Legal Commentary

We need zero-based thinking.

By Patrick J. Lamb

I just came out of a meeting that included by inside and outside lawyers.  I was stunned by the lack of self-critical thinking on the part of the outside counsel.  Not that inside counsel were immune to the notion, but I was hearing a lot "we're not the problem, it's other firms" or "the problem is really with the clients."

Everyone is familiar with the concept of zero-based budgeting. For those who are not, this is how Wikipedia describes it:

Zero-Based Budgeting is a technique of planning and decision-making which reverses the working process of traditional budgeting. In traditional incremental budgeting, departmental managers justify only increases over the previous year budget and what has been already spent is automatically sanctioned. No reference is made to the previous level of expenditure. By contrast, in zero-based budgeting ^[1], every department function is reviewed comprehensively and all expenditures must be approved, rather than only increases. ZBB requires the budget request justified in complete detail by each division manager starting from the Zero-base. The Zero-base is indifferent to whether the total budget is increasing or decreasing.

It occurs to me that the same concept should guide our thinking on most any issue, certainly the major ones.  Instead of making all sorts of assumptions, we should start our thinking from scratch.  Maybe not everyday, every time, but at least once in a while.  Just think what might happen if we ever critically evaluated the premises that underlie our business models and practices.

Full post as published by In Search of Perfect Client Service on July 25, 2008 (boomark / email).