A different S word

Read Stefan Stern’s latest column in the FT, Time to get your strategy right. It has been a pretty grizzly year, and it is not getting easier fast, but we will come out of this recession: and professional service firms, like any other business, need to be ready. So, as Stern opens, “We need to talk about strategy” – but, and this is where it starts,

. . . business leaders ought to recognise, as they catch their breath after months of turbulence, that the strategy they were pursuing until recently is unlikely to be right for today.

It’s not just that markets have changed. Your organisation has changed. You may have all been through a near-death experience. Even if you avoided calamity, it is unlikely that colleagues are the same carefree people you remember from a year or two ago. Most businesses have been making serious cutbacks. Co-workers may be doing their best to look calm and positive. But they can see unemployment rising and know that sustained recovery is a long way off.

More on Generation Y in law firms

Finding the time to think is never as easy as it should be: the demands of a transactional practice leave little opportunity to step back and consider where a difference can and should be made. An email yesterday, which somewhat unusually I did not straight away consign to junk mail (the usual destination for unsolicited communication), took me to the Pennington Hennessy Blog and a short post on Generation Y, and from there to an excellent article in the FT (which had prompted the post), A to Z of Generation Y attitudes.

I have posted on this topic before, Graduate divas – don’t you love them (triggered by a Jordan Furlong post in Law 21), and it is, as some of my partners know, a particular hobby horse I ride. But that doesn’t make it any less important. What I found interesting in Alison Maitland’s FT article, is this,

Yet two studies into the attitudes of those Generation Ys that are in the workplace suggest that Carrie, Alex and their young professional peers are not as different from other generations as supposed – and not just because the recession has upset their expectations.

While craving excitement and challenge, nearly 90 per cent of Generation Ys describe themselves as loyal to their employer, according to the study Bookend Generations , published this week by the US-based Center for Work-Life Policy. In addition, nearly half of this tech-savvy and “connected” generation prefers face-to-face communication at work to e-mails, texts or phone calls.

But what sets them apart from us (and I am unashamedly a Boomer) is

the unprecedented pace of technological change, which shapes how they expect to work and why they resist boundaries; and the disappearance of the job for life.

Our challenge is how to engage with them.

Public service greed

If true, and there is no reason to suppose it is not, even though I read it in the newspapers, the lead story in today’s Telegraph is every bit as good a reason to refuse to pay the licence fee as that advanced by Charles Moore in both the same paper and in his weekly Spectator column. Jonathan Ross may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but he has talent, and people continue to watch and enjoy his show.

A stark contrast to the greedy opportunists who run the BBC.

Taking a long term view

I was at two very different talks last week. The first, Priorities for medical research in the United Kingdom, given at the University of Exeter by Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, the last in their Shaping the Future series. Much of it well over my head, but a fascinating hour and 20 minutes looking at key issues in medical research, now and in the future. One interesting point: Borysiewicz stressed the need for researchers and research institutes to build their relationships with the wealth creation sector.

I came away feeling that this was an area which had been well and truly gripped- and that in the long term, which is what medical research is inevitably about, we are going to be well served.

The second had a rather more immediate subject. This was a valedictory presentation by Peter Gripiaos to the Devon & Cornwall Business Council on The South West – The credit crunch and the real economy. It was a sobering 20 minutes: not very much good news, for any part of the Region, and an interesting counterpoint to the South West RDA’s What Now, its updated plans for 2009 – 2011.

Gripiaos asked ‘So are we out of the woods?’. His view is no (“the signs of recovery are conflicting”) and his answer to ‘So what can be done?’ is just as stark:

We are in the realm of psychology now and the recession needs to run its course.
SWERDA and local authorities have little money and not much leverage.
Many businesses need to fail.
Businesses and consumers need to learn a harsh lesson.
So do politicians.
We should focus on long term strategic interventions rather than short term fire-fighting.

As for the last of those bullet points, that too was the thrust of Borysiewicz’s talk.

It makes for interesting scenario planning.

A most peculiar animal

We do not live in traditional hare country. There is a (relatively) local pack of beagles, and they meet, or have in the past, at Headless Cross on Mardon Down, but I have not seen a hare down here; well, not that is until the other morning.

Driving the windy road to Exeter (see Down narrow lanes) suddenly, at the top of the hill before the road drops down to Steps Bridge, a large brown hare; still, in the middle of the road. She must have come out of the fields on the right hand side. I stopped, and she lolloped off, across the road and into the woods that soften the the side of the Teign valley.

I have become used to seeing roe deer along this stretch of road, although the best view is from the passenger seat in the Land Rover; and occasionally badgers, although more usually their sad, muddy corpses. There are foxes in the woods, and early morning is a good time to see cubs. And through the trees buzzards and owls, and at night large brown bats. but a hare? It made my morning.