Twenty-six years ago Tom Peters and Robert Waterman published In Search of Excellence, and to some extent the genre of writing for business managers hasn't been the same since.  If for no other reason, it's worth taking a moment to revisit Peters' thoughts on the current state of the art of management, as the FT recently did in its weekly "Lunch with the FT" feature. 

But first, if you haven't read "Search," you might yet give it thought:

"When people think about the great management blockbusters, this is the text they have in mind. Search made the business book news. It has sold more than 10m copies and is still the model to which many business authors – whether they realise it or not – aspire. It also launched Peters on the path to global, jet-setting guru-dom."

Peters himself, however, will have none of his elevation to "guru:"

Few, however, have criticised what he does for a living as ferociously as Peters himself. “I say to people, ‘You got a bad deal, paying money to see me,’” he tells me. “I have utterly nothing new to say. I am simply going to remind you of what you’ve known since the age of 22 and in the heat of battle you forgot. You’d have to be one of those television preachers to believe that you’re going to work with a group of 500 people and change their lives. First of all, most of them agree with you. You’re not going to pay £1,000 [a head] to go and see someone if you think the guy’s a jerk."

Self-effacing as he may be, Peters has some deeply contrarian opinions.  For starters, don't kid yourself that you have it harder than your predecessors or that 21st-Century life is markedly more complex than things were in the past:

Is management getting harder? “No,” he replies firmly – and in defiance of the conventional wisdom. But what about all that new technology, the end of deference, the increased pace of life, and the heightened expectations of employees? Doesn’t that all make management harder?

On the whole, Peters thinks not. We exaggerate the extent of change, he feels. It is the arrogance of modernity to believe that we face unique and unprecedented challenges.   [Putting it in perspective,] my mom died two years ago a month short of her 96th birthday, which means that she lived through the arrival of long-distance telephones, automobiles, airplanes, jet airplanes, a man on the Moon, the great Depression, world war one, world war two, the cold war, Vietnam, Iraq one, Iraq two, [so don't kid yourself].

I beg to differ.  I believe the complexities of the challenges facing law firms today actually are unprecedented.  Here's a very short bill of particulars:

• No longer are all your partners within one timezone, let alone one zipcode. 
• Clients are more sophisticated (read: more demanding). 
• The war for talent, both raw recruits and laterals, has never been more intense. 
• Technology, a major blessing but with a correlative curse, has pushed "work/life balance" to the breaking point for many individuals.
• Transparency of financial performance, and pressure for ever-escalating numbers, seems to reach new annual highs.
• And perhaps putting a nice exclamation point on our landscape, Gary Hamel, merely "the world's most influential business thinker" according to The Wall Street Journal, has pithily described the world today as "less benign" than ever.

But speaking of war, which we were a moment ago, Peters served two tours of duty in Vietnam as a combat engineer building bridges for the Marines, and in a revealing passage, he says that much of what he learned about management came from the diametrically opposed styles of his two commanding officers.

I’m not exaggerating but I really spent the next 40 years of my life writing about Dick Anderson. He was a guy who believed that young men aged 23 needed a chance to express themselves. He believed that [writing] reports was incidental but that building stuff for your customers, typically the Marine Corps, was what you were there for.

“On tour two I had a naval academy graduate who would rather have produced an excellent report about things we hadn’t built than a lousy report about things we had. One guy wanted you to do something, the other guy wanted you to write reports. It was the best management training that one could possibly have had. Do what Dick did and avoid what Dan did – there’s the book ... it’s a very short book!”

What strikes me as most revealing about this remark is that it has nothing to do with strategy, it has entirely to do with execution.  And this from a pair of McKinsey consultants (Waterman, his co-author, being the other).

Peters confirms which side of the strategy/execution chalkline  he's on:

[T]he book did not have an easy birth. Its breezy tone did not play well with earnest colleagues at The Firm, as its authors were to find out. “There’s no way to describe the viciousness with which Bob and I were attacked within McKinsey,” Peters says. “This was not the Holy Writ. It was the intellectual challenge to what McKinsey stood for at the time.

“To some extent what Waterman and I were looking at was the business of ‘execution’, and execution is fundamentally a management thing. We were saying, ‘If you can execute well, it doesn’t matter what the hell the strategy is. The doing is what counts.’ But this was when ‘strategy’ was at its apex. We were pushing back."

