Sublime

knowledge and ability,

firm whose practice-mix was made up predominantly of clients who, rather than needing the profession’s most creative talent, wanted to find a firm that had accumulated experience in handling certain types of problems, and would not take an expensive “start with a blank sheet of paper” approach to the problem.

Can we organize and specialize our people in innovative ways, so that they become particularly skilled and valuable to the market because of their focus on a particular market segment’s needs?

An organization that rigidly adheres to a doctrine of continual transformation, following the creative desperation path, is different from one that is sensitive to connections, coincidences, curiosities, and contradictions.

They have acquired enough experience in various situations to be able to rely on their intuition to know what to do in which kind of situation. Their decisions in complex situations are explicitly not made by long rational-analytical considerations, but rather come from the gut

we’re thinking of making a decision, large or small, we use shortcuts developed from our long experience in the world; in chess terms, we do not consider 10 million different moves, but instead rapidly choose the two or three that are most likely to work.

Rather than relying on individual talents, the firm would need to create more of an institutional reputation, based not only on the “raw” talent of key individuals but on the ability of the firm to bring to bear its collective knowledge derived from past engagements.

collectives are typically more valuable than experts when the problem is complex and specifiable rules cannot solve it.

form a small team within each discipline (or service area). Their task is to develop a proprietary client-service methodology: that is, to come up with value-enhancing action ideas