December 2009 Archives

Ever wonder where the Times Square New Year's Eve balls go when they're retired?

No?

Well, then, putting that aside straightaway, we're here to enlighten you.

The New York Times has now revealed that they end up about 50 feet underground, in a subbasement of 1 Times Square, the building from whose summit they once descended.  There have been a total of 8 balls, at least by the somewhat improvisatory enumeration of Jeffrey Straus, CEO of the firm that produces the New Year's Eve celebration.  Unfortunately, Balls ## 1 & 2 have disappeared.  Balls ##3, 4, and 5 turn out, actually, to have been the same ball, serving from the mid-1950's to the mid-1990's, but in separate incarnations:  The original (#3), the same ball in the form of an apple, briefly during the early 1980's (#4), before reverting to its original form (3 with an asterisk), and finally #5 when it got new skin and rhinestones.

#7 was a one-of-a-kind, serving only one year at the turn of the millennium, and we are now on #8, one covered with 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles bolted to 672 LED modules, and capable of producing 16-million colors.

#6, you ask?

Here it, ingloriously, is:

Many have been the descriptors proposed for the period we've been living through since about the middle of 2007, but few strike me as more apt than "turbulence." Why?

• Turbulence implies unconscious, or at least unintended, forces at work causing the disruption;
• Turbulence is unforeseeable, both from a distance, and locally, while one is in the midst of it;
• Turbulence is unpredictable; it doesn't rise and fall in a convenient sine-wave pattern, it ebbs, flows, circles, eddies and creates water-spouts, becomes violent and quiescent.

And most importantly, it's almost impossible to "train for" turbulence. The best one can do is try to keep one's head while all around are losing theirs.

This brings me to Don Sull's recently published The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunity in an Uncertain World. Don is a professor of strategy at the London Busness School and--full disclosure--someone I count a friend. He also writes a regular column for The Financial Times.

Don begins by disabusing us of the notion that the current economic crisis is our first or our only encounter with turbulence. Instead, he posits that it's been on the rise for 20 or 30 years. By one measure (the likelihood that a firm will be knocked off its leadership position), turbulence increased three-fold. The frequency of currency or economic crises has increased four-fold.

What's driving this?

Primarily, the accelerating integration of the world. Technology now diffuses worldwide in utter disregard of "national" borders (what a quaint concept indeed, China's censoring of Google notably notwithstanding). According to Don, one-third of the world's population that was not heretofore part of the market economy has recently entered it.

How should leaders respond?

Let's start, perhaps, with how they should not--but how they typically do--respond. By digging in their heels.

Well, to be fair, we can be a bit more nuanced than that. Many organizations confronted with turbulence decide, perhaps not unreasonably on the surface, to dig down and do what they've always done best, only do it better.

So the world is changing a lot, you see the changes coming. You've got the data, McKinsey or somebody else helps you to get your arms around what's happening. And instead of changing what you're doing, you just step on the gas, spin the wheels harder, and hope to get out of the rut. Usually you end up digging yourself deeper.

This is what Don memorably calls "active inertia."

Another response is to try to focus especially hard on the telescope in order to predict the future, in the belief that if you just "squint hard enough" you'll be able to accurately anticipate the future.

Get real. (That's my advice.) Don is a bit more diplomatic:

"I'll be able to see through this foggy future. I'll be able to predict what's going to happen. I'll know what to do." That's just not going to happen. The record of people's predictions in business, or in any domain, is very, very poor. And as turbulence increases, the effectiveness of that approach decreases.

The final trap is trying to do what everyone else is doing. Now he's talking our language. As he succinctly puts it, if you're mimicking firms that are making the wrong responses, "it's unlikely that you're going to have a better outcome than they do." This observation of course is first cousin to Einstein's famous quip that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again while hoping for a different outcome.

What, then, is to be done?

Be agile. Easier said than done, I know (and I've counseled agility myself). "Agility" is simply the ability to identify, and then seize, opportunities more quickly than your peer set. I've analogized it to running a race, where winners are dependent on native running ability, to be sure (but you have that, right?), but even more so on situational awareness of your competitors, seeing opportunities (a flagging competitor, or the fact that you're 200 yards from the finish and feeling strong), and taking advantage. But "seizing" the opportunity is apt, because in moments it will be gone.