Peters subscribes with a vengeance to school of relentless execution, and also to the not-inconsequential  role of luck.  He ironically describes his own good fortune:  “I was born in 1942, in the US. I was protestant. I had relatively intelligent parents and I was white – that’s the first 99.9 per cent of it. Hard work may have done the rest."  And "Search" itself?  "A decent book with perfect timing."

In other words, try hard and then try some more.  Many many things may not be within your control—today seemingly more than ever, Peters' protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—but one thing is within your control:  How hard you work and how much you  get done. 

Having the energy, the imagination, and the sheer intellect to tackle today's escalating challenges—with, I should mention, impeccable integrity—is perhaps the single greatest thing we have to be thankful for today.

Afraid that if you communicate it will appear on Above The Law in no time?

Get over it.

We live in the YouTube/Above The Law era, but that does not relieve you of your obligation and your duty to lead. It makes it more challenging and more risky, but if anything even more necessary. I've written that information abhors a vacuum, and the unprecedented availability of channels for near-instantaneous distribution of rumors or innuendo increases, not decreases, the burden on you to tell the firm's story. If you're clear, consistent, candid, and direct, Above The Law won't be able to lay a glove on you. (If you disagree, permit me to ask you whether your time-frame is that of months and years, appropriate to managing a firm, or that of Above The Law itself, which is hours or minutes.)

Second, Behavioral Incentives: Reward (read: pay for) the behavior you want.

As an economist, I can't help but reflect the reality that I'm ingrained with the power of incentives. This brings us back to Citigroup:

To some, the misery at Citigroup is no surprise. Lynn Turner, a former chief accountant with the Securities and Exchange Commission, said the bank's balkanized culture and pell-mell management made problems inevitable.

"If you're an entity of this size," he said, "if you don't have controls, if you don't have the right culture and you don't have people accountable for the risks that they are taking, you're Citigroup."

A more serious problem was whether the bank, assembled from a potpourri of financial services firms by Sandy Weill, ever came together as one coherent entity:

Even as Citigroup's C.D.O. stake was expanding, its top executives wanted more profits from that business. Yet they were not running a bank that was up to all the challenges it faced, including properly overseeing billions of dollars' worth of exotic products, according to Citigroup insiders and regulators who later criticized the bank.

When Mr. Prince was put in charge in 2003, he presided over a mess of warring business units and operational holes, particularly in critical areas like risk-management and controls.

"He inherited a gobbledygook of companies that were never integrated, and it was never a priority of the company to invest," said Meredith A. Whitney, a banking analyst who was one of the company's early critics. "The businesses didn't communicate with each other. There were dozens of technology systems and dozens of financial ledgers."

As an example of how "Citi" never integrated, it's been reported that in China the mortgage unit and the credit card unit couldn't even agree on a common consumer-fronting language: One used Mandarin and the other Cantonese.

This brings us back to law firms.

Are your firm's incentives aligned to encourage people to collaborate, or to give them reason to hoard business? Do you keep track of partners who "give away" business they've originated to other partners/offices/practice areas to handle? Do you reward them for doing so? Or, contrariwise, to you have perpetual origination credits, rewarding partners or heirs of partners in perpetuity for entrepreneurial achievements now lost in the sands of time?

I suggest now is not the time to indulge in such hereditary droits du seigneur. If the unfolding lesson of Citi is anything, it's that unclear and blinkered management, perverse incentives, and a failure to enforce and communicate a firm-wide vision can catch up with you in sour times.

Care to guess how fast the sour times are going to end?

I'll be attending the "Globalization of the Legal Profession" conference at Harvard Law School this Friday (21 November), put on by HLS' Program on the Legal Profession.  Here's the  agenda, with some notables on the program including a keynote by Ben Heineman, and commentary across four panels from many other recognizable names such as:

• Stephen Denyer, International Development Partner of Allen & Overy;
• Prof. Marc Galanter of Wisconsin;
• Dean Elena Kagan of HLS;
• Peter Kalis, Chairman and Global Managing Partner of K&L/Gates;
• Prof. Ashish Nanda of HLS;
• Prof. Carole Silver of Georgetown; and
• Prof. David Wilkins of HLS.

Here's a brief description of the program:

Legal practice historically has been a largely parochial endeavor.  One need look no further than the complex debate within the United States about multi-jurisdictional practice between states (let alone questions of foreign lawyers practicing within the US) to see that the inherent complexities of the emerging global bar extend far beyond fitness and character to practice law.

