Author Robert Heinlein coined the acronym TANSTAAFL, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

I’m a fan of TANSTAAFP as well — there ain’t no such thing as a free puppy.

At left is part of a mailer I received recently offering a bunch of stuff associated with satellite TV for “free.” As Bill Cosby used to say, “Ri-i-i-i-ight!”

Free HBO and Showtime. (For three months. Then they’re very expensive.)

Free HD DVR. (You don’t have to buy it… because… you lease it. For $6 a month. I’m not quite sure how even via puffery that’s “free.” And even then it’s not included with the promotionally priced offer highlighted on the mailer.)

Free installation. (Okay, that part appears to be free.)

Free Blockbuster Home. (Lowest tier, one disc at a time, for three months. Then it’s $10 per month.)

Free local channels, too. Except ABC.¹

At least they point out that the puppy is not included.

Anyway, the point is TANSTAAFP.²

Puppies can be extremely rewarding. They offer love, warmth, joy, and occasional mastication of shoes and other objects you might have preferred intact. But they do require an ongoing investment — food, care, time.

Everything is a trade-off. If you accept the free puppy, you’ll find your Inigo Montoya moment quickly. (“You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”)

I teach in my classes that if someone offers you an additional task, a legitimate response includes some variant of “What should I not do instead?” More importantly, as a (project) manager assigning a task, you should be prepared for and indeed encourage this response. Both the task-giver and the task-receiver need to understand project priorities the same way.

I used to encourage my teams to ask this question directly and bluntly of me. That said, I strongly suggest that if you’re having the conversation with a manager who hasn’t been through my classes or indicated in some other way they’re expecting the question, you phrase the question very tactfully and carefully, even with a significant amount of circumlocution. Talk about help setting priorities, for example. Let the manager come to the realization that she just gave you a task that’s not nearly as important as the other five things she has you working on.

And as I would tell my teams, sometimes the answer is “I’ll take that other thing off your plate.” Sometimes the answer is “Let’s cut back the time (or level of effort / depth / ‘quality’) on a few of these tasks to make room for the new item.” Sometimes the answer is “Oops, this isn’t as important as the other stuff you’re doing; I’ll give it to someone else.” And sometimes the answer is “Sorry, but somehow we’ve got to get to it all.” I hated to give that answer, but occasionally it happens. Your job as a manager is to make sure it doesn’t happen as a matter of course, that it’s not the first answer or your only answer.

Because there ain’t no such thing as a free puppy.

I had a conversation recently with a firm leader about cost cutting. He said they’d gone as far with both cost-cutting and rate-cutting as they were able to. Yet clients were asking for more.

His implied challenge — actually, he asked it explicitly later — was, How can something like Legal Project Management help us? There’s not much more we can cut!

To start, Legal Project Management is not about cost (or rate) cutting per se. It’s not akin to trimming salaries or putting think-before-you-copy notes on the copier or taking Morton’s Steakhouse off your preferred provider list. Even legal process outsourcing or moving back-office and high-volume operations to less expensive cities don’t represent great parallels.

All of the things I listed above fall into the not-overspending category. (Trimming salaries falls into a lot of categories, really.) But that’s only one part of the profitability equation — and in my experience, not the most important part.

Once you’ve lowered rates and trimmed expenses, now what? Few organizations can cut their way to long-term profitability. Would GM be profitable today had it only cut costs? Probably not; they weren’t building enough cars that people were buying, and it was taking excruciatingly long times to make even small shifts in direction. They have become much more customer focused the past few years.

They have become more effective at producing and selling cars people want. It’s important that they produce them efficiently as well, but they could have doubled their efficiency producing Hummers and still not sold any more of them.

Effectiveness and efficiency aren’t the same.

Think of effectiveness as doing the right things and efficiency as doing things right. Will doing the wrong thing more efficiently sustain an organization in tough times?

Indeed, sometimes a focus on efficiency can obscure a more valuable and important push toward effectiveness. Successful Legal Project Management means becoming not just more efficient but more effective. LPM done right results in high-functioning teams, understanding true client needs rather than chasing short-term do-now items, stronger communication, skills-building through the years, and more.

