On a day when the BBC showed Into the Storm, and the Economist came through the letter box – and I got to read the obituary of Richard Sonnenfeldt, the chief interpreter at Nuremberg – the report in the Daily Telegraph of David Wilshire’s email reply to one of his constituents beggars belief. It included the following,

“Branding a whole group of people as undesirables led to Hitler’s gas chambers,”

Whatever the rights or wrongs of the MPs’ expenses story, comparing the treatment of MPs to that of Jews in Nazi Germany is a quite astonishing thing to say.  One of  Mr Wilshire’s constituents has suggested that he should go now, rather than stay on until the election. He cannot be the only one.

Back from a day in Bristol at Familiarity 2009, a conference for family businesses and their advisers. What makes this conference different is that the speakers are prepared to share their stories. So it isn’t just the usual death by Powerpoint. There can be, and there was today, not just a great deal of insight but a lot of emotion.Family businesses have all the problems and issues that other businesses have; likewise the family members have all the problems and issues that other families have. It is just that there is often no separation: things happen in the both business space and the family space at the same time, and often in the same place.

For me, as a professional advising family businesses, and as an outside non-executive director of a family business, there was also a lot on which to reflect. But that is for later; for now, just some of the quotes that stuck in my mind:

From Steve Fudge, MD of Dorset Village Bakery aka Fudges

Little Red Riding Hood has to go!

As Steve explained, this was one of the first things his non-family director said when he arrived.  LRRH has some 122 pages, but we all know the outcome, and it can be summed up in four words only – the wolf ate Grandma. So cut the waffle!

From Mandy Nickerson, MD of Bales Worldwide Travel,

We need to recognise our own success

All too often we are ready to recognise this in others, but we rarely look at we have achieved. Mandy also told us that there was not enough fun in business – but there should be. And she talked about how they deal with complaints (disarming customer terrorists).

And from John Tucker, of The International Centre for Families in Business, when talking about advising family businesses on ownership, control and succession

There are two questions you need to ask, and which are often very difficult to answer: who is family? And who isn’t?

Once a week in the FT’s Business Life column, Stefan Stern tells it like it is.  If you have no time for anything else, read him. Today’s column is as good as ever, Why you should pay attention to your employer brand. It is, or should be, common sense: and as important for law firms as for any one else: especially in the present economic climate.

You need to present a coherent and plausible sense of yourself as an organisation. That means having a robust employer brand: knowing who you are, and being able to tell a good story about yourselves.

This happy scenario will not come about by chance. It requires leadership and a sustained communications effort. You may need to bring to the surface your organisation’s values and attitudes that have remained tacit or undiscussed until now.

How did you deal with your lay-offs? And how will you deal with your next round of recruiting?

From the FT: not quite the press coverage law firms need right now,

Law firms and other businesses are seeking to jump the queue ahead of pregnant women and other vulnerable groups by mass vaccinating their staff against swine flu.

This says it all,

Selling time by the hour rather than results by value is as doomed in the long term as turning dead trees rather than electrons into information.

From Michael Stern’s excellent post in Legal Village, Change or die: reflections on Richard Susskind’s The End of Lawyers.

The opening quote of Francesco Guerrera’s Analysis article in this morning’s FT caught the eye, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste” (but then I don’t work at Citigroup, so hadn’t heard it before).

What struck me, however, and what is applicable to law firms as much as any other business was this,

Experts argue that although most companies see the need to reform in a crisis, many embark on the wrong kind of change. A common mistake is to go for across-the-board job and cost cuts that weaken the company without sharpening its core businesses. “The first thing you have to do is to protect and strengthen the core,” says Bain’s Mr Rigby. “In the same way our bodies allocate blood flow away from expendable extremities in favour of vital organs during a crisis, companies must make sure their best markets and consumers are protected.”

Driving change may be easier in times like these, but, as Guerrera notes,

In the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, companies face a daunting choice. Do they exploit the tough times to lose the ballast accumulated during the boom years and make risky strategic changes in the hope of emerging as lighter but stronger organisations? Or do they adopt a defensive stance, trying to weather the storm without rocking the boat until their markets and the economy rebound?

I always enjoy John Naughton’s posts in Memex 1.1.

Yesterday, in Onwards and downwards, what struck me most was less his finding the report of Alan Milburn’s inquiry into social mobility in contemporary Britain “deeply depressing” than his conclusion,

But the wider problem laid bare with scarifying clarity by the Milburn report remains. And nobody — and this includes Milburn — has any real idea what to do about it.