In an age of rapid globalization, this is no longer merely the academic issue it might have been even a decade ago.  The largest law firms now span the globe, with thousands of lawyers carrying the banner of a single firm, yet residing in geographically diverse offices and practicing law in numerous states. [...]

What can we do - as international scholars, educators, and practitioners - to adapt to the rapidly-changing economic, social and political environment and prepare the next generation of lawyers - domestic and international - to meet the challenges that globalization will continue to present?

I'll be staying Thursday night at the Inn at Harvard.  If any of you will be there and you want to look me up, don't be shy.

I owe the genesis of this insight to a faithful reader, Brent Jeffcoat, of McGuire Woods' Charlotte office.  He frames the key argument nicely:

When do law firms start seeking federal assistance?  After all, think of all the people we affect: our young associates marry and live in condominiums in urban centers.  We probably support Starbucks.  Allen Edmonds is toast.  Many high-end automobile dealerships will suffer mightily without the patronage of lawyers.  I mean, the list goes on.  Think of all those poor guys in Scotland who will not be able to sell their single malt whiskeys.  It would be a global crisis of unimaginable proportions if one or two of the AmLaw 100 were to fail.  The Federal government has got to step in and lend a hand.  Before year-end or else the distributions will be hit.  Heck, many people in the medical industry are dependent upon elective cosmetic procedures scheduled just after year-end distributions.  America needs us to survive.  Who will keep the kept women?

This is firmly in keeping with the evident economic philosophy of our times.  Who needs Microsoft, Intel, Starbucks, or, for that matter, Target?  Wouldn't we all be  better off in a world dominated by Wang, DEC, Howard Johnson's, and Nash Rambler?  And isn't your dream  for your kids that they can grow up and join the UAW?  Don't you wish you could, to paraphrase William F. Bucklkey, stand astride the tide of history and cry, "Stop!"?

Joseph Schumpeter (Mr. "Creative Destruction"), and Adam Smith himself, would be outraged and appalled.  And  rightly so. 

Permit  me  to remind our colleagues in Congress what happens when a company declares the dreaded "bankruptcy:"  Its workers are not taken out and shot, its factories and offices are not incinerated, and its customers' demand does  not evaporate.  Rather, all those assets  and market forces are  reallocated elsewhere.  If the Big Three have demonstrated anything  over the past 30 years, it is their unrivalled  managerial genius at misallocating productive  assets and falling ever further behind their rivals.  Time, one might  think, to give someone else a chance to deploy those assets.

Sympathetic as I am to law firms struggling with yesterday'spractice areas, and to lawyers rudely discovering the urgency of reinventing themselves, the dynamism of the  market will not abate. 

That is something devoutly to be celebrated.

Our texts for today come from (in inappropriate order) the New Testament, as it were, and Peter Kalis, the chairman of K&L Gates:

"The metaphysical question is whether you can have bulge-bracket Wall Street firms without Wall Street," says Kalis. "The capital markets, when they rebound, will no longer have the margins they once did. Like night follows day, they won't be willing to pay premium rates."

And from the Old Testament, Simpson Thacher's Chairman Richard Beattie:

"I strongly suspect we've got a rough period of time ahead". He sees the markets turning around within a year or two, and doesn't expect big changes ahead for his firm and its closest competitors. "I don't think [the market changes] will impact fees," he says. "The M&A work will come back, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will be advising the companies doing M&A, and I don't see the fees being different. . . . The private equity firms will be back. They're sitting there with huge piles of money."

In my conversations with managing partners in New York and elsewhere, they segregate their worries into the (relatively) pedestrian and the existential. The low-level worry is one of duration: How long will this recession last? If it's of "ordinary" duration, say about a year, and of "ordinary" depth, with unemployment staying below 8%, we know how to deal with that: Be prudent about costs, manage your partners' expectations, and stay the course.

But there's another possibility, the one Pete Kalis fingers: Are we facing an existential challenge?

If the US Treasury is a major stockholder in major financial institutions, how will that change the dynamic of how premium-level legal services are bought and sold? Not to be facetious about it, but how would you feel to be called before Barney Frank to justify your $950/hour rates?