We measure business opportunities in months or conceivably years, not moments, but the principle is the same.

First, you can be "agile" within your own operations: This is Toyota, or the Six Sigma god-head in general. Get smarter about what you do best, and do it better still.

Second, you can change your own firm's portfolio mix: Pull back from geographies and practice areas that may have outlived their usefulness (if they ever had a usefulness--topic for another day), and invest the saved resources in what you think the growth areas will be. Be attuned, in short, to opportunity costs.

Third, be strategically agile. Downturns provide, among other things, the opportunity to buy assets (office leases, most importantly talent) at below what-market-was a year or two ago. Be disciplined, be purposeful, but consider investing. Seriously.

Why? Don writes:

Many complex interactive systems--such as weather patterns, seismic activity, and traffic--follow what mathematicians call an inverse power law: the frequency of an event is inversely related to its magnitude. In turbulent markets, an inverse power law implies that companies face a steady flow of small opportunities, periodic midsize ones, and the rare chance to create significant value. Examples of golden opportunities include major acquisitions, transformational mergers, the opening of booming markets such as China or India, launching a breakthrough product like the iPhone, or securing hard assets on favorable terms during an economic crisis.

Given the unpredictable nature and uneven distribution of golden opportunities, a combination of patience (to wait for the right time to strike) and boldness (acting when that time arises) is crucial.

All this, of course, guarantees precisely nothing.

For one thing, how do you communicate the firm's strategic objectives to the partners, associates, and staff who will actually be the ones carrying it out? Don't you run the risk of inundating them with messages if you're trying to turn, relatively speaking, on a dime?

Well, yes.

All the more reason to stay focussed and decide very carefully about your priorities. Communicate those you truly believe in, in your gut. No more than three a year. Better, fewer.

But do not, above all, miss this opportunity.

A downturn brings hard choices into stark relief, provides an external rationale to justify difficult decisions, and offers "air cover" to reverse previous decisions. In the current market, senior executives should consolidate their major initiatives into a single list and make the hard choices needed to select a handful that are truly critical. To ensure that everyone gets the message, they should communicate the priorities throughout the entire organization, along with a list of initiatives that are no longer key objectives, to ensure that people do not waste resources on unimportant matters.

One final thought: economic crises can provide an ideal opportunity to invigorate the cultural transformation that is often needed to cultivate operational agility.

Cultural transformation? Indeed: That's where the rubber meets the road.

In the 1980's and 1990's, one often heard the only semi-facetious phrase that "investment bankers are short-term greedy, but lawyers are long-term greedy."  One of the few exceptions to "short term greedy" on the I-Bank side of the Street was always Goldman Sachs, which, under the leadership of people like John Weinberg, was the epitome of long-term greedy.

I was put in mind of this by a front page piece in today's New York Times, "As Goldman Thrives, Some Say an Ethos Has Faded."  Here's the gist.

Lloyd Blankfein has led Goldman Sachs since 2006, and "has surrounded himself with a tight circle of executives drawn from Goldman's trading operation."  The business model of Mega I-Banks has traditionally had two components, trading for the firm's own account, and counseling corporate clients on strategy, M&A, and so forth.  But if you believe the article (I do, fundamentally), this balance has shifted at Goldman:

Interviews with nearly 20 current and former Goldman partners paint a portrait of a bank driven by hard-charging traders like Mr. Blankfein, who wager vast sums in world markets in hopes of quick profits. Discreet bankers who give advice to corporate clients and help them raise capital -- once a major source of earnings for Goldman -- have been eclipsed, these people said.

To my way of thinking, the smoking gun is a 2006 change in compensation for measuring investment bankers' value to the firm.  That year, Goldman instituted banker "profiles," which are daily (yes, daily!) P&L's showing how much business its employees and clients are doing. As the article writes, this change--quelle surprise--had two effects.  First, Goldmanites focused on clients who might generate the most revenue in the very near term, and second, it "prompted bankers to fight more aggressively for credit for their deals." (Sound familiar?)

Regular readers know that I place great stock in compensation:  Read, incentives.  Econ 101, and Econ X01 through Y01, relentlessly teach the importance of incentives in molding behavior.  And the i-bankers at Goldman are surely smart enough that they don't need to be told twice how to bring home more of what they surely feel entitled to.

