About 52 percent of attorneys indicated in a Lateral Link survey that their work has slowed and of those about 30 percent actually fear firing. In the ABA JOURNAL, Debra Cassens Weiss reports that all this represents a radical change in law firm organizational culture. For as long as many can remember - at least 15 or 16 years - law firm jobs were like academic tenure: No one got laid off.
Well, attorneys, welcome to the Rupert Murdoch era, one of wild change, failure, and breathtaking comebacks. In his long career, Murdoch probably had more downs than ups but no matter what he managed to always move forward, not backward. How does he do this?
Insight into his way of looking at and approaching business comes from an unusual source: The 2001 biography of him by Neil Chenoweth. Titled "Rupert Murdoch: The untold story of the world's greatest media wizard," it includes Murdoch's impressionable years, the ones in college. Like most of us, he tried on different ideas, including Communism.
What was in the air that proved more solid than left-wing ideology for Murdoch was game theory. Murdoch was at Oxford and the best and brightest, maybe as an extension of their wanting to get an edge in poker and chess, were fascinated with a different way of understanding human behavior and approaching problem-solving. Across the ocean at Princeton, John F. Nash of "A Beautiful Mind" was developing the game theory which would win him the Noble Prize.
The free-thinkers in the crowd saw that game theory was taking on, says Chenoweth, "the classical doctrine that economic outcomes are attributed merely to impersonal forces." Free-thinkers in law firms would likewise be challenging the notion that layoffs and therefore career chaos result from the impersonal force of demand and that one just got the ax and quietly disappeared.
In essence, those attorneys who drilled down into game theory could stand the system, modus operandi, and expected outcomes on its head. Notes Chenoweth:
"Game theory seemed to turn everything around, with its implicit suggestion that the successful player in buisness or politics was the one who ignored convention and social expectations, who cut corners, who broke unwritten rules, who do what no one else in the game was prepared to do."
And those of us who reverse-engineer Murdoch's career see just those principles played out. He seems totally immune from fear, discouragement, social censure, slavish obedience to the rules of the profession, and what was, including relationships. Bill and Hillary Clinton also seemed to embrace this approach but not with Murdoch's brilliant outcomes - or smoothness.
Can attorneys, who tend to be rendered risk-averse by the need for good grades and good jobs, learn to play the game more like Murdoch and less like someone operating on fear? It's possible. For those astute enough to recognize the old order in the business of law is going or if not gone, it's probable.
There are many of us who saw the game differently during or after adversity. They includee Steve Jobs, Alan Dershowitz, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Jamie Dimon, and Charles Schultz. The best appliers of game theory seem to treat hardship, loss and threat as leverage for the Next Big Thing.