Short of being hauled before the television cameras of Congressional hearings, contemplate the implications of the changes in ownership of major financial institutions simply on the private side. If you think that Bank of America hires lawyers as Merrill Lynch hired lawyers, guess again. Here are a few examples from their website (warning: they run 69 pages):

• Extraordinarily explicit diversity requirements;
• Refusal to pay for first year and junior associates;
• No payment for time spent on conflict checks;
• Automatic "most favored nation" status on rates;
• Staffing demands enforced at a task-level basis;
• Highly stylized and formatted billing submission requirements, failure to adhere to which spurs immediate rejection of the entire bill; and
• You get the picture.

But back to the issue of New York. To what extent will it remain a financial powerhouse for investment banks and, by analogy, law firms?

At the risk of offending both Pete Kalis and Richard Beattie, I don't think New York will become Just Another Big City, nor do I think its pride of place at the pinnacle of the food chain is guaranteed. Instead, I want to offer an analogy between law-firm land and corporate land.

The common perception is that Fortune 500 companies have been abandoning New York for their headquarters in a steadily departing stream for the past 40 years or so. The reality is quite different. (Not so incidentally, there are a multitude of studies showing that firms that relocated outside New York have underperformed the S&P 500 whereas those that stayed here have outperformed--but that's a debate for another day).

Here are the numbers on Fortune 500 headquarters in New York over time; the exodus  actually ceased over 20 years ago:

• 1965:  128 of the F500
• 1976:   84
• 1986:   53
• 2007:   53

And just for reference, here are the top five states by Fortune 500 headquarters as of 2007:

• New York:  57
• Texas:  56
• California:  52
• Illinois:  33
• Ohio:  28

Even companies that have formally relocated their headquarters, with all the ancillary staff that usually implies, more often than not keep a core group of finance, design, marketing, and other professionals in New York, and you can be sure their key executives fly through regularly. (Even the Sage of Omaha almost invariably announces his big deals in New York.)

Similarly, as recently as 10 years ago, New York was where essentially all new significant company listings occurred. Since then, for a variety of reasons including Sarbanes-Oxley, the "Spitzer Effect," and even (I say this speculatively) America's relative fall from international grace, new listings on London's AIM, in Hong Kong, and even in Beijing are now substantial.

But New York remains the financial capital of the Americas and, I will confidently wager, will remain so as far as the eye can see.

Is its international importance diminished? To be sure. Is it at threat of becoming marginalized? Not a chance.

To some extent, the  erosion in New York's pre-eminence is an ironic reflection on how all-important it had become—and on how that importance can only decline, in a relative fashion, as Brazil,  Russia, India, China, and the Mideast grow in global importance.  But surely Orrick's Ralph Baxter has it right when he says:

"There will be some adjustment.  But there's really no way to be an American-origin firm that has anything to do with capital markets and finance without being in New York in a serious way."

On this view, New York will remain one of a handful of global financial centers, along with London, Hong Kong (or its possible Asian successor, such as Shanghai), and perhaps Dubai or another Mideast center of gravity. 

Recent months have brought a surfeit of announcements by firms of expanding finance practices in the Middle East and Asia.

Even before the financial crisis, Jay  Zimmerman, CEO of Bingham, said his firm had broadened its approach, continuing to seeek opportunity in New York but also expanding abroad, especially in Asia.

"There have been shifts in the global economy," he said. "Demographics are clearly pointing to a shift ininfluence and financial strength to Asia."

But Mr. Zimmerman added that it would be quite some time before such new markets could supplant New York, either as a financial center or a source of firm revenue.  He said that New York would remain Bingham's number-one priority for growth.

Let's not be seduced into thinking this is an all or nothing, Manichean proposition:  "New York will forever be King of the Hill or it will become irrelevant."

Consider that New York has so many established assets which are all part of the lush and verdant ecosystem sophisticated law firms needing to attract world-class talent have to have, and it's not all about stock exchanges, banks, and capital markets.  Hubs of top-end global commerce need to provide the environment to attract, please, and win the affection and allegiance of the Type A, discriminating, demanding professionals from all walks of life who together produce the pulse, the vibrancy, and yes, the romance, of a global capital:  Museums, theater, opera, restaurants, sports, universities, stores and boutiques,  a reasonably salubrious climate, great housing stock, and abundant international  air connections. These aren't built in a day.

And unless you really know New York, it may be hard to appreciate how profoundly woven into the City's warp they are.

