Community Section -
Dan Morris - 03/30/2008
I watched the stage production of 1776 last night. They were knowledge men and knowledge workers! I tire of listening to partners of firms as they look at team members as mere labor and hence the firm leadership stifles the profession and people leave; possibly never to return.
I so dislike Tax Season!
We have the raw ingredients - yet too many of our leaders are cooks and not chefs. Doers and not thinkers. Followers and not leaders. Facilitators of death instead of creators of life. I think little of our Profession’s ability to lead.
Ron Baker - 03/30/2008
Fellow colleague and VeraSage friend Brenda Richter recently attended our Everyday Ethics course in Woodland Hills, CA.
She showed me a memo written by the managing partner of a CPA firm in Seattle. This firm has been attempting to make the journey from Good to Great, as outlined in Jim Collins’ book of the same title.
I didn’t read anything in that book that said you should do useless tasks that don’t matter to knowledge workers; but I digress. From Brenda’s post, here’s the more egregious excerpts from the managing partner’s memo:
I expect that this report will lead to questions about time entry standards, especially with respect to non-billable time. After tax season, I expect to hold sessions for mentors and all team members aimed at consistency among time-keepers. In the meantime, continue to refer to the ‘ Non-Chargeable Codes’ memo from the billing clerk, and forward time-keeping questions directly to me, as it will help me compile a list I make sure to address.
As a final comment, I hope this doesn’t seem like a ‘big brother’ thing. This information has always been available, and I believe that making it more visible and regular will help the ‘disciplined people’, ‘disciplined thought’, and ‘disciplined action’ of the Good to Great journey be just that much easier to implement.
Wouldn’t you just love to see the “XYZ Non-Chargeable codes?”
Another colleague and friend of VeraSage, Mark Bailey—whose firm has trashed timesheets—has a wonderful series of blog posts on why he hates timesheets. His most recent post really said it well.
We at VeraSage are often said to be proselytizing a religion—one of Value Pricing and Trashing Timesheets. I’m guilty of using such religious terms myself. I need to stop.
VeraSage is not about religion; it is about empirical economic evidence of what works. I’ve been reading [Mortimer] Adler’s Philosophical Dictionary lately, and here’s his definition of the word ”Belief”:
It stands for things affirmed that lie beyond all philosophical knowledge or opinion, as well as beyond science and history.
Such affirmations tend to be stronger and firmer convictions than the knowledge we have or the opinions we hold by empirical evidence and rational argument.
Read that second sentence again, this time very closely. He’s saying something very profound.
At the end of World War II, English writer and prominent socialist H.G. Wells wrote:
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
Wells was a socialist who believed knowledge alone would create a more peaceful world.
But surely before they became the aggressors in World War II, the German people were among the best educated in the world—with their universities to become the model for America’s—and the Japanese among the most literate.
For as valuable as knowledge and education are, it is imperative to bear in mind that man is guided far more by his beliefs than his knowledge. How else does one begin to explain why people fly airplanes into buildings?
Recently, I’ve been crossing swords around the world with various consultants about the necessity of timesheets. They claim they are essential for measuring productivity, cost accounting, etc.
Yet, we have EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE that this is not so. Real live firms, made of up of flesh and blood human beings, performing advertising, IT consulting, accounting, law, consulting and other knowledge work, all without timesheets. More and more firms are joining them every single day.
Even when confronted with this evidence, many people still insist on believing timesheets are essential.
Ladies and Gentlemen, that is a religion.
If anyone in VeraSage is ever confronted with empirical evidence that his or her theories are wrong, I expect everyone of us to cower in the corner in utter fear. I also expect them to seek out the evidence, test it, see if it works.
If it does, they better change their beliefs. I wouldn’t ask the same about their religious faith.
Those tied to the status quo of timesheets and hourly billing are the real religious zealots. VeraSage is full of heretics, denouncing the existing orthodoxy.
It’s one thing for your religious beliefs to be inflexible and impervious to challenge. It’s quite another for your beliefs about the economics of human behavior, which should be based on observation and empiricism, to remain secluded from reality.
I’m not arguing that we don’t hold wrong beliefs in the area of economics. I’ve been wrong on many issues and have changed my mind when confronted with contradictory evidence.
It’s excusable to have wrong theories. What’s inexcusable is when the stay wrong.
The perpetuators of the status quo have a lot to answer for. It’s as if they were medical doctors still in denial of germ theory. Though they are not killing people with their beliefs, they are sup-optimally leading their knowledge workers, as well as destroying once nobel and proud professions with their religious-like dogma.
