high leverage is completely inappropriate if the firm has a high level of Brains work.

firms are continually confronted with a basic dilemma. On the one hand, they can choose to follow a practice area down its life cycle, adapting organization structures, staffing strategies, pricing, leadership styles, and all else we have discussed above to the new requirements of the marketplace. Of course, in so doing they will be transforming

Rather, what we are talking about is finding ways to make client assignments substantively more valuable to clients by changing the way professionals interact with their clients during the project.

The reason so many firms have control systems that emphasize only parts of the profitability formula is that their control systems are designed to focus on short-term profitability (what I term “hygiene”), and ignore the issue of “health” (i.e., increasing the fundamental profit potential of the organization).

Procedure projects usually involve the highest proportion of junior time relative to senior time (and hence imply a…

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Where a service is so customized or complex that its execution remains more of an art than a science, organizations tend to be more free-form, less hierarchical, and less bureaucratic.

At the expertise end, it is appropriate (and not uncommon) to find profit-sharing and bonus pool systems for junior professionals, while in experience-based practices greater use is made of straight salary, with increases deriving from seniority and the accumulation of increasing amounts of experience.

result? Per-partner profits have not increased! In fact, they have remained precisely the same! What this simple example shows is that there is no necessary relationship between growth and profits. As we have seen, growth in a professional firm is driven primarily by the need to attract and retain staff, and is critical for that reason, but is not

client service is defined more broadly than technical excellence: It is taken to mean a more far-ranging attentiveness to client needs and the quality of interaction between the firm and its clients.