What is going to be the single most important characteristic of business leadership over the next 20 years? Steve Jobs-like vision? Jack Welch-like process discipline? George Clooney-like charisma? I’m wagering it’s none of these. While any of those traits can be helpful, I firmly believe the future belongs to leaders who are willing to go deeply nerdy about their jobs.
When I say nerdy, I’m not talking about hosting a Dungeons & Dragons session in a firm conference room. I’m talking about the boring, unsexy, but increasingly critical work of gathering, analyzing, and understanding data. Data analytics can’t just be farmed out to the geek squad and relegated to a quarterly report. Good leaders need to be able to engage their analytical teams on their own terms, and leverage those findings into actionable agendas.
Led Off A Cliff
The image of the bookish, wonky CEO remains deeply at odds with the charismatic ideal of leadership that TV and movies have conditioned us to look for, and there remains a palpable hunger in the marketplace for dynamic, confidence-inspiring leadership. Academics have long been sounding the warning bells about the counterproductive myth of the superstar leader who inspires growth through just being awesome, but the warnings remain largely unheeded.
Consider for a moment the case of the young, magnetic CEO Elizabeth Holmes. By tapping her connections, charisma, and unbridled chutzpah, Holmes raised over a billion dollars for a company that promised to change the way medicine was performed. That company, Theranos, turned out to have forged most of its results, never developed a viable product, and in fact appeared to have promised its investors a concept that could not, as a matter of physics, work.
I raise the case of Holmes not to say that all magnetic CEOs are frauds, because they aren’t. There are leaders who know how to work a room like it’s nobody’s business and also run mind-blowing regression analyses using R. I raise Holmes, however, to highlight how easily charisma can mask a total lack of substance. By several accounts, Holmes consciously modeled her management style on Steve Jobs, who was notorious for projecting a “reality distortion field” that caused people to buy into impossible timelines and concepts, at least as long as Jobs was talking to them.
Charismatics are defined by their ability to cut through our mental defenses and get us to accept ideas and goals that we might otherwise reject. That skill set can be invaluable to companies that are resisting necessary disruption. But that can be a little like wanting to increase your browsing speed and disabling your antivirus firewall instead. Today’s economy demands the goods. A winning smile without intellectual firepower and technical knowledge won’t cut it today. Leaders can’t just live in the world of the “big picture” — they have to understand the less-exciting, nitty-gritty technical side of the business, as well.
The Other Guys
The better model for the leadership of tomorrow is the founders of Google. Pop quiz: who were they? If you answered Sergey Brin and Larry Page without resorting to the search engine they built, you’re probably in the minority. Most of us have heard those names dozens of times over the years, but these aren’t guys that stick in your brain. Their oratory is workmanlike at best. They didn’t inspire a cult of personality. They were coders who struck gold and grew their product without generating a lot of press for themselves. Google was notoriously spartan in its design, but wicked fast and more useful than any of its competitors (remember Ask Jeeves?).
Today, Brin and Page are the President and CEO of Alphabet, Inc. Google’s parent company, and worth about $100 billion combined. They’ve built one of the largest companies in the world, and they did it by getting deeply embedded in the technical side of their work. They realized before anyone else the power of the data they were collecting, and they’ve developed strategies to profit off that data that are head-spinning (and occasionally terrifying). Brin and Page lead an army of coders and IT professionals that they’re capable of having detailed conversations with, and they know how to translate those skills into successful implementation of their corporate strategies. Google is literally in the business of data analytics, and it’s one of the most powerful companies in history.
Learning The Lingo
The legal industry typically lags behind the rest of the business world by a few years, but even today we’re seeing firms that know how to mine and analyze data and turn that ability into profits. Smart firms are developing their data intake methods and combing through everything they can to find an edge on their competitors. Data analysis can help firms price themselves better, can help demonstrate value to clients, can spot market trends and identify targets for growth, improve compensation models, lower overhead…you name it.
The set of data we can make available to ourselves is enormous, and the tools to analyze that data set are cheaper and easier to use than ever. There’s a cost that firm leadership has to pay, however. Management has to educate itself so that it can read and converse with the data (and their geek squads) on their own terms. The Complete Works of Shakespeare might be high art, but only if you can read English. Otherwise it’s a 1500-page doorstop.
Case in point: in my practice, we discovered a number of years ago that search engine optimization was an underutilized avenue for bringing in business in our market. Like many lawyers, we first looked to experts to tell us what to do. We figured we’d hire a few nerds, they’d do some whiz-bang programming, and the phone would start ringing. It wasn’t that easy, and I eventually realized the problem was me. I couldn’t speak the language of SEO. That meant consultants could give me generic, off-the-rack advice with lots of jargon that wasn’t all that valuable, but I didn’t know. Salespeople could tout knowledge and results that I had no way to verify. In the SEO world, lawyers make easy prey. My ability to identify what I needed and convey that to my vendors was limited by my inability to speak their language.
The solution was to roll up my sleeves, get my hands dirty, and learn the industry. I got SEO tutors, went to conventions to learn, and started to understand more and more what we needed to do. Our team started seeing opportunities and taking them. We tracked endless amounts of data — conversions, bounce rates, ROI, any other statistic we could think to generate. Slowly but steadily, we crept up the Google rankings until we started to hit number one, and the phone calls were flooding in. We weren’t smarter than anybody. We didn’t have any SEO savants on our team. We definitely didn’t have charisma on our side. The difference maker was that we were willing to do the work, learn the wonky side of the business, and develop our strategy from there. We embraced our inner nerds.
It’s cliché to say that lawyers hate numbers, but aversion is no excuse anymore. Cats hate water, but they still need to take a bath. Data analytics is an important opportunity for growth for today’s law firm leaders, and tomorrow’s leaders will have to be fluent as a matter of course. Smart leaders will dust off their calculators and get to work.
James Goodnow
James Goodnow is an attorney, commentator, and Above the Law columnist. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is the managing partner of NLJ 250 firm Fennemore Craig. He is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management new release category. As a practitioner, he and his colleagues created a tech-based plaintiffs’ practice and business model. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at [email protected].