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CLE Leadership & Management
Ideas, Resources, and Techniques for
CLE Professionals
A periodic e-newsletter
By Chuck Bingaman - chuck@chuckbingaman.com
#9 November, 2003
Leadership
 Andy Falender, Executive
Director of the Appalachian Mountain Club, writing in this month’s Club
magazine, notes that “Skilled leaders have learned that healthy human
relationships and good group dynamics are essential ingredients of a
successful trip. A good trip leader
recognizes that we all have our particular strengths, and we can all learn
from others whose strengths don’t necessarily mirror ours.” Whether it’s a wilderness trip or the
journey of a CLE business, leaders must concern themselves with healthy staff
relationships and group dynamics.
Leaders must see that people with the right mix of skills are in the
right positions and that their staff people have mature role models to follow
and practical opportunities to work through the inevitable tensions and conflicts. Tom Peters is at it again! His new book is Re-imagine!
Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age (Dorling Kindersley). Love him or loath him, Tom is always
stimulating! His latest comment
on differentiation: “Successful companies must offer a ‘scintillating
experience’ in order to set themselves apart in an environment where most
competitors already provide a decent product.” Incidentally, the book’s quite
interesting visually, typical of all D-K books. Jennifer L. Kramer, President of Clarion Legal, a St.
Paul, MN not-for-profit CLE provider, has recently lead a “branding” makeover
and is now using the slogan “Exceptional Learning”. A bold, eye-catching promise and a
daily challenge to her and her staff!
Check it out at Clarion’s attractive web site www.clarionlegal.com.
Management
Want a living, breathing way both
to benchmark your CLE enterprise and to challenge yourself with ongoing new
ideas for growing your business?
Pick an exceptionally creative, well-run local business—not in the CLE
field—and make it your business to follow it with an eye toward adapting its
creative approaches to your situation.
What does it do in product/service development, marketing, customer
service, pricing, packaging, personnel selection and training, and change
management that make it succeed?
How do its leaders see their business, their market and the challenges
before them? In my case, I watch
the work of Larry Burdick of L.A. Burdick Handmade Chocolates here in
Walpole, NH. Burdick runs a
gourmet chocolate shop/restaurant here and in Cambridge, MA and an active
online business at www.laburdick.com. He’s a master businessman who always
seems to have something new happening, something interesting, something
appealing to his old and new customers.
He’s quite visible and interested in customer suggestions. Few CLE leaders have had formal
training in running businesses, but that's what we do. Fortunately there are great examples
to observe and follow nearby…if we look for them. Have you thought about your emergency management plans
lately? A consulting client told
me recently of a registrant who collapsed at one of her courses but who was
revived by a doctor on her faculty who applied CPR. Is your staff trained for CPR? Heimlich Maneuver? Stroke or heart attack recognition?
Should your organization have a portable defibrillator? Do you know about the emergency
preparedness of the meeting facilities staffs you use? Do you have an up to date list of
names to be contacted in case of a staff emergency?
Resources &
Strategies The worldwide
leader in industrial design, Ideo, approaches a design assignment by
attempting to empathize with those who may use the product to be
designed. Their systematic
method for getting inside the heads and hearts of potential customers is now
available to us in an ingenious $49 card deck called Ideo Method Cards. It borrows techniques from
anthropology, psychology, biomechanics and other disciplines. Might be just the thing to tune up
your CLE programs or publications.
Get full information or order your deck at www.ideo.com/case_studies/methoddeck/index.html. BTW, the decks are currently
back-ordered until later this month!
Have you checked out Capella
University’s web site? It’s
the three-year-old ‘Web based startup university that is attracting enormous
registration and revenues at www.Capella.edu. While online CLE is still searching
for a breakout success formula, the success of Capella really makes me think
that online education is going to break out of fringe status and BE a
mainstream before long. While I
doubt that it will displace in-person training, online surely will form a
large part of professional education in the not distant future. Capella’s motto is “Education. Reborn.” An ongoing in-house training
project has sent me back to Working with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel
Goleman (A Bantam Book, 1998).
What an avalanche of grown-up performance and leadership
insights! It would be the
perfect book to read and discuss with your business colleagues and to use in
training your staff! You could
even build a powerful in-house training program around it. Finally, I had occasion to read last
week—for the first time—To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Even if you read it in high school,
read it again as an adult! A
gripping drama. A haunting look into
American racial attitudes. A master storyteller at work! Quite inspiring for lawyers and those
who work with them!
Following an award-winning 20 years as Executive
Director of Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education, Chuck now
consults full-time on business opportunities and management challenges with
CLE organizations, legal publishers, and law firms. Chuck also teaches a course on law practice marketing and
writes a monthly marketing column for lawyers.
You can contact Chuck 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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