Here's another window on the change the firm may have undergone:

"Would John Weinberg ever be in this situation?" [offering vague apologies for "mistakes" leading up to the financial crisis], asked one former partner, referring to the legendary senior partner who ran Goldman for many years. "No way. He would have thought about the firm over 50, 100 years, not what people will get paid this year."

Since the modern Goldman emerged during the Depression, its executives have cultivated a ruthless professionalism tempered by what might best be described as Goldman Sachs Exceptionalism: a sense that Goldman stands apart from, if not above, Wall Street rivals.

This sense, strengthened by a tradition of government service among senior executives, runs deep inside the bank's headquarters at 85 Broad Street in Lower Manhattan. Indeed, from the day they arrive, employees are steeped in the firm's 14 principles. No. 1 is: "Our clients' interests always come first. Our experience shows that if we serve our clients well, our own success will follow."

If you perceive an analogy to Law Firm Land, the line forms to the left.

Surely, surely, your firm has stated core principles akin to Goldman's:  Put the interest of your clients first, and the firm will take care of itself.

But do you also have long-lasting origination credits?  And how important are they?

To what extent does your compensation model reflect a zero-sum game where one partner's hoarding gain is another's failure to collaborate loss?  Do you measure performance daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, or over three to five-year rolling cycles?

In other words, how short-term greedy are you and how long-term greedy are you?

I fear that too many firms became too short-term greedy in the past decade.

Were there reasons for this?

In hindsight, of course, we know that the reasons espoused at the time look more like pretexts or thoughtless obeisance to the common wisdom than they actually look like hard-boiled, unblinkingly analytical Reasons.  

• Why lend promiscuously to subprime borrowers?  Because housing prices only go up, never down.
• Why pinch clients for more immediate revenue with less regard to cultivating a long-term relationship?  (a) Because we're Goldman Sachs and we can; and (b) because we have eaten the fruit of the poisonous quarterly- and annual-results tree of knowledge.
• Why resort to financial acrobatics and structural contortions to boost your profits-per-partner figures for benefit of The American Lawyer?  Because no one wants to finish last in a beauty contest and because everyone else is doing it (and everyone else knows everyone else is doing it, so wink-wink).

Those that became short-term greedy are now faced with the consummate challenge of rebuilding their business model at the same time they need to re-educate their partners and their associates and re-invigorate a lost culture of client service first.  All while the "Great Reset" threatens to derail the entire train.

But if the design of your compensation system, evidently like that of Goldman's, encouraged short-term-itis, do not blame your partners.  Blame yourself.

Lloyd Blankfein

Update from a reader in the UK (December 22):

Fascinating and provocative as usual, Bruce. The question, though, is of course: is it possible for law firm management to be "long-term greedy" in the age of the lateral partner? Even public companies have institutional long-term shareholders who may exert some pressure to not throw the future out in the quest for quick returns. Law firms strike me as almost unique, in that the firm's talent are also the shareholders and can exert enormous pressure on management to do things their way; and, once you add a febrile talent market to the mix, you end up with partners able to effectively hold their firms to ransom: "short-term profit or I'm out of here". Of course, the Wall St law firms (ironically enough given what's happened to their clientèle) cling on to lockstep, relatively low levels of lateraling, etc. But any economist presumably knows "culture" is an inadequate bulwark against misaligned incentives

The results of our Reader Survey are in and this provides a brief recap of the results...and the announcement of who won the $200 Amex gift card, just in time for last-minute holiday shopping.  

The most important aspect of the survey is not, in a way, helping us compile a profile of who you all are; it's the immensely valuable input you provided in talking about the key challenges confronting your firms in this environment, as well as some nicely phrased observations about "Adam Smith, Esq." itself.  Suffice to say you individually and collectively raised several timely and some unforeseen topic areas for us to pursue in future columns.

First, thank you to all who responded.  We're all under enormous time pressure.  That said, 237 of you completed the survey.  Our research maven characterized that as a "robust" response.

Some gleanings from the results:

• 86% of responders are from the US.  Of the remaining 14%, many precincts were heard from including Austria, Australia, Canada, China, The Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, France, Germany, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Poland, Russia, Scotland, Sweden, the UK, and--no, we can't resist-- Kazakhstan.
  