And today I have finally got round to reading Alex Novarese’s post Law and the myth of social mobility in Editors’ Blog on Legalweek.com,

Does the legal profession have particular cause for concern? The basic fact remains that law, like medicine, is built on a foundation of structured academic learning, followed by equally structured vocational training. As such, law is not well equipped to overcome the weaknesses of the UK’s educational system. Interestingly, Milburn’s report also notes that the number of independently-schooled solicitors has fallen since the late 1980s, so on that yardstick there has been some progress. There is also the issue that law has a very structured career track, with clearly defined routes in, making it one of the more transparent of the aspirational careers.

There is an interesting comparison to journalism, which the report notes has moved from being one of the most socially inclusive careers to become considerably more privileged over the last 20 years. The report concludes that journalism is the only career in which the proportion of staff educated at independent schools has gone up (it was static or had fallen for all other professions, even for judges). There was also the hilarity of seeing one newspaper covering the report refer to journalism as a “former trade”, as if it had been transformed through the infusion of the privileged classes into an actual profession; my chosen trade has far more to be ashamed of regarding social mobility than law.

But the last word perhaps should come from Beth Wanono, in her Comment piece in the Law Society Gazette on 9 July, Managing Expectations. What she is writing about is not so much about social mobility and the legal profession as the very real and immediate challenge for those who aspire to be lawyers,

There is a difference between a crunch and a squeeze. My impression of the trainee market is that the situation is akin to 10,000 people trying to cram onto a train that can only hold 1,000. You could extend the tenuous analogy further and say the platform is already overflowing with those who couldn’t squeeze on to the last train.

This will only get worse. As Wanono remarks,

We have reached a stage where the balance between offering access to the profession and managing the expectations of those considering it has become dangerously tipped towards the former.

The Telegraph is given to hyperbole, and never more so than when knocking the present government (not necessarily something I usually mind). This morning’s lead story about swine flu is another good example.

What caught me eye, though, was this

The hold-up [by the Treasury taking seven months to sign off the deal to set up a flu telephone helpline] meant that the Government had to introduce a stopgap flu phoneline, introduced last week, manned by staff given just one day of training.

In the meantime, NHS Direct, which should have been running the service, has made hundreds of its highly trained staff redundant.

The conclusion the Telegraph invites you to draw is that the Swine Line is somehow sub-standard, operated by barely literate staff and likely to make the situation (sorry, in Telegraph-speak “chaos” or “crisis”: take your pick) much worse.

Well, I have news for you. Expert systems work and this is just flu.  The NHS National Pandemic Flu Service is not offering the expert health information and advice that NHS Direct does; instead it is something very different: a screen based expert system that allows people to check their symptoms. It doesn’t need highly trained staff; it simply needs people who can operate the system. Two days in and it is working.

Read Stefan Stern’s latest column in the FT, Time to get your strategy right. It has been a pretty grizzly year, and it is not getting easier fast, but we will come out of this recession: and professional service firms, like any other business, need to be ready. So, as Stern opens, “We need to talk about strategy” – but, and this is where it starts,

. . . business leaders ought to recognise, as they catch their breath after months of turbulence, that the strategy they were pursuing until recently is unlikely to be right for today.

It’s not just that markets have changed. Your organisation has changed. You may have all been through a near-death experience. Even if you avoided calamity, it is unlikely that colleagues are the same carefree people you remember from a year or two ago. Most businesses have been making serious cutbacks. Co-workers may be doing their best to look calm and positive. But they can see unemployment rising and know that sustained recovery is a long way off.

Finding the time to think is never as easy as it should be: the demands of a transactional practice leave little opportunity to step back and consider where a difference can and should be made. An email yesterday, which somewhat unusually I did not straight away consign to junk mail (the usual destination for unsolicited communication), took me to the Pennington Hennessy Blog and a short post on Generation Y, and from there to an excellent article in the FT (which had prompted the post), A to Z of Generation Y attitudes.

I have posted on this topic before, Graduate divas – don’t you love them (triggered by a Jordan Furlong post in Law 21), and it is, as some of my partners know, a particular hobby horse I ride. But that doesn’t make it any less important. What I found interesting in Alison Maitland’s FT article, is this,

Yet two studies into the attitudes of those Generation Ys that are in the workplace suggest that Carrie, Alex and their young professional peers are not as different from other generations as supposed – and not just because the recession has upset their expectations.

While craving excitement and challenge, nearly 90 per cent of Generation Ys describe themselves as loyal to their employer, according to the study Bookend Generations , published this week by the US-based Center for Work-Life Policy. In addition, nearly half of this tech-savvy and “connected” generation prefers face-to-face communication at work to e-mails, texts or phone calls.

But what sets them apart from us (and I am unashamedly a Boomer) is

the unprecedented pace of technological change, which shapes how they expect to work and why they resist boundaries; and the disappearance of the job for life.

Our challenge is how to engage with them.