A team that gains skills in Legal Project Management will over time not just see a reduction in unplanned write-offs but will have attorneys working both independently and together toward a common goal with less frustration and overlap. There will be fewer dropped balls and last-minute scrambles. People will communicate effectively and more clearly. Clients will be more satisfied because the work they value most is the work the team concentrates on. Attorneys will be happier as well.

You won’t get those results from focusing on efficiency or “tools” (particularly technological tools) rather than project thinking and project leadership. (You won’t get results overnight, either, but you will see the difference within months.)

What’s the Real Issue?

My experience with both clients and practices suggests that too often neither the client nor the firm know how to discuss – let alone quantify – the real issue, delivering value¹.

Clients say “cut your rates” in large part because it’s quantifiable and easy to report on. However, reduced hourly rates don’t guarantee additional value. They don’t even guarantee lower overall true costs when played out over a span of years.

I think LPM has a role to play here as well.²

The language of Legal Project Management can help facilitate a deeper discussion between firm and client. I’m under no illusion that this conversation will make the cost-cutting debates go away. However, thinking the Project Leadership way can provide both the means to have a “value” discussion without using that word and the tools to strengthen the win-win relationship between a client and an outside provider. This discussion can help turn “provider” into “partner.”

That’s both effective and efficient.

The PA announcer at Fenway Park, Carl Beane, died yesterday in a car accident.

To honor him, the Red Sox will silence the PA at Fenway this evening.

Classy move.

(For what it’s worth, I grew up a Yankees fan whose dreams and nightmares were announced — slowly and precisely — by the late Bob Sheppard.)

Harvard and MIT yesterday announced they’ll be offering some of their regular courses online.

These aren’t wimpy “free-U” courses. These are real courses. With real (tough) exams and grades.

Harvard and MIT aren’t alone. Working on competing (and complementary) efforts are a few other little schools. Princeton. Stanford. Penn. Michigan.

That’s serious stuff.

So… where are the law schools?

There are two avenues they could potentially travel.

Avenue A: Law School Debt

A lot has been written this past year about the burden of law school debt on newly minted lawyers. I don’t need to go there, other than to point out the semi-obvious:

• Such courses could go a long way toward reducing the debt burden over time — e.g., if law students could spend two years on campus and one year on line.
• Law schools might not be thrilled because of the amount of money they’re currently making… but remember Stein’s Law: If something cannot continue forever, it will stop.
• Not all courses are amenable to online delivery… but many would be.
• Would this encourage even more aspiring law students? (And what is the real problem, not the surface one under discussion? We already have more English Lit majors than English Lit jobs, but I don’t see a groundswell of complaint.)

Avenue B: Practical Legal Skills

Law schools by and large do not teach practical skills, from Legal Project Management to the techniques of document review.

An online environment might be an effective way to teach these skills. Not perfect, but effective.

I’m not talking webinars, remember, but serious online courses. With interaction. Study groups. Required participation scores. Exams and grading.

Consider the courses that might be available for in effect post-grad study by folks who already have their law degree, such as:

• Legal Project Management
• Document Review Techniques
• People Management
• Rainmaking
• Negotiating Settlements
• Negotiating Deals
• Negotiating E-Discovery – The First 30 Days
• The Economics of Law Firms
• Business Economics for In-House Attorneys
• Communication Skills

Those are just the first ten  that come to mind. Each of these could and should be a rigorous course, just as with a normal law-school course. A lawyer wouldn’t take them all at once, but one or two a year as she moved up in her career.

There are a lot of oxen to gore here, though. Independent providers of such training (such as my own outfit). Law schools themselves, worried that eventually this style will move from post-grad education to law school itself. Groups that put on for-lots-of-profit CLE events. Lawyers who treat CLE conferences as junkets.

Those are fair points.

What’s needed, I think, is an honest and open debate.

One thing that should be off the table — settled issue — is the potential efficacy, rigor, and delivery technology for those courses. It is a proven idea. It has been done in the technology arena for years. Harvard, MIT, Stanford, et al. are adding their imprimatur. This stuff works. (I’m not saying there won’t be bad teachers and dumb syllabi; rather, I’m pointing out that with sharp teachers there will be effective, testable, provable learning.)

So… let’s talk about this over the coming year.

