Introduction
You will see in the sub-heading to the blog a subtle but important change.
My blog is now focused on Excellence (and innovation) in Professional Practice. This is because, since stepping away from practising as a solicitor 3 weeks ago, I have now taken on a new persona focused exclusively in this area. I have a separate TypePad blog for my other passion of personal development, but I thought it was becoming confusing to try and run one blog to cover both subject areas.
Excellence in Professional Practice
Excellence has been much written about by Tom Peters of In Search of Excellence fame and I shall not labour the *dynamic* of Excellence to bring about a paradigm shift for professional services (if you want a good introduction I would highly recommend that you read Tom’s book, Professional Service Firm 50) but, for me, it means going beyond challenging and/or disrupting the status quo and taking a leap of faith and having self belief to see how Excellence has the power to redefine and change the whole notion of professional practice.
I think a lot of people now in professional services have forgotten that they and the firms/businesses exist for one reason and one reason alone: to serve their clients.
No clients = No employees = No business.
Yes I can accept a degree of disillusionment and fatigue – who wouldn’t be ground down with having, as in the case of law, to account for every 6 minutes of the day and being asked to bill more and more without necessarily seeing the correlative return – but I want to see, indeed it is my ration d’être, a reawakening so that the passion that inspired people to enter the professions (to change the world or make a difference to someone’s life) is reignited.
Too lofty an ambition? Possibly, but I have never been one to accept that this is all there is or that there is no other way of doing something.
I know for some this may sit uncomfortably with the notion of running a Professional practice but I truly hope that the material presented in this blog will, when implemented, raise the bar beyond any place that you thought possible, and challenge the very idea of what it is to deliver on your “vision” for professional services.