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Follow along as our new ACC President and CEO, Veta T. Richardson, chronicles her first year at ACC, with this monthly blog series. The voice, views and stories expressed in this series are of the author and are not ACC’s. To read the first installment of this series, click here.

Your Voice Counts: Creating a Strategic Plan that Becomes Our Mantra

“Your judgment is no better than your information.”

 – Nathaniel H. Bronner, Sr., African American entrepreneur and humanitarian

Shortly after accepting the offer to join ACC, I was asked to develop ACC’s next strategic plan. For a new CEO, it’s the best gift I could receive: the opportunity to work with ACC’s leaders, staff and stakeholders to chart the strategy for ACC’s future success. As a result, I am excited to share with ACC members how I am approaching this important job, and what’s going on right now.

Fortunately, I am not a newbie to strategic planning: I led the development and successful implementation of two strategic plans at my prior employer. I know that selection of the right strategic planning consultant is one of the first and most important decisions to be made. However, before identifying the right consultant for ACC, I needed to quickly assess some of ACC’s key opportunities and challenges to assure that the consultant has sufficient depth and breadth to address these and more. I turned to ACC’s leaders and senior staff for their perspectives so that I could make an initial assessment of the skills and abilities the consultant needed to possess. For an association like ACC, it was also essential that the consultant have experience working with a global organization.

After asking around and collecting the names of several highly recommended consultants, I interviewed them. We talked about process, experience and my desire for a plan that goes beyond recommendations, and addresses implementation tactics, and, the related metrics to monitor how successfully the plan is being achieved. Closely tracking these metrics will enable early warning of instances where the plan may be veering off-course and requiring corrective steps. It will also track areas that are exceeding expectations and may suggest the need for more aggressive goals or timelines. Ultimately, it was also important to choose a consultant who would communicate and relate well not only with me, but also with the many ACC constituencies that would be involved in strategic planning. In addition to high IQ, the people with whom we will work best should also have high EQ.

The consultant ACC chose to work with is Axiom Consulting Partners. In addition to offices in Northern Virginia, Axiom has offices in Dublin and Brussels. Their offices outside the United States proved an influential factor in their favor, as it will support opportunities for engaging members of ACC’s European Chapter where ACC has its largest network of in-house counsel outside of North America.  

Right now, the Axiom engagement director, Juan Gonzalez, and manager Kate Richardson, are hard at work getting smart about ACC. The ACC staff has provided them reams of reports and data, including membership satisfaction surveys, census data, website analytics and more. They are reviewing these with the intention of understanding what members think, value and want. In addition, a group of about a dozen ACC members has been assembled to work as an advisory group to which Axiom can turn for ongoing feedback, testing proposals and mapping ACC’s key “value drivers,” which are the factors members view as most valuable or important to their decision to join and remain as members of ACC. In selecting the members of this advisory group, we made every attempt to include representatives of the ACC board, chapters, committees, non-US-based members (those in Canada, Europe, China, Argentina) and, members who are social media savvy, contribute to educational conferences and write for the ACC Docket. We sought representation from larger, medium, and smaller-sized law departments. In addition to tapping this advisory group, Axiom will also host member focus groups at the ACC Annual Meeting in Denver to gain the valuable perspective and opinions of ACC members. For those who will be attending the ACC Annual Meeting, additional information about these focus groups will be available to you on-site.

In addition, we are interested in hearing from you as part of ACC’s strategic planning process. I invite you to contact me at richardson@acc.com with your responses:

• What existing ACC resources, services, networks, programs or products are most important to you?
• What new resources, services, networks, programs or products should ACC provide to increase the value of your membership?

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 The grocery-strategy connection

 Week 11. Each week, via the In-house ACCess blog, follow the promise and pitfalls of forming a new value-based client-firm relationship. ACC Value Challenge steering committee member Ken Grady, General Counsel and Secretary of Wolverine World Wide, offered to profile his selection and start-up process of launching a trademark portfolio management engagement with law firm Seyfarth Shaw. Ken's co-blogger is Lisa Damon, a member of Seyfarth's Executive Committee and leader of the firm's efforts to incorporate Lean Six Sigma into its business. The voice, views and stories expressed by the authors below are their own and not ACC’s. To catch up on the story so far, click here.