The physicist Max Planck wrote:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
This statement has often been interpreted as “science progresses funeral by funeral.”
I’ve always considered this a rather pessimistic view of mankind’s progress, as if we had to line up our elders and shoot them to advance.
Yet, sometimes it seems so. How else do we account for all of the negative and obsolete beliefs most professionals possess—from hourly biling, a ruthless focus on efficiency, Frederick Taylorite thinking, and measuring for the sake of measuring, confusing cause and effect?
I do not have a conclusive answer to this question; but I do belief it is largely because we are guided far more by our beliefs than our knowledge; and since our beliefs are part of our theories of how the world works, we relinquish them only after some traumatic experience, or the difference between our beliefs and reality is simply to great to ignore—in other words, people change not when they see the light but rather when they feel the heat.
This is precisely why entrepreneurs are so essential to growth and wealth creation. Existing organizations that have done something well millions and millions of times are usually not the best vehicles to perform something new for the first time.
Jack Welch put it this way:
Change has no constituency.
Niccolo Machiavelli said it even better in The Prince:
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new.
John Perazzo, in his book The Myths That Divide Us, sums it up nicely:
It requires courage to cast the accumulated myths of a lifetime to the wind. Our natural desire for simplicity, certitude, and the approval of others occasionally causes us to defend even our most flawed worldviews as if our very lives depended on them. Dead belief systems are difficult to bury, for in doing so we enter a world we do not recognize; we watch the carefully crafted towers of our understanding crash down in ruins; and we lose an integral piece of the only reality we have known, reinforced and imprinted on our minds by a thousand voices, internal and external.
It’s tiring and nauseating to have to continue to debate people who are not just impervious to contrary evidence, but are also unaware that any exists at all.
The economist John Maynard Keynes said it well:
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
To which philosopher Bertrand Russell added:
The resistance to a new idea increases as the square of its importance.
So, to all those consultants I’ve crossed swords with over the necessity of timesheets (and some over cost-plus pricing), I’ll leave you with another thought from John Maynard Keynes:
When somebody persuades me that I am wrong, I change my mind. What do you do?
Are you leading your firm based on what you believe or on empirical evidence? It’s worth pondering.
Ron Baker - 03/30/2008
I presented a Value Pricing Webinar for RainToday on February 28, 2008. Although I answered a lot of questions during the program, there were still many left over.
I responded to each one in writing, which RainToday posted on their Web site here.
There are many frequently asked questions here, along with some that have a new twist.
I’d be interested in how others would have answered some of these.
Ron Baker - 03/23/2008
Another hat tip to Stephanie West Allen for sending me this article, “Billing By the Hour—Is There A Better Way?”
I’m sometimes accused of making general, sweeping statements, such as “there is enormous empirical evidence that customers dislike the billable hour,” or “there’s an incredible backlash against the billable hour.” But these statements are true, backed up by endless surveys and studies, which I have cited extensively in my books and on this Web site.
This article provides some more updated evidence, such as this:
The ACLA/CLANZ Legal Department Benchmarking Report 2008 shows that when asked for fee estimates, law firms were consistently on or below budget just 2 per cent of the time. Only a third of the corporates surveyed reported that firms met their budget more than half the time.
But the key area of concern is the hourly billing. Only 3 per cent of general counsel surveyed considered billing by the hour to be the best basis upon which to price legal services.
Nearly 40 per cent of those surveyed considered hourly billing to be “not very appropriate” or as “rewarding inefficiency and providing no incentive for success”, or “not at all appropriate” and “totally outmoded.”
Certainly internationally, nowithstanding all the talk of flat fees, contingent fees and success fees, most corporate lawyers (between 90 per cent and 100 per cent) still bill by the hour.
To me, the most interesting part of the article is the conclusion, from Ron Pol, a consultant to the legal profession from Team Factors, who said:
“Finding a good alternative is not easy. People have tried before, and nothing’s yet taken hold on sufficient scale to break the billable hour stranglehold. But when it does, and it really is only a matter of time, the client who brought it about would become an overnight business guru, and the law firm’s name would become synonymous with the new methodology replacing the infamy of hourly rate billing.”
Well, Mr. Pol, there are firms doing it, especially in New Zealand, thanks to our Senior Fellows Peter Byers and Yan Zhu. Not only have they ditched the billable hour, they’ve trashed the timesheet as well.
