“What customers really want is choice, those that innovate to deliver genuine choice will not just survive but will prosper.”
Stephen Allen has posted an interesting and colourful post called “Too much turnip can be a turn off!”
My add…
There is a forgotten part of innovation that I don’t think sits well with the current lawyer culture. I think it partly explains why lawyers aren’t that innovative.
Innovation is not a turn key, a mouse click, a download or push button.
Innovation is many, many things but for me, (and after all this is my site), it is vision.
Innovation is about exploring, testing and trying. A lot of the time you get it wrong but you learn from that.
Do you think we built our technology with no mistakes, no miscalculations? Not at all. But we did, (and still do), adapt, adjust and re calibrate very quickly because if we don’t then we too become toast.
Innovation requires patience, vision, a capacity to listen, a clarity of understanding, a conviction in what you do combined with a crystal clear vision of where you think things are going.
Woah…timing and innovation, there are whole books just written on that three word combo alone and what they mean. Whole multinationals have been wiped out by getting timing and innovation wrong. Things that have taken years to build can go stratospheric or be vaporised in a matter of months.
So yes…this is serious shit guys.
That vision may be tiny. As an innovator it is, sometimes, the only thing you can hold onto.
That conviction must be strong to keep you going when no one is (really) listening or (really) understands what you are saying.
So what do you do? It’s the same for all of us; you, me, lawyer, law firm, technology company the whole goddamn lot of us.
You have to go back to the drawing board and learn why they aren’t (really) listening or don’t (really) understand what you are saying because that bloody vision thing is like a hunger, a thirst, a passion.
This is the culture of the innovator not the culture of a law firm.
I said partly responsibility for lack of innovation.
What people forget when talking about change and innovation is that to change you have to see a clear value for doing it.
I don’t think lawyers have seen that value yet.
That does not mean that they never will.
Or as Andrew Grech alluded to recently, now is but “a moment in time.”
