From Good to Great
Becoming an Excellent Business Lawyer
Co-ACC Mini MBA Program
Keynote Address: Geoff Wilcox
May 16, 2013
© 2013
Good In-House Lawyers
• Understand law affecting
their business
• Risk intolerant
• Defer to business people to
make decisions
• What’s the risk of this
approach?
© 2013
“Good is the enemy of
great. And that is one of the
key reasons why we have so
little that becomes great.”
Jim Collins
Good to Great
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What Makes a Great Lawyer?
“Well, I don't know as I
want a lawyer to tell me
what I cannot do. I hire
him to tell me how to do
what I want to do.”
J.P. Morgan
How do we get there?
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Great Lawyers Become Great Leaders
• Build relationships & trust:
Emotional intelligence
• Find solutions:
Creative intelligence
• Take risks:
Make recommendations
• Prioritize effort:
Assess importance of issues
“Move out of your comfort zone.
You can only grow if you are willing
to feel awkward and uncomfortable
when you try something new.”
Brian Tracy
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What Makes a Great Leader?
• 11 companies
• Leapt from good to great
• Stayed great for 15 years
• Outperformed market 6.9
times during this period
• Great leaders were the key
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Good Leaders
“Larger-than-life
celebrity leaders who
ride in from the outside
are negatively
correlated with taking a
company from good to
great.”
Jim Collins
Good to Great
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Great Leaders
“The good-to-great
leaders…[were] selfeffacing, quiet, reserved,
even shy – these leaders
are a paradoxical blend of
personal humility and
professional will.”
Jim Collins
Good to Great
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Great Leader: Darwin E. Smith
• First leader profiled: in-house
lawyer at Kimberly-Clark
• Became CEO in 1971
• Lagging 36% behind market
since 1951
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Great Leader: Darwin E. Smith
• By 1991, stock beat the market
by more than 4X
• Outperformed rivals P&G and
Scotts Paper
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Good Leader: Lee Iacocca
• Icon of business leadership
• Saved Chrysler from disaster
• Chrysler peaked at 2.9 times
the market halfway through
tenure
• Second half of tenure, Chrysler
fell 31% behind the market
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The Icarus Problem
“In over two thirds of the
comparison cases, we noted
the presence of a
gargantuan personal ego
that contributed to the
demise or continued
mediocrity of the company.”
Jim Collins
Good to Great
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The Secret to Smith’s Success
• Personal Humility:
–
–
–
–
Worked with a team
Seemingly ordinary man
Mild mannered
Awkwardly shy
• Bold & decisive action:
– Sold off the paper mills
– Exited company’s core business
– Took on world-class competitor
P&G in consumer paper
• What made Smith different from
the ego-driven leaders?
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Two Minds
• We have two very different,
complementary brains
• Left brain: linear, sequential,
literal, ego center, language,
remembers the story of our life,
follows rules, makes judgments
• Right brain: non-linear, timeless,
sees life as collage of images,
empathy, feelings &
relationships, makes creative
leaps, interprets non-verbal
queues, intuition
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My Stroke of Insight
• Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: highly
successful neuroanatomist
• Massive stroke in left brain
• Lost ability to talk, walk, read,
write or remember her life
• “Became empathic to what
others felt,” tuned into “facial
expression and body language,”
noticed “energy dynamics”
among people,” and felt “deep
inner peace”
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Balance: Stepping to the Right
• During 10 year recovery,
learned to “step to the right”
and draw on abilities to
empathize, utilize intuition
and “think out of the box.”
• Chose not to recover left
brain dominance and
tendency to be “mean, worry
incessantly, or be verbally
abusive.”
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Finding the Right Mind
• Focus on present moment
• Focus on breathing
• Listen to music
• Ask “how does it feel to be
here doing this?”
• Notice and let go of negative
“brain chatter”
“Smell the rain, and feel the wind.”
Ashley Smith
© 2013
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Great Lawyers (And the Right Mind)
• Humility
(Empathy)
• Bold leaps
(Creativity & intuition)
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Building Trust: Emotional Intelligence
• Empathize
• Listen first
• Seek to understand
• Then challenge
“Seek first to understand,
then to be understood.”
