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August 27, 2009
Ambiguity: There are several quality answers and solutions.
There are no right answers, proven-out formulas, connect-the-dots kits.
The current winners--think Jobs, Murdoch, Eastwood, Drudge--are those who are custom-making solutions and brilliantly implementing them.
--Jane Genova
"E" at the Beach: Grateful to be a guy who could think on his own.
An acceptance of complexity, of subtlety, of unclear-ness. Do you hire people who have and embrace that with open eyes, excitement and vigor? And can think hard things through? Well, do you, Jack? Or do you attract the cookie-cutter crowd?
My problem: for more and more younger people in the workplace, novelty--which I view as gorgeous, sometimes elegant, and always beckoning--makes their heads explode.
Complexity. A messy problem. A "hard" thing.
They don't like it. They can't deal with it. They want a "form".
But great work doesn't have "forms". Am terribly sorry about that. You will just have to think on your own.
So here's a true gem we love--written in late December 2008--by Jane Genova at Law and More (subtitled "Deconstructing What Happens in Law"): "Managing Partners: Are Your Millennial Gen Associates Not Dealing With Ambiguity".
The issue for WAC? is not just one about the care-and-feeding of often delicate Gen-Y, the new, complex, and astonishingly intricate "tea cups" in your shop. How do your lawyers, other professionals and staff of any generation with undergraduate degrees in, say, engineering (no Aggie jokes, please) and accounting deal with the wonderful chaos of hard, complex, messy, unruly and--"worst" of all--novel problems?
To me, those are the fun ones--and often the only issues I want. But novelty makes lots of us fold.
For many projects, for a great client or for your firm, Western logic and/or "the usual procedures" cannot provide all the answers. You either have that awareness--or you don't. Most lawyers just don't.
And it's the reason even good clients perceive us as "half-there" technicians and mechanics who, somehow years ago, lost their common sense and any degree of creativity we once might have had.
Read Genova's valuable, perceptive thoughts.
Link, and Inspiration: Stephanie West Allen.
(from a previous WAC post)
Posted by JD Hull at August 27, 2009 12:00 AM