  
• Among US responders, nearly 45% come from the AmLaw 50, 61% from the AmLaw  100 and nearly 75% are in the AmLaw 200.  On the other end of the spectrum, 14% come from single-office firms.
  
  
• Again among US respondents:  Nearly 10% reported being MPs, Firm Chairs or members of the firm's management or executive committee.  Partners accounted of 31% of responses, associates 39% and "C"-suite professionals nearly 6%.
  
  
• In terms of demographics, the median age of responders is 38 years, and median, annual household income is $227,000.
  
  
• The male/female split was 87%/13%.  (We'd certainly like to improve the balance of that ratio - and if you have suggestions - don't be shy.)
  

While we're at it, here are a few other "facts" about the site.  In the year ending November 30, Adam Smith, Esq.  generated over 4.5 million page views, or on average over 375,000 per month.  This is a 16% increase over the previous 12 months.  For perspective, newspaper readership declined 10% in just the six months ending September 30.  To say this is gratifying would be our own understatement of the year.  And you, dear readers, have made this possible.  We humbly thank you.

This survey is enormously important to us at Adam Smith, Esq.  Not only do the results provide a clearer picture of the issues you are dealing with, it also offers insights applicable to the legal industry, at large. 

Here is more detailed information about you.

Note that all these charts "read" clockwise from noon.

The breakdown of your roles at work.  What's interesting here is the upward skew, towards partners vs. associates and towards members of senior management of firms among partners.

What types of firms you are in. Clearly readers of Adam Smith, Esq. tend to come from larger firms.

Next, the breakdown by practice area.  One amusing detail in this chart is that none of you is retired (or willing to admit it):

You are a youngish crowd:

Finally--on the topic of the survey--those of you who responded may recall that we asked you what is "the most pressing/frustrating strategic, financial, or business issue facing me/my firm."

Here is a highly selective sampling of your responses:

• The firm's identity. It's foundational and is showing itself through attorney pay, international expansion and information to partners and associates.
• Not being intentional in thinking about change.
• Preservation of shared values, culture and cohesiveness in the face of relentless expansion and consolidation
• I think you nailed it your recent blog (on laterals) regarding lack of strategy. Law firm partners running a multi million dollar business need to think like executives, not like a frat house brothers. Furthermore, there is oftentimes (probably way too often) a general disdain of creativity, passion, excellence, and ability to question from firm managers. What seems to be solely valued is billings --not even collections! While the "Great Reset" is happening all around, law firms are still not getting how they themselves need to morph/reset into something new, agile, flexible, creative, and compensate accordingly. I sincerely doubt that we will replicate the past with regard to the business of law firms, even if the economy does "come back."
• Lack of a meaningful strategic plan.
• Integrating multiple divergent practices into a coherent international enterprise. Converting from a loose confederations of lawyers who don't actually like each other very much into a multinational.
• Surviving a shift to the new reality when we don't seem ready to do it; getting parterns to be more forward thinking and innovative; moving fast enough to respond to market opportunities

And, now the winner of the $200 Amex gift card...drum roll, please.

We are delighted to report that the winner is a corporate associate in the New York office of an AmLaw 50 firm.  We phoned our winner to give him the news and congratulate him, and ask if he could permit us to identify him here on "Adam Smith, Esq."   (We should note that we called around 6:30 on a Friday evening and he picked up his own phone on the first ring.) 

He replied, most professionally, that he'd have to check and get back to us.  In about five minutes, he phoned back to report that the marketing people would prefer we not identify him.  No reason given.

What follows is done without his knowledge or permission and can only come as news to him.

We don't believe that "no reason" is a good reason, and so we choose to take issue with the good folks in marketing and suggest that you look up a certain associate who's University of Washington BA in Accounting and Economics, a licensed CPA, and a Columbia Law JD/Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, where he was also a member of the Columbia Business Law Review.

A worthy winner, we surmise.  Marketing support or no marketing support.

Again, thank you for your time and especially the care and thought evident in your responses.

Hasn't the last year and a half been a horrible nightmare? Aren't you sick and tired of our fallacious infatuation with the "free market"? Maybe we should bring back Glass-Steagall, reinforce Sarbanes-Oxley, create an uber-regulator for the financial services industry. Aren't we all well and thoroughly sick of deregulation and privatization? Most of all, hasn't capitalism shown us to a fare-thee-well that, left uncontrolled, it can all too easily run off the rails? What have we been thinking for the past couple of decades?

