For sale: One perfectly round hole through wood.

This week, Doug Jasinski wrote a post titled The Richard Suskind Experience: Bespoke Suits, Power Drills, and the Power of Decomposing. Seriously, how can you not read a link-bait post like that? Anyway, I found this quote interesting:

Professor Susskind began with an anecdote involving power drills.  As the story goes, Black & Decker routinely takes their new hires for a period of training, shows them a picture of a power drill and asks them to confirm that this is what the company sells, which the new recruits blithely do.  The company then shows them a picture of a hole in a piece of wood … and advises that this is what their customers are in fact buying – not a product the company offers but rather a solution to their problem.  The message is a stark one – do not become so focused on your current product or service offering that you become myopic and lose sight of the client’s perspective – and their willingness to move their business elsewhere if a simpler, cheaper or otherwise better solution is presented.

This got me to thinking, what is the hole in the piece of wood for legal publishers, law librarians, and lawyers? In other words, what are our customers in fact buying from us (legal publishers:lawyers and librarians, law librarians:firm, lawyers:clients)? Or to turn it around, what are we selling?

Here’s what I came up with:

1. Publishers (and authors) sell intelligence or access to it (you can also call them “solutions”).
2. Librarians sell intelligence management and training (to facilitate good, efficient decision making).
3. Lawyers sell outcomes (which rely on intelligence and decision making).

The B&D training anecdote is interesting because it refocuses our attention on the hole, not the tool that produces it, and then requires us to ask whether “a simpler, cheaper, or otherwise better” tool can be offered.

I think the current discussions on alternative fee arrangements are a good example: look at the client’s desired outcome, consider the tool you use to achieve that outcome, then ask, “can we make a better tool for the client?” Jordan Furlong recently reviewed The LegalBizDev Survey of Alternative Fees by Jim Hassett, and had a few choice pull quotes, one of which I liked a lot and sort of highlights the narrow mindedness of firms these days:

One of our problems is that our partners seem to think they have a better product than the people we’re competing with. And so when the client compares our fixed fee with other firms’, they ask how come we can’t do the work for less. [The partners typically reply that competitors are] not offering the same product that we are, so I ask [the partners], ‘Why are we offering a product that the client won’t pay for?’ It’s a whole mindset that will require a long time to change.

There have also been some recent discussions (e.g., here and here) about the “value” of law librarians. A frequent sentiment I continue to see expressed is “show your worth.” From what I gather, the traditional approach seems to go like this (WARNING: simplistic reduction to follow): show the firm your tools (i.e., the services you provide) and demonstrate how well you’ve used them over the course of a year (e.g., number of research requests handled, content resources managed). The new approach suggests looking at the hole, and in the context of the firm I’m assuming the hole means—broadly—competitive intelligence. If you change your focus (from tools to hole), what do you see? The precise tools you use may or may not be contributing to the firm in the way you expect, or maybe you’re just not capturing the right metrics to show alignment with the firm’s goals. Either way, refocusing helps change our mindset, and allow you to use the correct set of tools to establish the all elusive “value.”

Then, of course, there are the publishers. I think we’re seeing some good stories on this front lately. For example, the story of WestlawNext is actually a pretty good example of focusing on the hole rather than on the tool. Thomson Reuters Legal (TRL) wanted to deliver better intelligence (READ: answers or solutions) to its customers, so it analyzed the way customers used a tool (Westlaw). Then they changed to tool, in some cases for better (e.g., UX, federated search), in some cases for worse (e.g., fail on secondary sources and pricing). For a history of the development of WestlawNext and a review of the product, see my post here. Lexis is attempting something similar with its Microsoft Word integration, which could prove to be a huge success or a huge flop. But the stories share something in common: selling intelligence or access to it is the focus.

As we enter the realm of iBooks and ePub formats, publishers face the danger of chasing new technology for the sake of the technology. We need to remain focused on the hole lest we produce a tool that may look really cool and be awesomely portable, but produces a square-shaped hole instead of a round one.

One other observation I had about this was something that wasn’t said about B&D’s training exercise. Namely, we might also want to give some consideration to the fact that the consumer may not even know he or she needs a round hole. Think about the last tool you bought and weren’t sure if you needed it, but it turned out you use it for all sorts of things you never imagined. I can think of at least one for me.

Now, how do we go about doing the same for our customers?

[Image (CC) by geoffreyrockwell]

UPDATE: After I published this, I noted on Twitter that Prof. Richard Danner spoke today at Harvard Law School on “Taming Multiplicity in a Post-Print Era.” The lecture notes can be found here. If you are a law librarian, I suggest you read them. Danner suggests that law librarians should be viewed as collaborators rather than as simply “service professionals.” This is an interesting recasting of the role, particularly as we move away from the “third place” (i.e., libraries) towards more digital, online environments.

Tagged as: future, legal publishing, Susskind