There are also firms here in the USA, such as Chinn and Associates, Shepherd Law Group, and of course our own Chris Marston of Exemplar Law Partners, among many others.
These firms are pioneers, but they don’t get the recognition they deserve because their colleagues think they are insane, as is typical with most innovators. It really speaks volumes about the lack of intellectual curiousity of lawyers, and those who consult with them, that these firms are not better known.
Far from being overnight business gurus, they are outliers, lone voices in the wilderness. But they will continue to march forward, blazing the trail for others to inevitably follow.
Ron Baker - 03/21/2008
Ron Baker - 03/19/2008
Senior Fellow Paul O’Byrne, of O’Byrne and Kennedy, has been conducting a series of Webinars for Principa on “Re-engineer for Value, Rid Yourself of Problem Clients and Super-Size Your Bottom Line.”
This was in response to his (and Paul Kennedy’s) presentation at the Principa conference in Las Vegas last year, which was a huge hit.
You can now listen to one of the Webinars, entitled “Keeping it Going,” here.
Ed Kless - 03/18/2008
This Sunday’s Dilbert is on the old axiom “Measure Twice Cut Once.” It got me to thinking.
If measuring time is so important and critical to the success of a firm, shouldn’t we encourage people to submit two timesheets. I mean it is important that they be accurate right.
So, for all you timekeepers out their I propose that each professional should be required to do two timesheets, one on a daily basis and one at the end of the week to see if they match one another. This is clearly a great leap forward.
Now that I think about it we should really create a system of timesheet buddies. This system would require that each professional track not only their time, but the time of another professional in the firm. After all, doesn’t make sense to have some oversight in the firm? If time is so important shouldn’t there be a system of checks and balances.
Oh, I forgot you already do this, it is called a management review. As Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella used to say, “Never mind.”
Ed Kless - 03/18/2008
An open letter to consultant to the profession David Connell:
David,
Despite (or perhaps because of) our common Irish heritage, I am “calling you out.” Fortunately, we have moved beyond fisticuffs, but this is a fight of and for ideas.
In your last newsletter you state, “Timesheets should only ever be a monitoring system to see how we compare with the true value of the work we do and to monitor staff productivity.” I can clearly demonstrate this statement to be false. If I can do so, you must admit that timesheets are a fraud and must be eliminated. If you are interested in reading this demostration, please reply via a comment to this post and I will meet you on the field of battle.
David, your Irish honor is a stake. Marquess of Queensbury Rules, of course.
Sincerely,
Ed Kless (yes, my surname is Austrian, but I am 3/4 Irish including O’Melia, Foley and McMahon.)
Ron Baker - 03/14/2008
A couple of weeks ago I received another email from Chris Forsman, who had alerted me to an article about movie theater popcorn, which I blogged about here.
In this new email, he related this fascinating story.
Good Afternoon Ron:
I have been fascinated by pricing models for as long as I can remember and as a salesperson, it is my job to “extract” as much money as humanly possible. I remember being in an opportunity once in which we were competing against several firms in which all of our pricing came in at roughly $750,000 for an end-to-end solution. This number was given to us by the prospect as their desired budget and we all had to “massage” our numbers to fall into this price range. How do you pick the winner when everyone has the same price?
One competitor, who had several recent wins in this industry priced their solution at $1,200,000. They understood that their references would be stronger and that would somehow show that they had deeper domain knowledge. It would also insulate the executive from making a bad decision since their peers purchased the same solution. Naturally, they chose this higher priced solution.
Best regards,
Chris
What a great story! The $1.2M firm separated itself from the competition based on value, not price. We always say, high price tempts, and here’s even more empirical evidence.
This got me thinking about Requests for Proposals. We at VeraSage recommend that you don’t do them, because they subsidize dysfunctional buying behavior, often being used as a club to beat up the current provider by customers who have no intention of changing. Or they are used by price sensitive customers you don’t want anyway.
We also think you should charge for an RFP. Why not? The customers are asking you to compete, which has value in and of itself. If you charged for an RFP, it might actually be a process that had some value, rather than merely reciting deliverables.
That said, we realize many PKFs have to do a certain amount of RFPs. If you do, you should be well versed with what economists call the winner’s curse.
Never forget that your weapon is made by the lowest bidder.
