BREAKAWAY®

"We travel the path first broken, and over the years that path, through continuing affirmation of use, becomes a rut that directs our travel without the need for thought as to direction or destination. We become experts at mimicking mediocrity."

              James Jeans, author of a classic text on trial advocacy

Would your firm's current strategy cause your competitor's palms to sweat, or simply provoke a yawn?

Let's think for a minute - How different is what you are doing right now - the strategies that you are employing now - from the four or five key competitors in your marketplace?

If your answer is "not much" - then how are you expecting to surpass their performance? We all know instinctively that doing the same thing and expecting different results is futile. But, unless you are willing to "breakaway" from your current pattern and embrace an agenda of strategy innovation, there is little hope of achieving superior performance.

Now your firm could stay the course, except for one minor consideration - Your firm is today practicing in a dynamic environment in which rivals can come from anywhere (looking to eat your lunch) and the pace of change is blindsiding.

In the midst of this, it takes a new breed of rugged and fearless competitive premeditation to succeed. Faced with a barrage of growth constraints - and threats to your long-term success - now is the time for you to make a crucial decision. Do you want to maintain your firm's current moves or do you want to seize control of your future?

Today, many firm leaders are worried about their firm's competitive profile. Their concern is of a financial nature and emanates from observing that while revenue and profits may have been increasing, they have not been increasing as fast as competitors. Others have with some alarm, witnessed key partners moving one foot out the door, because they don't feel their firm is progressive enough.

If your firm gets caught behind the curve,
it wasn't because these trends weren't visible;
it's because they were ignored.

SO WHAT ARE YOUR OPTIONS?

• YOU COULD indulge in the latest fad and commit some significant dollars to a program designed to develop and advertise your firm's "brand".

  And advertising in the right circumstances might be a viable marketing endeavor. Just a couple of questions to reflect upon:

  Which firm was the last professional service provider that you hired based on an advertisement?

  Did you happen to read yesterday's newspaper? What was the headline on page one? If you can't remember the headline, how in the world are you expecting people to remember your advertising among the vast media clutter that suffocates us all?

• YOU COULD simply wait until events unfold and then adapt to whatever changes were having the greatest impact.

  Many believe that they can quickly adapt if anything really dramatic manifests itself. And agility is great, but if you become nothing more than agile you will remain a perpetual follower - and even fast followers find few spoils. Your goal is not to speculate on what might happen, but to imagine what you could make happen

  "With very few exceptions, once a firm has achieved some measure of success, it stops making waves. Studies have shown that we are not so much risk-averse as loss-averse - the more we already have, the more our inclination is not to gamble it."

• YOU COULD engage the management committee and partners of your firm in a bit of strategic planning.

  Unfortunately, what all too often passes for strategic planning is nothing more than conventional approaches. Follow conventional thinking and planning, and you can kiss your future goodbye! Conventional strategic planning seldom illuminates new opportunities or provides any insight into how to rewrite the rules. Rather it relies on historical data with the result of simply extrapolating history into the future.                                     News Flash: Your future is not an echo of the past.

  Further, to buy your strategic plan from the same old, tired consulting organizations that your competitors use is delusional. When some consultant tells you, "we've done strategic plans for hundreds of firms like yours" he's really saying: "We'll infect you with the same boilerplate we've used with everyone else in the profession." To create true differentiation you must innovate in ways that your competitors are not doing. If your strategy ain't different, it's DOA.

FORGET CONVENTIONAL . . . THINK RADICAL.

Here is a rather "radical" option, it's called our BreakAway® Program. Our primary message: ignore precedent, ignore what other firms are doing, create opportunity. One of the things we have learned is that significant shifts in achieving growth do not occur by imitating some competitive firm's moves. Rather, significant shifts can occur only by looking to where the profession is evolving, moving quickly to get to the future first, developing a position of meaningful differentiation, thereby seeking to change the rules of the game.

Our BreakAway® Program is designed to help your management committee and partners develop effective strategy. We believe the measure of effective strategy is the:

• breaking of existing rules and precedents
• search for a (temporary) monopoly
• ability to differentiate in a meaningful way that attracts clients
• creation of new wealth by creating new markets, new clients and new revenue streams
• achievement of above-average profitability
• making of hard choices which usually involves excruciating trade-offs
• action plan that folds the future back into the present
• number of small, limited risk, field tests and experiments that get underway

Consider this. Did your last strategic plan make any allowances for answering questions like:

• What new and emerging areas of client demand can we develop faster than our competitors thereby building a lead position?
  [Many of our clients enjoy the profitability that accrues to being "first-movers"]
• Could we do something that would reduce our clients' desire or ability to retain any other firm?
• What do we believe would be an insanely unreasonable (but perhaps, realizable?) expectation for our firm's revenue growth over the next three years?
  [It's curious how a firm never grows beyond the expectations it sets for itself.]
• How many unsolicited business plans and innovative ideas that require investment has firm management received during the past year?
  [One of our clients, a top 20 firm, has set up a special internal innovation fund for the development of new practice areas and knowledge development initiatives]
• What business would we get into, given what we know and what we own, if tomorrow we could no longer practice in our given profession?

"For those who built the firm's past successes, the temptation to preserve the status quo can be overwhelming. The battle is not globalism versus regionalism, it is about innovation versus precedent. If the medical profession was based on precedent, we would still be using leeches. The practice of law is about following precedent, strategizing is about being first."

Conventional wisdom suggests that strategy is the easy part, implementation is the hard part. Don't believe it! Implementation may indeed be hard, but strategy is easy only if you are content to have a strategy that resembles everyone else. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery - it is the worst form of strategy. Strategy is anything but easy if your goal is to create meaningful differentiation.

We have but one objective - to help you create innovative strategy. If you want profitable growth, take dramatic action - time is not on your side.

BreakAway®  Summary

Initial Orientation

• We collaborate in reviewing the firm's growth expectations and our unique approach to strategic innovation.

Module 1: "Breaking With Your Immediate Past" Firm Level - Current Position (Where We Are)

• We introduce the need for innovation
• We discover, with the partners, some areas of firm distinction and also some areas that need remedial action
• We begin to build partner buy-in to the strategy process
• We develop some initial action plans and an implementation schedule.

Module 2: "Discovery & Foresight" Firm Level - (Where We Might Go)

• We identify the firm's culture, the partners collective appetite for growth and where they might see some unexploited opportunities.
• We get a sense of the firm's competitive standing, special competencies, and potential areas for differentiation.
• We explore where the future of the profession might be headed and what that means to the firm in terms of focusing our action.

Module 3: "Practice Group Strategies"

• We identify unexplored possibilities arising from existing client achievements
• We ascertain emerging and growth opportunities for each practice group
• We develop practice group strategies and implementation plans

Module 4: "Practice Group Client Interviews"

• We test some of our initial thinking with real clients while also exploring their hidden and future needs.

Module 5: "Exploring Growth Options" - Firm Level

• We bring all of this together to look at the vast spectrum of growth opportunities available to the firm and where we are best positioned to focus our attention and resources in order to develop new clients, new markets, and new revenue streams.

Module 6: Strategy Formulation - Firm & Practices

• Together with the Executive Committee, we draft our strategic directions and present the recommendations and implementation schedule to a meeting of the partners.

Modules 7: Implementation

• We identify those action items that would benefit from having consulting assistance in the implementation.