It's not that you can find a dozen great restaurants or a spectacular concert or a wonderful theater troupe or the "nowhere else" boutique, because you can find those in a hundred or more cities worldwide.  No:  It's the depth of New York's "bench."  By which I mean:  Not only are the top 10 [pick your favorite category] institutions great, but so are the 50th, the 250th, and the 500th. I would pit a "neighborhood" New York restaurant against a top restaurant in many other cities, the chorus line at an off-Broadway show against lead dancers in other shows, and so forth.  You are welcome to call  this chauvinism or provincialism, and I'm an increasingly appreciative consumer of culture and the "urban experience" around the globe, but it's a difficult base of expertise  to replicate in short order.

Think this is a bit touchy-feely?  Think again. Studies of why corporations tend to favor large metropolitan areas for headquarters reach a common conclusion: 

"What exactly are the competitive advantages of large cities?  The central function of corporate headquarters is the acquiring and disssemination of information.  [...More specifically,] concentrations of business service firms in large cities, such as medial, law, accounting, and consulting, may enable firms to achieve cost and price advantages."

If acquiring and  disseminating information doesn't sound to you like what law firms do, what would?

But don't just take my word for it. 

Professor Bill Henderson of Indiana University School of  Law—Bloomington just published "The Changing Economic Geography of  Large US Law Firms," which analyzes the geographic  migration of lawyers in the AmLaw 200 over the past 20 years and concludes (emphasis supplied):

Our preliminary findings suggest that over the last twenty years, New York City has supplanted Washington, DC as the more interconnected market, particularly for law firms with international offices in Europe and Asia. Although profitability and revenues per lawyer appear intimately tied to presence in large global cities, particularly New York City and London, the network analysis reveals several firms that are following successful niche strategies.

Bill also produced this fabulous graphic showing the change in headcount of lawyers in AmLaw 50 firms from 1984 to 2006, by region of the US:

This shows how uneven lawyer  headcount growth has been.  In absolute numbers the growth occurred:

• Abroad: +8,012 lawyers
• New York: 7,315
• Washington, DC:  4,908
• Los Angeles:  2,453
• San Francisco:  2,430
• Chicago: 2,130
• Everywhere else (domestic): 7,372

The short story this tells is that, if you're a lawyer in BigLaw, being in a major metropolitan center is more important than ever, not less.

If you're asking yourself right about now whether this distribution mirrors that of corporate America,  the answer is not in the least. 

To dimensionalize that asymmetry, Bill undertook an ingenious analysis,  namely comparing  the percentage of Fortune 500 revenue attributable to each city to the percentage of AmLaw 200 lawyers in each city.  (Actually, it's next to impossible to determine the percentage of Fortune 500 revenue actually  "attributable" to each city, so as a proxy Bill assigned all revenue to the headquarters city.  I'm not a statistician but this  strikes me as a fair approximation.)

At one extreme, take the Midwest region (ex-Chicago), which accounts for 25.2% of Fortune 500 revenue (2004) but only 10.1% of AmLaw 200 lawyers.  The ratio of lawyers to revenue is then 0.40.  At the other extreme we have Washington, DC, with 14.7% of lawyers but only 3.4% of Fortune 500 revenue, for a ratio of 4.33.  Here are the other figures:

In macroeconomic terms, this means that New York is a net exporter of legal services (and,with more AmLaw 200 lawyers than LA, San Francisco, and Chicago combined, a huge exporter). 

The question remains—and a fair one it is—whether New York's past pride of place is prologue to future pride of place.  The answer will emerge from whether New York can continue to generate innovations—in finance, in transactions, and in capitalizing  upon changes in the regulatory environment.  And the answer to that, in turn, depends on continuing to attract the premier, take-no-prisoners, absolute best of breed talent.  So far as I can see, nothing that has happened in the last year has changed that dynamic.  Nothing.

The challenge is famously laid down in the sappy but still resonant chorus to "New York, New York:"  "If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere."  Those of us who have lived through this City's re-inventing itself roughly every decade for the past 40 years will give the last word to Jay Zimmerman: 

"I wouldn't want to bet  against New York."

Our text for today is the National Law Journal's article "Survival Tips for Law Firms," covering a presentation on "The Law Firm of the Future -- Who Will Be the New Winners and Losers?" that I gave at DRI's annual convention in New Orleans last week. Here's the line from the article that got my attention (emphasis mine):

The law firms that survive during these trying economic times are the ones that are willing to discount rates, said panelists, which included Bruce MacEwen, a New York-based law firm consultant; Sheryl Willert of Williams Kastner in Seattle; Patricia Diaz Dennis, senior vice president and assistant general counsel of AT&T; and Raymond Williams of DLA Piper's Philadelphia office.