 The client side

 From Ken:

Nutritionists have told us for years that we should develop a strategy before we go grocery shopping. We should plan our meals for the week, deciding what we will have at each meal, and how to do things like sequence the meals to use leftovers. From that plan, we should develop our grocery-shopping list. If you are efficient, you group items on your grocery list according to where the store places those items. When you go shopping, you move efficiently through the store, without backtracking, and you buy only what you need. You don't go shopping when you are hungry, and you don't give in to the temptation to buy those goodies in the checkout aisle.

Lawyers love tasks and checking things off lists, but as much as we advertise our strategy skills to our clients, we often neglect that step ourselves. We don't develop our strategy before we dive into the tasks. Of course, we do use strategies from time-to-time, usually for lawsuits, acquisitions and other transaction events. However, typically, we don't develop strategies for routine work.

For the Wolverine trademark portfolio, Wolverine and Seyfarth are working to develop many strategy tools. These tools will guide our decisions on issues relating to each mark, streamlining pieces of the decision process that today are ad hoc.

We want to make decisions up front about what to do in various situations and know where marks fit into our portfolio before we are confronted with the question. For example, we want to know the relative importance of a mark, and which countries are more important for that mark -- based on factors such as sales levels, related marks and counterfeiting risk. We want to have a strategy for customs surveillance, and a strategy that ties the mark to our domain name strategy. Using these and other strategy tools, we can make decisions quickly. If something pops up on a watch list, we know whether that country is important for that mark, and that guides the decision about what effort to put into a response. We avoid ad hoc decisions that result in our buying things we don't need.

Doesn't it take time to develop these strategy tools? Yes, but not a lot. Once we have the template, the time is in filling out the templates with the assistance of our client. The savings potential is enormous. It can cost thousands of dollars to oppose a proposed registration of a competing mark in one country. If we decided that our mark in that country is not strategically important and we avoid spending the thousands of dollars, then we probably covered the cost of the strategy process for the mark. We avoided the temptation to buy something in the checkout aisle and stuck to our original strategic shopping plan.

Next: Developing a map to the future.

The firm view

 From Lisa:

Ken's entry this week talks about developing a strategy before you act. For us, Lean Six Sigma helps provide the discipline for that step.

When I look at how Lean has changed my life as a lawyer, one of the keys for me has been to develop the discipline to stop and think before returning to business as usual. Ken talks about this step in the trademark area; for us, it is a step we try to use in every matter across the spectrum.

A key feature of Lean is DMAIC, a structured way to look at a matter and plan an approach, a strategy. This discipline asks you to:

·       Define the problem first -- what are you trying to accomplish? What problem are you solving? It mandates talking to your client, standing in his/her shoes and understanding the issue.

·       Next, you Measure. Look at the information/data that you have available (not relying on your "gut" or on the way you have always done something).

·       You then Analyze and Improve -- or implement -- the strategy or the solution.

·       The “C” stands for Control, which is the discipline of not going back to the way you have always done something, not returning to "business as usual."

Using DMAIC as a framework for the way you think about a legal problem can be no more than a quick mental ‘stop and check’ before you begin a project or a longer more involved discussion. The important thing for me is the pause to think, to consider and to plan -- the strategy that Ken talks about.

Lean provides other tools that I find useful in the world of lawyers -- for instance, the concept of looking at the root cause of problems and the tools designed to help you get there are ones that I use frequently -- not just in law, but in my like life as a manager of people. Too often, instead of stopping and analyzing, we jump to a solution -- lawyers are trained to solve problems. Again, Lean gives us the discipline to stop and consider: Are we really solving the root cause, or are we simply putting a bandage on something that won't last or won’t truly solve the issue?

Like effective project management and process design tools, taking time to plan strategy on the front end almost always saves time on the back end. I believe that strategic planning is not a luxury or an option to use only when time permits, but instead, it is a step that should always be integrated in my thinking -- whether I'm planning the trip to the grocery store or planning a much more complex project for one of my clients. I guess that all of those law school professors were right in the first place: Keep your pencil down in an exam until you have planned the answer!

Next: Working with Ken to map out strategy

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