Ken,
I’m not in the force-of-arms business, but I stumbled across your publication while researching the origins of the axiom, “In stressful situations we do not rise to the occasion, we fall to our level of training.”
I found your writing really useful for my purpose. I make it a practice to reach out to anyone whose thinking stimulates me to look at things differently and usefully, or who causes me to remember a principal that I’d forgotten or gotten too sloppy to use consistently. Hence this note to you.
For almost 20 years, I trained senior partners in the largest law firms how to sell to Corporate America. For that, I needed what some call a “command presence,” especially since they generally held the mistaken belief that rainmakers were somehow naturals vs. the product of the 10,000 hours of focused practice, coaching and feedback that the research shows is necessary to achieve expertise in any field. Bottom line, I had to prove to them that I was the professional salesperson and they were amateurs. Obviously, that’s not hard to do; amateurs don’t beat professionals at anything, ever.
Now, I’ve invented a virtual world where they learn the same things via scenario-based simulations, which makes the training affordable, scalable, mobile, measurable, etc. The good news is I’ve done something that’s never been done before, and am creating a new category. The bad news is I’ve done something that’s never been done before, and am creating a new category.
The problem I’m wrestling with now is lawyer complacency. Despite the law industry going through its most wrenching disruption in its history, and the previously unthinkable now showing up in the legal press and the Wall St. Journal, i.e., that law partners were being dumped by their firms for not bringing in enough business, lawyers persist in a form of complacency that’s hard to explain, lawyers are behaving as if sales skills were still optional, gold-star-on-the-forehead endeavors rather than the survival tools they are now. It’s a head-scratcher.
I’ve stolen, I mean, borrowed, much from you, which I’ll attribute in the eye-opening white paper that I’m writing to try to stir up the mud at the bottom of the industry’s stagnant river.
Just a note to let you know that somebody out there in the blogosphere appreciated what you expressed.
Mike
"Mike"
Attorney