—Law Number 20 of Murphy’s Laws of Combat
In auction markets, economists refer to the dreaded winner’s curse—whereby the winning bidder is often a loser. In other words, the only RFPs sellers will accept are ones you should not make. One of the ways to avoid the winner’s curse is to bid more conservatively when there are more bidders. Thomas Nagle and Reed Holden explain why in their seminal book, The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing:
To understand the curse, imagine first that you are one of two bidders and you win a bid with the lower price. You will probably be quite happy. Now imagine that you are one of ten bidders and you believe that your competitors are sophisticated businesspeople who know how to bid a job. Again you win. Are you still happy? What does it mean that you bid below nine other knowledgeable bidders? Perhaps it means that you were willing to take less profit on the job. On the other hand, it could also mean that you underestimated the cost to complete the work.
The more bidders there are, the more likely you will lose money on every job you win, even if on average you estimate costs correctly and both you and your competitors set bids that include a reasonable margin of profit. The reason: The bids you win are not a random sample of the bids you make. You are much more likely to win jobs for which you have underestimated your costs and are unlikely to win those for which you have overestimated your cost.
The only solution to this is, in effect, to formalize the principle of “selective participation.” You do that by adding a “fudge factor” to each bid to reflect an estimate of how much you are likely to have underestimated your costs if you actually win a bid. Needless to say, adding this factor will reduce the number of bids you win, but it will ensure that you won’t ultimately regret having won them (Nagle and Holden, 2002: 225).
RFPs have become more commonplace as competitive bidding has replaced negotiation for price buyers. It is as if dysfunctional buying practices have arisen to counter dysfunctional selling practices.
It is important to judge the seriousness of potential buyers going out to bid, as a lot of the RFPs are, in reality, nothing but hammers used against existing suppliers to obtain price concessions. Your company should not waste its resources drafting RFPs to anonymous buyers whose criteria for judging your company’s offering are not known to you. It is important to have some contact with the economic buyer, that is, the person who can actually make the decision to hire you, rather than just the procurement department. Establishing relationships and having internal advocates in the customer’s enterprise also helps to ensure your value is being considered, not just price.
In their book Co-opetition, Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff offer this sage advice with respect to RFPs:
There seems to be a natural impulse to offer competition for free. After all, that is what business people are supposed to do, is it not? You want a bid? I’ll give you a bid…
The right question to ask is: How important is it to the customer that you bid? If bidding is so important, then you should get compensated for playing the game. If it is not so important, then you are unlikely to get the business and even less likely to make money. You might want to reconsider bidding at all (Brandenburger and Nalebuff, 1996: 84).
Another strategy with responses to RFPs is: No surprises. Your potential customer should know everything in your proposal before you submit it. Gaining an understanding of your customer’s expectations, business model—how they make money—and how your company can add value is imperative to increase your odds of a successful proposal, one that will not suffer from the winner’s curse. Search for the differences that will ultimately be weighed in selecting a new supplier. If customers are worth bidding on, they are worth spending some resources on in order to improve your chances.
Brandenburg and Nalebuff also discuss the following eight hidden costs of bidding (in bold, with commentary added), which are also worth considering:
- There are better uses of your time. Keeping current customers happy may be a better strategic advantage as opposed to chasing after other company’s customers. Attracting a new customer can cost three to six times more than holding on to an existing one, and the existing one is most likely less price sensitive.
- When you win the business, you lose money. A customer won on price alone is signaling they have no loyalty, and will leave you once they find a lower price. Do not fall into the trap of thinking you can start with a low price and raise it later; the evidence is overwhelming this will not work, as once you set a low price you are rewarding the customer for beating you up in price.
- The incumbent can retaliate. If this is a good customer, then your win is someone else’s loss. If it is a bad customer, then you have already made a mistake. The incumbent supplier is likely to respond, perhaps by targeting one of your good customers. He may not be successful, but he can force a price concession on your part. If he is successful, you both have achieved nothing but turning two high-margin customers into two low-margin customers—a real lose-lose scenario.
- Your existing customers will want a better deal. Lowering your prices within RFPs sends a distinct message into the marketplace that will no doubt find its way to your existing customers. Some will believe you’ve been overcharging them and may leave; others will demand price concessions. Is winning one job worth the risk?
- New customers will use the low price as a benchmark. Once again, sending the wrong signal to all potential future customers.
- Competitors will also use the low price as a benchmark. Since your competitors can easily discover your RFP price, they will use this as a reference price in future RFPs, most likely resulting in lower priced RFPs in the future amongst all bidders.
- It does not help to give your customer’s competitors a better cost position. Your future and that of your customer are naturally linked. If your future is tied to Boeing, you do not want to help Airbus get a lower price. Unless you have very good reason to believe that you can get Airbus’ business while keeping Boeing’s, bidding for Airbus’ business is costly. You help your competitor’s customer and thereby hurt your own.
