Blog Glob: Sunday afternoon shorts

Excerpt from Stopping the Leak: Attrition in the Professions is Getting Ugly (Michelle Golden) . . .

The legal and accounting professions are leaking like sieves.

In law, there's an 85% attrition rate of professionals who are abandoning the entire profession in their first five years. The public accounting profession is not far behind (about 65-70%, we estimate).

Excerpt from Lawyers Need to Have Mental Health Check-ups (My Blogging World Lourdes)

Thus, the Online Think Tank has suggested bi-annual testing of all lawyers over age 50 to make sure they are competent and this can be done in conjunction with "on-going education" and passing a 3/4 bar test every two years. Their IQs can be tested too, along with their recall.

Excerpt from "Working over time" (Rocky Mountain News)

[Brooke] Wunnicke has no plans to retire.

She spent the first 23 years of her law career in Cheyenne, handling cases of real estate, oil and gas, and corporate law. She has an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and a law degree from the University of Colorado.

Wunnicke came to Denver with her husband, James Wunnicke, in 1969. She soon joined Hall & Evans and still remains with the firm after 38 years - except for the period from 1973 to 1985 when she served as chief appellate deputy in the Denver district attorney's office.

Excerpt from "The Graying of the Bar: Paper and the Older Lawyer — Both Are Here to Stay" (PDF) (Edward Poll) . . .

It [this article] subsequently declared that “incompetence due to declining skills, failure to keep pace, or dwindling mental acuity may soon rise in the legal profession.”

That seems overblown enough, but a second item described a new regulation in India (where legal work is increasingly being outsourced) stating that if you are not licensed by age 45, you cannot become an advocate. “We don’t want the Bar to become parking lots for retirees,” one official was quoted as saying.

Excerpt from "Office Politics: The key to increased morale" (Nova Scotia Business Journal) . . .

When we smile, we become our own physicians, filling an endorphin prescription from our pharmacy within. If we want to alter our brain chemistry, we don’t have to take expensive drugs, we can just smile.

Excerpt from "Women of the world, unite!" (The New Mexican) . . .

A section of the book called “Just-Go-There Places” lists several locales that perch near the top of my personal list — Dubrovnik, Croatia; Samarkand, Uzbekistan; Kraków, Poland, and my hands-down best pick: Essaouira, Morocco. Two hours from Marrakesh on the Atlantic coast, foggy Essaouira is a place where pieces of bark are still sold as toothbrushes, boys hawk giant trays of macaroons in the main square and women waft through souks in sorbet-colored djellabas. It’s a place, according to the author, “where surprises await behind every azure door. Boats unload their cargo and fishermen auction their catches along the harbor, and you can have a fish prepared any way you like on a sizzling grill in the nearby street stalls.” Not hard to fall sway to its charms.

Excerpt from The Foundations of a New Marketing Paradigm (Part 4) (Ageless Marketing)

Our life stories unfold across four clearly distinct seasons. A person’s core needs –needs that must be satisfied for healthy personality development to occur – are determined by the season of life through which he is currently moving. Each season has a primary developmental objective. Meeting this objective depends on how well the needs it gives rise to are met. By -season of life, the primary developmental objectives are:

Excerpt from Belief and Beyond: A New Gallup Poll (Annie Gottlieb)

However, THIS poll found the numbers of "basic believers" among young people to be 90% -- statistically identical with those of all other ages. That suggests that it's religion, not God, that young people are staying away from. Lotta "spiritual nomads" in the 18-to-29 set, though as they get older and become parents this may change: many people eventually seek out a religious congregation for the social and moral support, especially for raising children (and losing parents).

Excerpt from CNN: Elder Sex is a Dirty Joke (Time Goes By) . . .

It is not possible to overstate the crude, lewd tone of the CNN story, more suitable to Saturday Night Live in the days of John Belushi than a news program. Little information was transmitted among all this hilarity.

Excerpt from I didn't like Sundays... (Johnnie Moore) . . .

I'd quite like to invent the term Sunday Syndrome to stand for the oppressive impact of pious regulation which takes the place of genuine faith and spontaneity. I see plenty of that in "best practices" and quite a lot in many prescriptions for how to be successful in life.

Excerpt from Contradictions (Jonah Lehrer) . . .

That reminds me of a story a neuroscientist recently told me, about the addicted gambler who refused to give up his health insurance. The guy was flat out broke - and clearly loved engaging in risky games while inside the casino - but refused to tolerate the risk of a high-deductible. We sure are a funny species.

Excerpt from Anatomy of a telephone game applied to a neuroscience study (Brains On Purpose) . . .

What lessons can we learn from this recent sequence of events? First, be careful about the conclusions we draw from studies. Second, related to the process of conflict resolution, remember the tricky telephone-game effect. In both our personal and professional lives, I am sure many of us have been both a witness and a party to telephone-game connections showing us communication can be very slippery.

Excerpt from Let's make a deal: man haggles for hot dogs and more in negotiation experiment (Diane Levin) . . .

[Tom Chiarella] writes about his experience in "Haggling for Hot Dogs", an article that appears in Esquire. Lessons learned include "Never let them know how much you have to spend. Draw people into your life. Show your personality. Learn people's names. Work your way up to the person who has a stake in the sale and the power to make a deal." Also, don't "think of money as the only thing...to offer. I found that trading favors proved relatively easy."

Excerpt from Value to the Customer (VeraSage) . . .

The customer never buys a product. By definition, the customer buys the satisfaction of a want..." Following Drucker's idea, Ron Baker is the promoter of "The Chief Value Officer" concept. He encourages professional service firms to think in terms of value rather than time. In an interview [linked to here] with Ed Poll, Ron discusses this concept further.