And learn which top-14 law school will be the first to step up, perhaps in partnership with an AmLaw 10 firm and a Fortune 20 law department.

We may live in interesting times.

I bought my 11-year-old son a new baseball mitt yesterday.

His old one — a hand-me-down from his sister¹ — was totally worn out. The last straw was a weekend game where as shortstop he took a perfect throw from the catcher to nail a runner trying to steal… and the ball slipped through the webbing because the laces broke as he caught the ball.²

You can buy a Little League level mitt for as little as $25. Or spend $200 or more.³

There are two project-management (and economics) related questions here:

1. Will he be a better fielder by virtue of having a better mitt (v. new lacing for his old mitt)?
2. Is the difference, if any, worth the cost?

These are the same questions you should be asking about any tools for your job.

Will He Play Better?

Jeremy is one of the better players on his team, which is one of the better teams in its non-Select division. (In other words, the very best players in his age bracket are already playing in another division.) There are numerous players among his peers who don’t know how to field or throw, who don’t know where to position themselves, who don’t understand what to do next should they corral the ball. There are a few kids who get it, who both understand the game and have the core skills down.⁴

Jeremy is in the latter group. If he were not, I probably would have opted for a much less expensive mitt, because there would have been no discernible difference to either his enjoyment of the game or his ability to make plays to help the team (which also leads to increasing his enjoyment of the game).

In other words, the tool he’s now using will increase his capabilities slightly. For example, it has a better pocket that’s properly formed for infielders, meaning the ball is more likely to be in the same place every time he fields a grounder, thus making him a bit quicker and more consistent transferring the ball to his throwing hand.

That said, he has yet to be involved in a fielding play this year where .1 seconds was the difference between safe and out at first base. Chances are good that he won’t see such a play this year; at this level, there are very few bang-bang plays at first (where it’s a close call between safe and out). Often a fielder bobbles/misses the ball or throws wildly to first, but if an infielder catches the ball cleanly and throws to first accurately, the batter is usually out by a couple of steps. That’s the reality of Little League distance-between-bases and foot speed at this age level.⁵

It may increase his confidence a bit (the placebo effect), which is worth something, but objectively it has only some likelihood of making a difference.

Thus it is with many tools.

First, tools cannot give you skills you don’t already have. Tools cannot replace the skills you need to learn. If Jeremy couldn’t field reasonably well, the glove wouldn’t help at all.

Second, tools provide incremental leverage; their effects are rarely dramatic.⁶ The better glove will occasionally make some plays easier, but it won’t help him get to a grounder or popup he couldn’t have caught with his old mitt (once I got the lacing replaced).

Third, tools have a learning curve. You need to invest time in learning to use them, or you’ll be frustrated and slowed rather than seeing gains. Jeremy needs to learn via muscle memory where the ball will sit in the pocket of his glove, or he’ll still be fumbling for it on glove-to-hand transfers.⁷

Is It Worth the Cost?

How do you determine value?

At one level, there’s nothing at stake. Why spend $100+ when I could have spent $25, or spent nothing at all (other than the cost of relacing his old glove)?

Of course, there is something at stake. Jeremy enjoys playing, and he enjoys it more when he plays well.⁸

At any sort of realistic dollars-and-cents (and sense) level, it’s not a great investment. On the other hand, I value seeing him enjoy himself, feel good about himself, and this investment furthers that end.

With most tools, you can apply a more quantitative set of metrics. Does it pay for itself in, say, a year? Does it give you capabilities you didn’t have previously? Does it free up time for the users once they’ve learned it?

With many tools, there are also hard-to-quantify benefits. Does it reduce their frustration levels? Does it make them more loyal to the firm or department because they feel better taken care of? Does it encourage them to go the extra mile because they know you’ve gone the extra mile for them?

It’s hard to quantify or even rationally examine buying Jeremy a pricey glove. The arguments I can make all sound somewhat specious. Nonetheless, it seemed the right thing to do in the circumstances, and I feel good about the decision.

Sometimes it’s hard to quantify the reasons for investing in a tool, or a technology, or training. At some point, you can develop and defend numbers on either side of most any argument.