- Do not destroy your competitor’s glass houses. The notion you win if your competition loses is simplistic and potentially dangerous. If you lower your rival’s profits, he now has more reason to become aggressive by going after your accounts with abandon, potentially launching a self-destructive price war. In contrast, the more money your competition is making, the more it has at risk from getting into a price war (Ibid: 86-88).
This is where the firm’s value proposition becomes a critical differentiator from its competitive bidders. By offering an unconditional money back service guarantee and competing on total quality service, your firm can maintain a premium over the competition.
Do not let the proposal be the first time you test your price, as this can result in a waste of resources going after price buyers who have no intention of considering value.
Another effective strategy is to offer various value propositions, in the form of differing options, within the proposal, thereby preventing it from becoming merely a one shot, take-it-or-leave-it option. You can even use Chris Marston’s concentric circles to help you, not only to scope a job, but to offer different options.
Maintaining your pricing integrity on the RFPs you decide to respond to sends an important message within your firm that pricing is a strategic decision—one based on value—and not just a number to be arbitrarily derived in order to make the next sale.
Be sure to maintain a mortality log for proposals submitted but not accepted. Perform post-mortems on lost bids and determine the reasons. This will help you focus on value for future RFPs rather than merely cost and price. The better you know the customer and the more thorough you are at ascertaining both their needs and wants, the higher probability you have of securing your share of profitable RFP work.
Keep the winner’s curse in mind as you prepare to respond to RFPs and be sure the potential customer is serious about doing business with you and not just using your bid as a way to lower their existing price. Some firms have tested this commitment by charging for a proposal and then offering a full credit if the bid is accepted.
Utilizing the above advice could help your firm secure a $1.2 million engagement when everyone else’s price was $750,000. That’s win-win all the way around.
Ed Kless - 03/11/2008
Much of my role at VeraSage involves combining the disciplines of project management and pricing. It is universally agreed that pricing with purpose presupposes a detailed understanding of perceived value to the customer and of the scope of the knowledge to be transferred. The former goes by the moniker of sales (I prefer the term value investigation), and the latter by the term project management.
It is my belief, however, that while development of a great scope document is clearly necessary to set price, it is risk, not scope, which should have the greater impact actually setting of price. This risk is not only the risk of the professional, but also the perceived risk of the customer. I recently posted a story in the trailblazers’ section of this blog that illustrates this point.
To clarify what I mean, I would like quickly to examine the four responses to risk: avoidance, transference, mitigation, and acceptance. Here is a brief definition of each:
- Avoidance — avoiding the risk altogether. In some cases this means not performing the engagement.
- Transference — shifting the impact (dollar amount) of a risk event to a third party.
- Mitigation — for a negative risk this means reducing either the probability (percentage chance) or the impact of a risk. For a positive risks (yes, there are positive risks, some prefer the term benefit), it means increasing either the probability or impact since you want this event to occur.
- Acceptance — do nothing about the risk and proceed anyway. Normally, this is done only with lower impact risks.
For a professional knowledge firm (PKF), it is transference and mitigation about which we are most concerned because rarely is a firm engaged in situations of risk avoidance or acceptance. I posit that C and D level customers hire PKFs primarily for risk transference. That is, they want someone to pin the blame on if (when) a project goes south. Whereas, A and B level customers hire PKFs for risk mitigation. They recognize that the work of knowledge transfer is risky and that the possibility of success increases when the work in collaboration with an outside firm. Note that working with a PKF does not eliminate the possibility of failure.
With this idea in mind, I submit that recognizing this crucial distinction of risk transference versus risk mitigation is the critical factor in setting a price for a knowledge transfer engagement. Clearly, a customer seeking risk transference should be charged a higher price than a customer seeking risk mitigation should because they want the professional to accept more risk.
I would love to hear from you on what you think.
Ed Kless - 03/11/2008
VeraSage is pleased to announce a new Trailblazer in the technology industry - Forepoint LLC. Click here for the full article.
Ron Baker - 03/11/2008
Congratulations to Tim McKey for being featured in the Baton Rouge Businessreport.com article, ”Billing time,” by David Jacobs on Monday March 10, 2008.
Great job Tim, I especially loved the picture of you torching of the timesheet and the final line in the article, inspired by Ed Kless.