I mark this time because it was just over 30 years ago--May 4, 1979--that Margaret Thacher become Prime Minister of the UK, to be followed shortly thereafter as President of the US by Ronald Reagan, seen rightly in retrospect as cross-Atlantic twins as far as promoting the virtues of the free market and dragging down the curtain on the sad, sclerotic decade of the 1970's (stagflation, depressing cardigan sweaters, and "malaise," anyone?)

I'm reminded of this anniversary by Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times, who sums up what she did:

Mrs (now Lady) Thatcher entered office determined to reverse a national decline marked by high inflation, slow growth and trade union militancy. Her government emphasised monetary control, deregulation, particularly of the financial sector, flexible labour markets, and privatisation. The post-1997 Labour government did not overthrow these policies but built upon them. Labour increased public spending but not hugely: in 2007-08, expenditure was below where it had been under Mrs Thatcher until 1988-89. Labour also abandoned active fiscal policy, adopted inflation targeting, introduced central bank independence and welcomed the vigour of the financial sector.

Note the emphasis on "revers[ing] a national decline, ... monetary control, deregulation particularly of the financial sector, ... and privatisation."

We also can choose to celebrate the anniversary of another systemic earthquake, the 20th Anniversary (last month) of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Why are you reading about these momentous--but exhaustively analyzed--events on Adam Smith, Esq.?

Simply this: To provide a moment's worth of perspective.

Since it has been 20 years since the Fall of the Wall, memory has clouded over what it represented: Very simply, the end of a 40-year experiment in which Germany, a First World Country by any measure, was divided in two economically, one region a market economy and the other centrally planned. Once the gap in living standards became so egregious, the experiment self-destructed.

John Kay, writing in the FT, reminds us of this, and reminds us, more importantly, of exactly in what the genius of the market economy consists. He cites three primary components, to which I would add a fourth:

• Prices act as signals for resource allocation.
• Markets promote innovation by adapting to change "through a chaotic process of experimention." And
• Markets diffuse political and economic power. "This is the most effective way to protect society from rent-seeking - a culture in which the principal route to wealth is not creating wealth, but attaching oneself to wealth created by others."

And the fourth, mine:

• Markets permit, enable, encourage, and all but insist upon individuals finding their own highest uses in society (the real meaning of the Invisible Hand, as I construe it). Few things contribute more highly to human happiness.

Scarred as we all are by the events of last September (2008, that is), we may be tempted to retreat to the faux security of command and control by the best and brightest. Don't go there; don't even be tempted to go there.

The market excels not just at creating and spreading new ideas, but at getting rid of failed ones. As John Kay puts it:

Disruptive innovations most often come to market through new entrants [and] from unpredicted sources. If you had been planning the future of the computer industry in the 1970s, would you have asked Bill Gates and Paul Allen? If you had been planning the future of retailing in the 1990s would you have asked Jeff Bezos? Of course not: members of the politburo, cabinet or large company board would have consulted grey men in suits like themselves.

Markets are not a well-oiled machine: they are a constantly changing, adaptive biological system. Pluralism is their motive force, their essence chaotic, their development inherently uncertain. If we could predict the evolution of markets, we would not need markets in the first place.

To tie this to reality, this week the always-worthwhile Economic Principals, concidentally, has a tour de force recap of the nascent venture capital industry, starting in Boston immediately after World War II, which begins:

"It is hard to describe how quickly attitudes changed in Great Britain in the wake of the Thacher Revolution. It was as if a oppressive shroud had been removed."

After noting that Deng Xiaoping did more or less the same for China, only perhaps on a greater scale, he hits his stride:

Of course New England businessmen were scrambling up "the value chain" for three centuries before the term would be invented. None knew where it led. But from cod to candy, from slaves and opium to ice and stone, from railroads and telephones to electricity and radio, merchant traders and manufacturers in Boston understood that the essence of competitive advantage was that it didn't last.

Now we're getting to the heart of how markets work.

Out of the shockingly tiny world of Boston-centric venture capitalists came, in the space of a short career:

• American Research and Development Corp., which merely sired Digital Equipment Corp.;
• Greylock Partners;
• TA Associates;
• Arthur Rock (West Coast, but who went to school on the Boston gang, with Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel to his credit);
• And just a few other Boston-funded startups including FedEx, Cablevision, Wang, and Biogen.

