“Someone”:http://www.scottweisbrod.com sent us this link about former Razorfish execs starting a company called Bond Partners.
Quote from article:
“…plan on running the new venture more like a law firm than a typical ad agency or consulting company… Fancying Bond more of a consulting company than an ad or marketing agency, Orensten said the company will focus on ‘experience design.’ “
This is the exactly what we’ve been doing since 2002. Our model was based on a law firm structure. We only have two titles here, partners and associates. A partner always works on a client’s business (sometimes multiple partners will work on a single project).
This model allows us to be involved in the work and not obscure it through levels of agency hierarchy.
Good to see that others are thinking the same way.
written by Jon Lax
I think the law firm structure is right on. We do the same thing at Nevo, although we haven’t quite worked out the titles. The biggest difference from the typical software consulting firm, I think, is that we don’t have salesmen. Everyone who talks to the clients is involved in doing the work, so clients are always talking to someone who understands their problems. We still have to do sales work, of course, but it’s our senior technical people who do it.
People hire us for our expertise in designing software systems. Why would they want to talk to someone who’s not an expert?
How does this structure scale? Personally, I find the structure appealing but am curious how you envision it if you decide to scale up. The only instance I’ve heard of a company successfully scaling this approach is W.L. Gore & Associates, the folks that make Gore-Tex. Malcom Gladwell wrote about this in his book the tipping point.
Here’s a good analysis about Gore & Associates:
http://www.workforce.com/section/09/feature/24/29/22/index.html
One choice quote:
“It isn’t a company for everyone,” Brinton says. “It takes a special kind of person to be effective here–someone who is really passionate about sharing information, as opposed to controlling it. Someone who can handle a degree of ambiguity, as opposed to ‘Here’s my job and I only do these tasks.’ Someone who’s willing to lift his or her head up from the desk and see what the business’ real needs are.”
Scaling is pretty easy, look at law firms… they have scaled pretty well. But I think it comes down to what kind of company you want to be.
Scale isn’t the issue it once was. Sure there will always be companies that require mirror organizations but less and less. The days of large massive scale deployments are kind of over.
Hi there. I’m new to this firm + blog. Scott Wiesbrod turned me on to you and I’ve spend about 10 minutes browsing. So far I really like what I see here and I’m going to come back to look through the content more in depth.
Very nice stuff here—and I like the design of the site.
-David (Logic + Emotion)
Great to have you here David. Feedback is always welcome. As an aside, I’ve been a subscriber of “your blog”:http://darmano.typepad.com/ for a couple of months now – keep it up.
Geoff