ChuckBingaman.com -- Leadership & Management Newsletter

CLE Leadership & Management
Ideas, Resources, and Techniques for CLE Professionals
A periodic e-newsletter

By Chuck Bingaman - chuck@chuckbingaman.com

#34 March 2007

Leadership The Wharton School and the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education have launched "The Executive Program in Work-Based Learning Leadership”, a new Masters and PhD program for Learning Leaders (corporate CLOs—Chief Learning Officers—and others), according to Elliott Masie who sits on its Board of Advisors. “It’s a tough, rigorous and innovative program that has almost 20 senior leaders as students in its first ‘cohort’”, says Masie. Fellow board members include two of the first CLOs in the country, Steve Kerr (GE and now Goldman Sachs) and Bill Wiggenhorn (Motorola University and now Executive Development Associates), as well as senior learning executives from Home Depot, IBM and MTV.The Wharton School and the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education have launched "The Executive Program in Work-Based Learning Leadership”, a new Masters and PhD program for Learning Leaders (corporate CLOs—Chief Learning Officers—and others), according to Elliott Masie who sits on its Board of Advisors. “It’s a tough, rigorous and innovative program that has almost 20 senior leaders as students in its first ‘cohort’”, says Masie. Fellow board members include two of the first CLOs in the country, Steve Kerr (GE and now Goldman Sachs) and Bill Wiggenhorn (Motorola University and now Executive Development Associates), as well as senior learning executives from Home Depot, IBM and MTV.

“Over the coming years,” says Masie, a guru in online learning, “this program has the potential both to increase the research base of learning as a business force and to prepare the next generation of learning leaders.” For more information, see http://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu/clo.cfm.

Maybe CLE organizations should be sponsoring conferences for law firm CLOs (or helping firms to create such positions). Maybe ACLEA should offer national conferences for law firm CLOs. For more resources on CLOs, see http://www.clomedia.com/content/templates/clo_home.asp?articleid=714&zoneid=145

Management Should you offer a course on Building the “Green” Law Firm: 50 Ways to Manage Your Resources, Save Expenses and Attract Far-Sighted Clients? It might bomb the first year. It also might set your organization apart as a visionary group that offers exactly what GenX lawyers and their clients want in 2007. And it might be the way to offer important law office management material that hits lawyers from a new angle and where they live: in their bank accounts! One of the primary themes of LERN’s November, 2006 Annual Conference on Lifelong Learning was that CE sponsors now serve two similarly sized but quite different markets: Baby Boomers and GenXrs. Because their life experiences, values and outlooks are so different, LERN leaders argue that we must tailor different approaches for each group if we want to maximize their responses to our offerings. Different programs, different marketing themes and advertising images, different faculties, etc. Those of us that have been in CLE for a long time have had the luxury of serving almost all Boomers our whole careers. But now Boomers’ ranks are beginning to shrink, and the GenXrs’ numbers—and especially their influence— are growing in the legal world. What is your organization’s strategy for adjusting to this seismic shift in its markets? Have you considered the value and emerging potential of offering certificate programs? They can set your organization apart as THE source for in-depth, high level training in an emerging field, they can offer portable credentials that some professionals want and need, and they can generate significant revenue. Possible blended formats—live, webinars, web casts, retreats, online materials and exercises, etc.—offer educationally creative possibilities and new markets. And they may enable you to offer real learning in subjects heretofore beyond traditional CLE fare such as Chinese Language for Lawyers, International Trade for Lawyers, and What Business Lawyers Must Know About Climate Change. Two straight-forward and adaptable lessons from a new Business Week survey of customer service leaders: first, no employee of Four Seasons Hotels gets a job without passing four employment interviews. Great hospitality performance—just like great CLE performance—is the result of superior relationship management. Make sure you get great people people on the front end! Second, when J.W. Marriott Hotels replaced paper comment cards with online surveys, responses jumped by 50%. CLE sponsors could easily test the comparative results of such a changeover.

Resources Have you seen the book called Word of Mouth Marketing: How to Get People Talking by Andy Sernovitz (Kaplan Publishing, 2006)? Sernovitz, quoted in the March 2007 Fast Company, suggests, among many other approaches, to put “tell a friend” links on every page on your web site. Make it simple for your web readers to share what you offer with their friends. Speaking of Fast Company, that March edition is worth the year’s subscription fee if only for the cover story “Fast 50: 50 Profit Driven Solutions for What Ails the Planet”. The introduction is very thoughtful, and the 50 profiled people and ideas are inspiring and stimulating—the perfect antidote for the depression I’ve been suffering from based on “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The End of Suburbia”!

Personal Notes I’ll be attending the 2007 ABA TechShow in Chicago March 22-24, making notes on all the latest lawyers’ uses of technology and writing a thorough report oriented toward the wants, needs and interests of CLE administrators. If you want details on subscribing to my report, send me an email. Also, let me know if you are interested in my report from the LERN (Learning Resources Network) Annual Conference on Lifelong Learning held last November in Baltimore. LERN is the world’s largest continuing education organization. Its keynotes and many breakout sessions generated a LOT of good ideas directly adaptable to CLE.

Following 20 years as Executive Director of a major American CLE organization, Chuck now consults on CLE strategic planning, marketing, CLE executive hiring, and management challenges with CLE organizations, bar associations, law firms, and law schools. 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.