Ron Baker - 03/11/2008
The Complete Lawyer provides “Tools and insights on professional development, quality of life, and career issues that impact every lawyer’s success and satisfaction.”
In March, they will be running a 4-part series of articles, the first one is an interview with me on The Firm of the Future.
The next three will deal with Value Pricing, which I’ll post here as they are published.
Ron Baker - 03/07/2008
Another hat tip to Stephanie West Allen for sending me this New York Times article, “Time Out of Mind.”
This is really a great article, and so is Stephanie’s blog post on it.
The article quotes the famous saying from Ben Franklin, “Time is money.” For attorneys, a saying just as famous is Abraham Lincoln’s “Time is an attorney’s stock in trade.”
Both are nonsense, but in fairness at least Ben Franklin meant opportunity cost, so he was more correct than Lincoln. Let’s look at it.
Time is Money?
Franklin’s little saying has certainly infected the way in which businesspeople view the value of the goods and services they deliver; unfortunately, it is taken out of context. The saying was written in 1748—over 100 years prior to Marx’s labor theory of value—in a letter Franklin sent to a young businessperson just starting out who sought Franklin’s advice. Here is what Franklin wrote in its entirety on the subject of time in a letter entitled “Advice to a Young Tradesman”:
To my friend, A.B.:
As you have desired it of me, I write the following hints, which have been of service to me, and may, if observed, be so to you. Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides.
Note Franklin was not speaking of value, nor price; he was articulating the concept of opportunity cost.
Cost means a foregone opportunity, the road not traveled, so to speak. In reality, every cost is an opportunity cost. This is the idea that every activity or product in the economy has an alternative use, and was coined by the Austrian economist Friedrich von Wieser [1851—1926].
It is an important economic principle, but a seller’s opportunity cost has little to do with the value provided to the customer. In fact, Franklin’s statement has been misinterpreted as validating the labor theory of value, yet it does no such thing. Opportunity cost may influence the quantity of a good offered, but not its value to the customer.
Time is certainly precious, as it is nonrenewable and cannot be stored. But even resources are useless until a purpose is found for them people will value. Recall oil was worthless to the farmer until the invention of the combustion engine.
The New York Times author said it well:
But the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal—or very little.
Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.
The remedy is to liberate ourselves from Franklin’s equation. Time is not money but “the element in which we exist,” as Joyce Carol Oates put it more than two decades ago (in a relatively leisurely era). “We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.”
And Stephanie in her post said it even better:
The billable hour becomes like an automatic metronome in our brains, setting an habitual cadence that influences us even when we are not at work. Know that rhythm? You can change the beat of the drum to which you march. The first step is self-awareness. Carefully watch how you relate to time today.
Time is time, we mortals are all subject to a limited amount. It’s not the quantity of time you have or work that is valued, but the results you produce with the time you commit.
This is why the billable hour and timesheets measure the wrong things. The two go hand-in-hand. Get rid of either, and the other must go as well.
When will professionals give up the ghost of Ben Franklin and Abe Lincoln with respect to the importance of time?
Ron Baker - 03/07/2008
I’m delighted to be part of the Maryland Business and Accounting Expo, to be held in Baltimore on June 17-18, 2008. Here’s a the description from the Website:
Join us along with 1,000 CPA and business professionals from across Maryland and Washington DC for two days of outstanding education (90+ sessions), networking, and business-to-business meetings with 100 exhibitors and sponsors in the resource center. The Maryland Business & Accounting Expo (MD Biz Expo) is designed to provide up-to-the-minute resources and tools to help your company or organization deal with business challenges and find and seize new opportunities.
I’ll be presenting on Value Pricing, as well as a new topic I’m really excited about--“The Ten Business Books (You Must Read)”. This presentation is an adaptation of a full 8 hour CPE course I am currently developing with my VeraSage colleague Dan Morris, tentatively titled “The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.” We’ll be teaching this longer course for the Maryland Association of CPAs’ Business Learning Institute on July 18, 2008.
Since we at VeraSage get so many questions about the books we cite, read and discuss, we thought it would be fun to put together our top 100 favorite business books. The criteria was the book had to either change your thinking permanently or your behavior. In other words, it had to have a significant impact on your life. It’s a bit tough to limit it to just business books, but we are trying. My list is currently around 170, so I need to do some cutting, which is not easy. But then again, we aren’t really limited to just 100.
In the future, we will share with our community an incredibly effective resource that will enable you to see what we’ve read, our reviews, what we are currently reading, and even plan to read. Stay tuned.
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