idealawg

Do right- and left-handers see abstract concepts in different ways?

This research seems to indicate they do, at least in certain situations. From the article "Embodiment of Abstract Concepts: Good and Bad in Right- and Left-Handers" (Journal of Experimental Psychology) by Daniel Casasanto [linked to here]:

Whereas right-handers tend to associate right with positive ideas and left with negative ideas, left-handers show the opposite pattern, associating positive attributes like goodness, intelligence, attractiveness, and honesty with the left side of space. Both groups implicitly associate good things more strongly with their dominant side: the side on which they can act more fluently with their dominant hands. These results validate the body-specificity hypothesis. People with different kinds of bodies, who interact with their physical environments in systematically different ways, form correspondingly different mental representations, even in abstract domains.

In a Newsweek article about this research, Sharon Begley suggests:

Memo to restaurant owners: if there are particular dishes you want more customers to order, list them on the right side of the menu.

I hope more research is done on the body-specificity hypothesis, this idea that people with different kinds of bodies (e.g., right- versus left-handedness) think about their worlds differently. Could have some very intriguing applications—beyond restaurant choices.

Note added August 8, 2009: Another article on this research: "Lefty or Righty? A new hold on how we think" (Stanford University News).

Blog Glob: "Law firms contend with new form of info leakage: Blogs"

Excerpt:

It wasn’t that long ago that law firms would only have to worry about the spread of office gossip when sensitive news was announced internally.

But today, leaked internal documents to blogs such as Above the Law have changed the way law firms disseminate news internally. This strategy has kicked into high gear as law firms have been forced to announce a lot of bad news in the past year.

...

Sites like Above the Law have been airing the profession’s dirt — from layoffs and slashed salaries to more edgy personal information about certain partners.

...

But since the recession hit home for the legal industry last fall, the blog has filled a niche not often served in the large law firm world. It has removed some of the public relations machine from the equation.

...

“About five years ago, we wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the press got a hold of information,” [Topper] Ray said. “But now it’s almost like you are posting a memo directly on the Internet.”

Click to read the rest of "Law firms contend with new form of info leakage: Blogs" (Philadelphia Business Journal).

From ABA Chicago: 7 Secrets to Help Lawyers Thrive in a Recession

My friend Julie Fleming gave a presentation "Seven Secrets Every Lawyer Must Know to Thrive, Even in a Recession" at this year's ABA Annual Meeting. The program will be reprised later this month as a teleconference; details here. To read her seven secrets which are posted at the ABA Web site, click here.

Report from recent LMA Rocky Mountain meeting: "Forget About Love and Hate: Strive for 'Professional' in Your Relationship with Reporters"

The program for the March, 2009, meeting of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Legal Marketing Association featured a panel of reporters and editors giving advice on how best to work with them. Excerpt from the program summary:

Lawyers and law firms often maintain a love-hate relationship with reporters.  When they have good news to tell about themselves or their clients, they actively seek media attention.  When the news is not so good, they try to duck around the corner.

...

Before pitching a story idea to the press, carefully review the publication to see which kinds of articles it runs and to determine which reporter covers the appropriate “beat.”  All of the panelists said that they prefer to be contacted by email or by phone – not mail.  A “blanket” press release that has obviously been sent to many publications will get less attention than an email or phone call offering an exclusive.

The definition of “news” in the eyes of a reporter or editor can vary with how often a publication appears, although there is some overlap.  A daily publication wants to be the first to cover news as it happens (although all publications relish the opportunity to break important stories).  To appeal to a daily, you must be timely with your news and provide the name of a lawyer who is ready and able to talk.

“As a weekly, we have the luxury of having more time to interpret the news,” said [Cara] DeGette.  “Because of Law Week’s unique focus on the legal industry, we often can include stories that would not qualify as news for a reader of The Denver Post.  If a story has already run in the daily newspaper, we will be looking for a fresh angle on that story.”

...

A daily newspaper, for example, might run the news that a new law has been adopted at the state or federal level.  A weekly (or the Sunday section of a daily) would be more likely to consider and write about the impact of that law on local law firms (Law Week) and businesses (The Denver Business Journal).  A monthly might write about the lengthy lobbying effort that contributed to passage of the law.

Each reporter and editor indicated an interest in ideas that provide a local or regional perspective on a legal trend or a national or international business story.  Weeklies provide editorial calendars, and are particularly receptive to stories that fit within their calendared themes.  None wants to dedicate much time or energy to news that has appeared in a similar form in a competing publication.

Click to read the rest of "Forget About Love and Hate: Strive for 'Professional' in Your Relationship with Reporters."

Is your childhood home a clue to your best office space today?

After reading Does Your Childhood Home Dictate Your Design Choices? (Fast Company blog), I ordered Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places, the book discussed in the post.

From that post:

Newsstands are crammed with shelter magazines that dictate how your home should look. Cantilevered credenzas, bamboo modern beach furniture, appliances in bold colors--these are furnishing of the moment.