That's actually not what I said. But what do I know? I was only there.

With all deference and utmost respect to the reporter, understanding the demands of delivering from remote locations on deadline, the fascinating aspect of this story to me is how perceptions of the "same" event experienced by different people end up producing such different impressions.

So what did I talk about at the DRI annual meeting?

• The client/law firm disconnect
  • Two-thirds of law firms give themselves an A on client service, but fewer than 1 client in 5 does
  • 85% of clients rank us poorly based on our understanding of their needs
  • But 85% of them say they explain what they need very clearly
  • 60% of clients are unwilling to share investments in knowledge and training
  • But over 80% want to "share" cost over-runs
• The billable hour conundrum
  • Now that we can itemize to the dime what we did, by whom, when, and where, we think we're bulletproof on fees
  • But this is only an invitation to clients to micro-scrutinize what we actually did, and to tell us that we did it (a) unnecessarily; (b) with the wrong people; or (c) inefficiently
  • Wouldn't it be better, after all, if we could just get back to "For professional services rendered: $XX,000"?
  • As for "professsional services rendered," do you think it's a pipe dream? Go back 30 years (or less, where client trust prevailed) and it was commonplace. I'd like to think it would become commonplace again during the remainder of my career.
• The requirement to make your clients look good
  • Impeccable lawyering is, and has been for a long time, table stakes. Any serious AmLaw 100 or 200 firm can do your deal or defend your litigation with, in all likelihood, utter competence.
  • But true client service goes beyond that. An associate GC at Goldman Sachs calls legal advice "level 1" service, but you want to get to is "level 2." "Level 2" is "that you make me look good; you don't just return my emails, you figure out what I need to be totally prepared for this internal meeting I have coming up, and you advise me on that. Because that's where you distinguish yourself."

Back to the beginning: How could it be that it was reported that I recommended, in a soundbite, discounting rates--which I firmly disavow as a strategic model, and which I never have and never will advise--as opposed to all the thngs enumerated above that I actually thought I did say?

Actually, I can't answer that question. As I said, reporters in remote locations under deadline file stories. That's their job and I commend them for it. In my experience, they are almost without exception responsible, accessible, and committed to their craft.

My answer is on a slightly different level: They no longer have the last word. The famous "Mainstream Media" have lost their monopoly.

Look at the news that was reported in the space of a single week:

• The Christian Science Monitor will no longer publish in print, but only online.
• The Newark Star-Ledger, on track to lose $40-million this year, is laying off 40% of its newsroom staff.
• Time Inc. is laying off 600 people.
• The long decline in newspaper circulation appears to be accelerating, with drops occurring "nearly across the board."

Should we then be wringing our hands at the (inevitable, no matter how much they may protest) impairment of editorial coverage? I for one counsel optimism. How is that possible? Look around. There have never in history been more media outlets than there are now.

Other publications, including, I would fervently hope, "Adam Smith, Esq.," cover important issues with substance and depth in ways that conventional distribution models cannot always match. Imagine, if you will (yes, I've tried this thought experiment myself) bringing a business plan to a venture capitalist proposing, 5 years ago, to launch something resembling "Adam Smith, Esq.," but to do it as a monthly print publication. You would be escorted to the door before you could open your laptop. Why? Because it would be perfectly obvious that assembling a global audience of people interested in something as arcane (yes, I can say that) as "the economics of law firms" would be a fool's errand.

But, to launch the same publication online would be, and has been, entirely feasible:

• It permits you to "publish" multiple times per month, essentially at will, as topics develop;
• Everything is archived, and available through a click, in perpetuity;
• The combined power of word of mouth and my best friend, "Forward," will help grow circulation;
• The marginal cost of an additional copy is zero;
• It's available on demand across a variety of platforms from desktops to smart phones;
• And by now you get the idea: One would be a fool to launch any new publication other than online.

Don't for a moment think I'm Holier than Thou: Online publications can err as egregiously or more so than mainstream media--certainly if they're unreflective and sensational (I don't need to name names). But we have enough experience now with the media, onlne and off, to know who we believe and who we suspect of bias, who we know writes to unyielding daily deadlines and who publishes to the clock of a different drummer, who has column-inches to fill and who doesn't.

Herewith the first and last discussion you will ever read in these pages about the conventional publishing model.

Thank you for reading "Adam Smith, Esq."