director of a major American CLE organization,
Chuck now consults on strategic planning for CLE organizations and bar associations,
on marketing for CLE sponsors and law firms, on CLE executive hiring, and on
management challenges with CLE and other legal organizations, law firms, law
schools and others. He also offers economical in-house training through conference
call courses for CLE and bar association staffs. He welcomes
your inquiries on projects designed to enhance your organization’s effectiveness.
You can contact
him at chuck@chuckbingaman.com, at 1-603-756-9268, or at P.O. Box 390, Walpole,
NH, USA 03068-0390. Past issues of this newsletter are archived at www.chuckbingaman.com.
|