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Law Firm Leadership Collections
Good afternoon all, I have a few ‘Friday’ questions on the subject of law firm leadership collections. Hopefully a few of you can contribute…
- Does your Library have a dedicated subject collection to support the cultivation of leadership skills?
- Do you brand this collection in a unique fashion? If so, how?
- Can you estimate the size of your collection? An area of growth? Are you constantly culling or it easily maintained?
- Outside the major legal vendors and consultants, are there low profile authors or niche publishers that you’d recommend?
- Do you know of a substantial pathfinder or annotated bibliography on the subject?
Thank-you for any contributions that may follow. I do read a fair bit in this area, but I’m hoping for some collection development advice here, and of course, to be pushed in new directions.
Steven – this isn’t a topic that I’d rely on traditional sources for at all. I’d be looking at Ed Dietel’s work, the blogs of Gerry Riskin, David Maister and “Adam Smith” and generally work from what’s left of the Edge Group.
Useful work was being done at the Leadership at the Peak programme in Colorado Springs, and at Campbell Law School. I would also suspect that the biz school literature would be helpful.
Thanks Simon. Those are definitely core (Maister, Riskin, McKenna, etc.), and the ‘get to the point’ aspect of blogs is definitely attractive to many (including obviously me), but there must be a place for longer discourse materials? no?
Personally, I’m inclined to see the final solution as a mix – sometimes short and thought provoking, and sometimes longer works, laying a substantive groundwork. … It was interesting to read that even David Maister has trouble dedicating his time to reading books, but comforting that he saw the negatives too.
And thanks Simon for the pointers. Ed Dietel’s a new name for me. Someone sent me the Peak website last year, but I didn’t look closely or bookmark. Can you drop me a link?
Our books in this area are mostly kept in individuals’ offices I’m afraid, mine included. Those of us in leadership roles tend to each have our own favourite authors and build our own little collections. I do like your idea of gathering them in one place. Will they get read by others? I’m not so sure about that.
At one time I thought it would be good to collect books on practical things like time management and how to give presentations. Mostly they have ended up sitting in my office.
The few leadership titles we have in our collection are in the KF 316.5 area which, I think, is the law firm marketing subject area.
We have a few copies each of books by Harry Beckwith:
– What Clients Love
– The Invisible Touch
– Selling the Invisible
at one time they were promoted internally, and I have a little red handwritten sign above them (a la Chapters/Indigo) saying “Beckwith Books” to make them stand out. That’s as close to separate branding as we’ve come.
Our goal is to try to incorporate as much into the KF modified classificiation scheme as possible, not pull things out into separate collections.
I like the idea of a pathfinder or bibliography. Don’t know of one. Sounds like a job for a wiki! 8-)