But it’s worth having the discussion anyway. Get the arguments on the table. Should we invest in this? Is this a good way to invest in our people, in our teams?

Sometimes, the only way to figure it out is to try, to do a pilot project.

So Jeremy will pilot his new mitt at a game tomorrow night. (We’ll probably go up to the field in a few minutes to have a catch and try it out now that I’ve let the glove conditioner work overnight.) And at least to me, it’ll be obvious quickly if it’s a good investment. I only have to watch his face to see if he’s enjoying it.

I wish all decisions were that simple.

When I want to know the weather, I don’t search Weather Underground or AccuWeather or The Weather Channel.

I go to Google and type, “Weather Chicago” or whatever city I want to know about. (I’m in Chicago right now after the GC SuperConference.)

Google and Bing are fast. The weather sites are painfully slow.

Google and Bing tell me exactly what I want to know, and they have the information preloaded on their servers (cached) for rapid delivery. Here are Bing (top) and Google (bottom):

I personally prefer Google because it’s cleaner and easier to read, but either works.

It tells me what I want to know. Quickly. Without fuss. And without loading up the page with a whole bunch of might-be-relevant-to-me-but-usually-isn’t data, from ads to offers to links to excessive detail.

All that detail (and other stuff) takes time to load. Why do I want to pay for that with my own limited time? I don’t. I just want an answer!

How often does a client come with a question and the firm deliver not an answer but a disquisition?

I don’t really care about the specific hour thunderstorms may hit, that the moon is in the waxing crescent phase, that the sun will set at 7:43 (or so they say, but it will be behind those thunderheads), that today is forecast to be warmer than yesterday, etc. These are just a few interesting but extraneous facts delivered AccuWeather that clutter my screen and make the load time s-l-0-w. (The Weather Channel and Weather Underground are similarly overwrought.)

If the client has a question, answer it… and offer more if they want it.

Sometimes they’ll want it, and you’ll be the first place they turn, because they know you’re thinking about their needs first.

Google’s thinking about my needs first.¹ I need a fast answer, with the option to get more data. And that’s what they deliver.

Ryan McLead has a terrific post at 3 Geeks… about the mismatch of expectations among lawyers, firms, and in-house counsel. He lists what attorneys think they sell, what firms think they sell, and what clients think they buy, and what he thinks firms should sell.

I’m writing this response in Chicago, where I’ve been attending and speaking at the General Counsel SuperConference. The issues Ryan raises are incredibly relevant to that group, yet almost no one was talking about them through three general sessions and about 25 breakouts.

That’s a shame.

Consider the difference between efficiency and effectiveness:

• Efficiency: Doing things right.
• Effectiveness: Doing the right things.

In a sense, many of the sessions — even, surprisingly, some of the ethics sessions — were about efficiency rather than effectiveness. How do we do what we’re doing a bit better? There was little questioning (some, but not all that much) along the lines of, Are we doing the right things?¹

Ryan’s fourth question, to me, is not just the most interesting but a great starting point for the debate these issues deserve. What do/should clients want?

Clients, in my experience want to buy one of these four things:

1. The answer to a question
2. A bunch of work they don’t have time/staff for
3. Help in solving a problem
4. “Air cover” (CYA)

The first is the product of specific expertise by a specific person. Can I do this (legally)? How? What are the risk if I do X? The answer they want is usually much terser (yes or no) than they answer they get (15 pages of history coupled with ‘it depends’).

The second is basic overflow work (outsourcing) or sometimes truly low-relative-value work (offshoring, figuratively if not yet literally).

Neither #1 nor #2 hits large firms’ profitability sweet spots. Mismatch.

#4 is what many firms believe they offer by virtue of their name. “We’re Smith & Wollensky LLC, and if you hire us, everyone (read: the CEO and board) will know you’ve hired the best!” In-house counsel do often ask that, especially when the public ramifications of their current mess are large and the outcome uncertain (and likely messy). So #4 is a match… when it happens.

#3,  help solving a problem, is the most interesting. (Note that I didn’t say “legal problem.” The problem likely has legal components, but to the business client it’s a business problem. There is a mismatch when the firm addresses only the legal aspects.)

It’s where firms and clients can build a true connection of lasting value.