Will they gratify you? Not unless you understand the emotional roots of your likes and dislikes, according to Toby Israel, an environmental psychologist and author of Some Place Like Home. Just as therapy helps a patient unravel family patterns and predilections, design psychology shows how we're unknowingly influenced by the design and décor we knew in our formative years, for good or ill. Israel helps clients "design from within" by plumbing what forms and objects from the past have positive associations. "We all have an environmental autobiography," she said. "Why not open this treasure chest and think consciously about what gave you pleasure?"

Environmental autobiography . . . writing one sounds both fun and useful.

Image credit: ImageAfter.

Suddenly Solo is theme for this month's LAW PRACTICE TODAY

Click to read July's issue of Law Practice Today. Article topics for solos include marketing, technology, Web resources, employing staff, and billing.

A good reminder to be aware of taking generational stereotypes too far

The consultant described in "Speaking to Generation Nexus: Guru Explains Gens X, Y, Boomer To One Another" (New York Times) has reduced generational differences to "cheat-sheet wallet cards." I think the degree of simplistic stereotyping she has brought to the various cohorts is both laughable and insulting.

Many of the quotes from the article made me wonder if this woman is putting us on. For example:

Near the end of the seminar, Loehr instructs one group to devise an ad campaign for a trip to France geared to Generation Yers. As the allotted time ticks down, Perry, the banker, stands up and rattles off buzzword after buzzword.

"We're going to fly in the Airbus . . . which is advertising green accommodations . . . and recycled seats . . . while being connected to the Internet . . . and because we are somewhat risky, we are going to [bungee] jump off the Eiffel Tower," she says. "Text us at organic.com for a 20 percent discount."

Everyone laughs and claps, but Loehr stands up to evaluate. "That was great. A couple comments. . . . Gen Y do not like to fly because of the carbon [emissions]. . . . Also, you started off by saying, 'We work hard to play hard.' . . . That's an X thing. That kind of threw me off. And the last thing, you

One lawyer's reasons for backing off from Twitter

In two words: time and balance. From the blog post Thoughts on Twitter, Web 2.0, and legal marketing written by Tom McLain.

So why is it that, after less than two months with apparent Twitter success, I have decided to back off on my commitment to Twitter. The answer is time. The beginning of the end for me can be traced to some of the questions that I answered in my twitterview. Those questions caused me to focus on my overall marketing plan and just how things like Twitter fit into it. Both sides of the debate over Twitter for lawyers recognize that it is vitally important to remain true to proven core marketing principals such as face-to-face meetings and other forms of personal interaction with people and that Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools are a poor substitute for "good, old-fashioned" client development. I do not think that I am alone in my belief that the marketing efforts should be focused on, in order, face-to-face interaction, maintaining a good website that is visible in Internet searches, maintaining a good blog that generates attention, and Web 2.0 tools. Of the Web 2.0 tools, my personal preference is LinkedIn, followed by Twitter. A fair assessment of my own marketing practices is that my priorities have been wrong and I was spending too much time on Twitter and not enough on higher ranking methods. In short, my balance was off or, in the words of Larry Bodine, I had allowed Twitter to become a "powerful distraction from getting real marketing work done." I simply need to create more time to focus on face-to-face marketing and blogging. In the words of my dear friend Chris Kimbel, sales director at Womble Carlyle, my marketing plan lacked proper balance and was skewed in an unhealthy degree in the direction of the least productive marketing methods.

I recommend that you read the whole post. Got me thinking.

Hat tip: @dianelevin.

"The CEO As Storyteller In Chief"

Excerpt:

"The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms," wrote the poet and social activist Muriel Rukeyser. To the schooled and scientific mind, that may sound sacrilegious, yet we know there is some truth in it. Our lives are a series of stories woven together--our own stories and the stories of those around us.

Great leaders--religious, political or business--realize this and are good storytellers. Jesus spoke in parables. Krishna and Rama came to life through the stories they told. The Torah, Judaism's founding legal and ethical religious text, the first five books of the Old Testament, is not a boring list of rules but a set of moral lessons and commandments intertwined with a wealth of life stories.

In the business world, many successful top executives are very good storytellers. They entice us with their stories all the time, telling us how they started their businesses, what they stand for and where they are going. ...

Click to read the rest of "The CEO As Storyteller In Chief" (Forbes).

At the mercy of our brains? An antidote to priming is metacognition

Research on priming was described in "Reading Reports Involving Risk-taking Affects Financial Decision Making" (Science Daily). What's priming? From the SD article:

Priming is a known psychological phenomenon, influencing memory retrieval processes by exposure to different stimuli. Dr. Kliger explains: "Consider, for example, a situation where you have returned home after watching a horror movie. While climbing the stairs, you hear the garden gate creaking. A common fear under such circumstances might be that there is a burglar outside. Hearing the same sound after returning from a tedious workday at the office, if noticing it at all, one would probably interpret it in a banal way – 'Woops, forgot the cat outside again'. In this example, the horror movie is the priming substance, affecting subsequent behavior."

One way to lessen the effects of priming is metacognition, thinking about your thinking. Jonah Lehrer recommends metacognition as one of the best ways to improve your decision making. I agree.

Along these lines, I just read Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. (More about the book.) If you read the book and pay heed to the author Winifred Gallagher's message, you will be walking down the road towards improved metacognition and prime proofing yourself.