“Law Two” from my article: “The Seven Immutable Laws of Change Management 2)Create a vivid picture (vision) of where this initiative leads It is tempting to be vague because then you are not committing to anything. Not committing avoids scrutiny and criticism. But without certainty, your troops cannot get excited about your change initiative. Be specific: “If we dominate the provision of X legal services to the Y industry, we will not only increase our revenues in both the A and B practice groups by at least 25% in the next two years, but we can also expect increases in the C and D practice groups of at least 10% attributable to cross selling initiatives from the A and B practice groups”. Obviously the particulars are customized to the situation but the point here is to be specific. While quantifiable measures are essential to your firm’s success, qualitative ones may be equally motivating to your people. For example, many of your people will work hard for the prize of having more work of a preferred nature or to do more work for preferred clients. You will rarely be exactly right when it comes to strategy and tactics — and that is OK. You will almost always do better or worse you’re your forecast. Get comfortable with being wrong because that is what management is all about. If you meet your objectives all the time, you are way too conservative. You will learn from your performance and continually correct and fine-tune. This is not the practice of law — it is the management of the business. In a real estate transaction, we expect to get good title for the purchaser on closing. This is not a guess or a hope or speculation. It is precise and we had better get it right — it’s what we’re being paid for. But a percentage increase in revenues from a particular kind of work is a crap shoot. No matter how smart you are, there are some variables beyond your control and many that are beyond your capacity to predict accurately. Worse, even if serendipitously your strategy is perfect, your tactics may be quite imperfect, at least initially. Business winners constantly monitor outcomes and frequently change or at least fine-tune tactics in an effort to continuously improve results. The punch line here is to create a vivid quantitative and qualitative description of a desirable outcome that everyone in your organization can relate to, knowing and accepting that it is not perfect. (Law 3 – Link to Law #1 if you missed it) (…thanks to Cameron Cooper of the Australian Law Journal where my article first appeared)