As a client, how often do you go to your firm, lay out the (full, real) business problem, and say, “How will you partner to solve this problem?”

As a firm’s client manager, how often do you listen to the in-house counsel and say, “I know your business, so I think I see the ramifications of your internal client’s business issue; here’s how we can best partner to solve it”?

Sweet spot.

Meeting of minds.

Wouldn’t that be a good place to be for the long term?

A story in the NY Times today about e-book pricing prompted me to share some thoughts about publishing.

Here’s my background. I worked in publishing 1975-1984 or thereabouts. I have published two business books, one of which has been highly successful.¹ I also have published young-adult novels under another name.²

I talked with a series of traditional large publishers about an early draft of my first business book. They were interested, but they said I would have to promote it, market it, build a “platform” for it,³ and edit it⁴ myself.

I asked them, “What do you do, then?”

They said, “We’ll copy edit it, print and bind it, stock it, and make it available to bookstores.”

In other words, they were willing to do only what I could either do myself or have Amazon do for me. In addition, they would take far more money from the sales price than Amazon. In other words, I’d do almost exactly the same work either way, but I’d get less than half as much money with a large publisher as intermediary.

Thus I didn’t go the traditional publisher route.

Since then, I’ve talked with other authors who’ve done the same thing. Some were highly successful with earlier books through large publishing houses; others were relatively new to publishing.

We all asked, What value is the publisher adding?

Now if you’re John Grisham or Suzanne Collins or Stephen Covey, the publishing house will put a vast amount of money and resources behind your book. They will occasionally do the same for a new author whose work catches their fancy and where they believe they can sell a million copies (e.g., Stephenie Meyer) or whose work is highly derivative of such an author who’s tapped into the zeitgeist (the Stephenie Meyer wannabes writing last year’s glut of vampire books).

From a business standpoint, that’s fair. They want to publish what they are confident they can sell.

It’s also shortsighted, for two reasons.

First, it plays to the present, not the future. How will they get future top-selling authors on their imprint  if publishers don’t nurture them earlier in their careers? That’s what we did when I was in publishing 35 years ago. We found, supported, and built up authors in the expectation that we turn a long-term profit from them+us.

Second, it opens a huge innovator’s-dilemma door to competition. Specifically, that competition is called Amazon.com.

Amazing, isn’t it, that they could identify and name their competitor and yet failed to react.

Right now, the publishers are trying desperately to spin the story. Amazon is at fault because of their price-setting policies. Amazon wants to sell everything cheap… now. But once they have a monopoly, they’ll raise prices.

That’s certainly a plausible argument, but it’s also a red herring. Amazon is winning because the publishers abdicated. It’s like a baseball team bunching all its players on one side of the field and then complaining when the hitter slaps the ball the other way.

Here’s to Amazon, who for all their faults has walked through a door that their competition intentionally opened for them! That’s why publishers are failing. They’re not doing their job the way they used to. It may be good business and PR strategy to blame Amazon, but it’s not anything like the whole truth.

Now excuse me, I have to get finish my imitation-vampire novel.⁵

Colleague, friend, and project manager extraordinaire Scott Berkun just posted an excerpt from his book on project management about what to do in a crisis.

I’ll list his eight steps below, but go read the full post — or, better, get his book on general project management, Making Things Happen.

1. Calm down.
2. Evaluate the problem in relation to the project.
3. Calm down again.
4. Get the right people in the room.
5. Explore alternatives.
6. Make the simplest plan.
7. Execute.
8. Debrief.

It’s a great article; read it.

(Minor suggestion: The one thing I’d add to Scott’s debrief step is to ask not just, “What can we do next time to avoid this?” but ask as well, “What did we do well, and not so well, in responding to the crisis?” There will be more crises, and part of your toolbox as a project manager is learning to handle them better each time.)

To those celebrating Good Friday and Easter, I offer holiday greetings.

And to those celebrating Passover, which begins tonight, Chag sameach (which means “holiday greetings,” more or less).

No bread for the next eight days. I think I need a book called 101 Not-Too-Awful Meals You Can Make With Matzo. Actually, I like the stuff, but my kids are less than enthused. (For those who’ve never tried it, it tastes pretty much the way it looks.)