• Know your own emotions
Stephen R. Covey
The 7 Habits of Highly
Effective People
• Find a mentor
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Empathy
“Empathy…is the fundamental
people skill.”
Daniel Goleman
Emotional Intelligence
“Good-to-great management
teams consist of people who
debate vigorously in search of
the best answers, yet who
unify behind decisions,
regardless of parochial
interests.”
Jim Collins
Good to Great
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Empathy & Leadership
The salient discovery is that certain things leaders do –
specifically, exhibit empathy and become attuned to others’
moods – literally affect both their own brain chemistry and that
of their followers.
Daniel Goleman & Richard Boyatzis, Social Intelligence & the Biology of Leadership,
Harvard Business Review (September 1, 2008).
© 2013
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Empathy & Leadership
The salient discovery is that certain things leaders do –
specifically, exhibit empathy and become attuned to others’
moods – literally affect both their own brain chemistry and that
of their followers. Indeed, researchers have found that the
leader-follower dynamic is not a case of two (or more)
independent brains reacting consciously or unconsciously to
each other. Rather, the individual minds become, in a sense,
fused into a single system.
Daniel Goleman & Richard Boyatzis, Social Intelligence & the Biology of Leadership,
Harvard Business Review (September 1, 2008).
© 2013
22
Empathy & Leadership
The salient discovery is that certain things leaders do –
specifically, exhibit empathy and become attuned to others’
moods – literally affect both their own brain chemistry and that
of their followers. Indeed, researchers have found that the
leader-follower dynamic is not a case of two (or more)
independent brains reacting consciously or unconsciously to
each other. Rather, the individual minds become, in a sense,
fused into a single system. We believe that great leaders are
those whose behavior powerfully leverages the system of brain
interconnectedness.
Daniel Goleman & Richard Boyatzis, Social Intelligence & the Biology of Leadership,
Harvard Business Review (September 1, 2008).
© 2013
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Finding Solutions: Creativity & Intuition
• Steve Jobs studied calligraphy
• Designed beautiful fonts into Mac
ten years later
• "Much of what I stumbled into by
following my curiousity and
intuition turned out to be priceless
later on… You can't connect the
dots looking forward. You can only
connect them looking backwards.
So you have to trust that the dots
will somehow connect in your
future.”
© 2013
“In August 2012, Apple became the
most valuable company in history…the
first company to become ‘most
valuable’ because of its creativity.”
Bruce Nussbaum
Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the
Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
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Creativity & Fear
• 2010 U.Penn. experiment
• People unconsciously
associate creative ideas
with: “vomit,” “poison” &
“agony”
• Bias caused people to
reject ideas for new
products that were novel &
high quality
© 2013
"Revealing the existence and
nature of a bias against creativity
can help explain why people might
reject creative ideas and stifle
scientific advancements, even in
the face of strong intentions to
the contrary.”
Mueller, J. S., Melwani, S., &
Goncalo, J. A. (2011) (hyperlink)
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Creative Intelligence: Darwin Smith
• Knowledge Mining
– Years in the business
– Recognized patterns
• Framing
– Letting go of old lens
• Pivoting
– Closed the mills
– Shift to consumer paper
Bruce Nussbaum
Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the
Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
© 2013
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Taking Risks
• Great in-house lawyers commit
• Communicating with business
people
– Don’t split hairs: “legally we have a
strong case”
– What can they do with that?
– Consider everything: legal issues
and the business case
• Provide an actual bottom line
recommendation
– Settle
– Seek early summary judgment
– Go to trial
© 2013
“Security is mostly a superstition. It
does not exist in nature, nor do the
children of men as a whole experience
it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the
long run than outright exposure. Life is
either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
Helen Keller
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Prioritize Effort
• Volume of issues can be
overwhelming
• Assess importance of issues
• Trust your gut
• Schedule based on priority
• Match level of effort & depth
of analysis to importance of
issue
© 2013
“The key is not to prioritize what's on
your schedule, but to schedule your
priorities.”
Steven Covey
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Great Leadership
“When the Master governs, the
people are hardly aware that he
exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved.
Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised.
If you don't trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.
The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, ‘Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!’”
Lao-tzu
Tao Te Ching
A New English Version
by Stephen Mitchell
© 2013
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