What about Silicon Valley?

Following is more commentary from the same Economic Principals piece upon the recently published A Vision for Venture Capital: Realizing the Promise of Global Venture Capital and Private Equity, by Peter Brooke:

But Brooke's book is equally interesting, about, for instance, about the difference between Boston and California. East Coast lenders didn't know much about technology, at least in the early days; they were generalists, not technologists. They took a portfolio approach, emphasizing diversification and limited appetite for risk, preferred companies that had a revenue base and were moving towards profitability.

The West Coast guys were not averse to supplying seed capital and early stage financing, all part of the pioneer spirit. "They were good at what they did, and gained an edge that they have never relinquished." That said, Brooke continues, technological savvy will take an investor only so far. It's still essential to know how to identify market opportunities, size up entrepreneurs and develop relationships "in which information and ideas flow freely."

These skills are not easy to acquire, he says, but those who possess them can add substantial value, "even without knowing everything there is to know about a particular product or technology." Harvard and MIT: it was ever thus.

The whole second part of Brooke's book is an extended meditation on changing styles of venture finance, meaning mostly startups, usually high tech firms, and private equity, meaning restructuring large public companies through buyouts. The same skills are required at either end of the spectrum, he says, but emphases differ.

On the manner in which today's financiers have insulated themselves from risk at the expense of their investors, he quotes [Tony] Perkins [co-founder of the legendary Kleiner Perkins] approvingly: "Today I stand in awe of the way the managing partners of some of the huge buyout funds reward themselves; fees for raising the fund, fees for managing the fund, fees for doing the deals within the fund, and profit participation for individual investment, whether or not the overall profits are achieved."

Why do I focus on what may now seem like old news? I mean, Fairchild Semiconductor and Wang, for heaven's sake?

Again, perspective: These firms were enormous drivers of economic growth in their day, and even though both ultimately failed (news flash--most firms do), the way we work today and our overall economy would be fundamentally poorer without them and their kind.

What, then, has this to do with Thacher and Reagan and the free market?

Simply this: Let us not lose faith.

All things considered, I believe that free market capitalism has done more to promote the quality of life of more human beings than any non-theological belief system in the history of mankind.

And even after all the Sturm und Drang we've been through since September, 2008, here's a telling graph comparing the growth, from the start of 1991 through the third quarter of 2009, of the US and other major world economies:

So if you think the Thacher/Reagan era of deregulation and its aftermath was a misguided detour, think again.  To recap:

• US up 63%
• Canada 60%
• UK 48%
• France 35%
• Germany 22%
• Italy 19%
• Japan 16%

Finally, if you think the Asian tigers are overtaking the US, here, courtesy of David Brooks in today's NYT, is an incontrovertible rebuttal: In 1975, US GDP amounted to 26.3% of world G.D.P. The US share today? 26.7%.

The genius of the free market, present and potent since before (yes, even before) Adam Smith, is not to be gainsaid.

Your last chance to take the Readers' Survey is this weekend. 

As of Sunday night, it will close and we will conduct the random drawing for the $200 gift card from among those who have completed the survey and entered the contest.

Fair warning!

Nearly 2,000 of you already subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter, which we've been publishing for over 3-1/2 years, since the spring of 2006. 

To those of you who do subscribe, what follows will be repetitive since you've already seen it in this month's issue of the newsletter, which arrived in your inboxes earlier today. 

But for those of you who haven't yet subscribed, we wanted to offer you the opportunity.  Please read on.

We've been alerting you for some time to the fact that the newsletter would move to a paid model, and the day has arrived.

Why are we doing this?

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Please let me know if you have any comments, observations, or questions.

We very much look forward to welcoming you--make that, continuing to welcome you--to the Adam Smith, Esq. newsletter.

Final reminder!  This will be the last week you can take our Reader's Survey.

Why should you take it?

• You can enter for a chance to win a $200 gift card.
• It takes less than 3 minutes--if you dawdle.
• You can provide us with indispensable insight into what you want to hear more about, what's on your minds, what the most pressing strategic issues are confronting your firm.
• Besides, voting is your civic duty.

Again, it takes very little time and you'll have the chance at the end not only to enter the random drawing for the $200 gift card, but to subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter.