A little while ago an article The future for law firms: virtual law firms, legal outsourcing and the battle for talent appeared in Thomson Legal reporting on some of my thoughts on where the legal industry is headed.
The article opens:
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The Committee for Economic Development for Australia (CEDA) today launched a landmark publication Australia’s Future Workforce?
It’s an excellent report, bringing together contributions from leading researchers from Australia and globally, looking at the exceptional challenges of the changing landscape of work, and some of the policy prescriptions that will help nations and their citizens to prosper.
One of the highlights of the report was an analysis of the likelihood of automation replacing jobs in Australia, adapting the methodology used by the Oxford Martin Institute in examining the risk of job losses in the US.
The Australian study looked at the likelihood of different job sectors being replaced by automation.
Source: CEDA
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Last week I ran a brief workshop at the strategy offsite of a professional services organization, with their top 100 executives in attendance. They wanted to understand major business trends and the implications for both their own organization as well as the services that will be valuable for their clients.
In a highly interactive session I ran through major trends in technology, business, and society, went into depth on the lessons emerging from lean startups and crowd-based models, and then facilitated groups in generating high-potential ideas for new service lines and creating a high-performance organization.
While many of the concepts of lean startups feel quite foreign within many established organizations, a useful way to help shift thinking is to focus on the concept of ‘testable hypotheses’. This is central to how dynamic startups function, and can fairly readily be introduced into large organizations – and their clients – without seeming overly radical.
In introducing the idea into enterprise I have found it useful to frame testable hypotheses as 5 steps:
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Yesterday professional services expert George Beaton and I ran the inaugural Clients and Firms of the Future: How to Compete conference in Sydney, bringing together around 100 senior leaders of professional services firms to look at the future of the industry.
It is just over 15 years ago now that my first book was released with the subtitle The Future of Professional Services (now out in its Second edition). While these days my work covers a far broader scope, over the years I have worked extensively with professional services firms to help them create successful futures.
There has been substantial change in the professions over the last decade, however there will unquestionably be far greater change in the years to come.
It was an absolutely fascinating day at the conference exploring the future of professional services. I will be sharing more from the conference over time, but today would just like to put down a few initial thoughts from the three themes of the day.
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Leading up to the Client and Firms of the Future: How to Compete conference in Sydney on March 11 (which I discussed in a previous blog post), my co-organiser George Beaton and I have recorded a brief video to set the scene.
In the video we begin by addressing the question: Why do professional services leaders need to think about the future? and go on to discuss what to expect at the conference.
Points we make in the video include:
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The subtitle of my first book, 15 years ago now, was ‘The future of professional services’. I still believe it’s an incredibly important topic, not just in the future of business, but also in the future of work and society.
As such I am delighted to be collaborating with one of the world’s leaders in professional services strategy, George Beaton, in organising the Clients and Firms of the Future: How to Compete conference in Sydney on 11 March.
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A week ago I gave a keynote to a relatively small but rapidly growing professional services firm on the occasion of their 10th birthday celebration, to help them think about their next decade of business.
My presentation began with macro trends, then drilled into shifts in the professional services landscape, and finally onto the leadership required to create the future of professional services.
The theme that the group picked up on the most which drove our ensuing conversation was how they could tap external experts to generate value for clients.
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Last week I gave a keynote on Mega Change: Tomorrow is Here at the NASSCOM Global In-House Center Conclave at Pune in India.
Global In-House Centers (GIC) describes offshore service and processing centers that are run and owned by the parent company. While business process and IT services have long been outsourced to offshore service providers, as many firms have chosen to establish their own centers, not least to maintain full control of operations and standards.
It was a fascinating event, bringing together the leaders in the space. GICs in India generate $15.5 billion in revenue and employ over half a million people.
Often GICs provide not low-level processing functions but highly sophisticated functions. Some of the world’s largest multi-nationals locate the global cream of their technologists and data scientists in India.
The next phase is for GICs to go beyond cost arbitrage on support to drive innovation and higher-value functions, as shown in this diagram from a recent NASSCOM report on GICs in India.
Source: NASSCOM/ Deloitte
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A very interesting global survey title The Professional Revolution has just been released by Thomson Reuters (Disclosure: I long ago worked for its predecessor Thomson Financial as Global Director – Capital Markets).
The report uncovers a number of very interesting insights into professionals and professional work. One of the most interesting is the differences between emerging market and developed market professionals.
The most interesting statistics from the report, shown below, show emerging market professionals demonstrating clear leadership in creating the future of professional work.
Source of all charts is the report The Professional Revolution.
Emerging market professionals are substantially more entrepreneurial than their developed market counterparts, wanting to drive change and initiatives, and preferring a competitive environment. They also recognize there is no conflict between competition and collaboration, and that collaborative work is the essence of professional growth and work satisfaction.
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I am currently preparing a number of keynotes for senior business audiences over coming weeks. In preliminary conversations with one group I encountered a very common and deeply misleading view of how business is changing today.
We engaged in discussions on “economic structural change”, that were in fact only about changes in industry composition. The mindset was to consider the changes in relative sizes of industries in the economy, such as manufacturing getting smaller and tourism becoming larger. This perspective is prevalent with economists, who like to predicts shifts in industries over time.
However this is a deeply fallacious perspective in thinking about change in the economy.
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