One of my favourite series of all times is the West Wing, which is coming to the end of it's final series (7) and this series has been dealing with the election of the successor to President Bartlett (magnificently played by Martin Sheen). Well the votes have been counted and there have been no hanging chads etc - the new president will be Matthew Santos - the first Hispanic president.

He achieved his narrow victory with a slim victory in Nevada, the final state to be settled. But his total of 272 electoral votes, two more than needed, included 63 from five states with growing Hispanic populations: Texas (34 electoral votes), Arizona (10) Colorado (9), New Mexico (5) and Nevada (5).
In the real world, all five of those states were among the "red states" that gave President Bush his 286-252 electoral vote victory in the 2004 election. But some Democratic strategists see all of them except Texas as potentially winnable as early as 2008 if their party can mobilise enough unregistered Hispanic voters.
To be sure, Mr. Bush showed in both of his presidential elections - and in his gubernatorial races in Texas before that - an ability to attract Hispanic voters. His fluent Spanish undoubtedly helped, along with his stance on immigration and other issues of interest to the large Mexican-American population in Texas.

Now a few days after reading this I attended a diversity conference at a local law firm and they repeated a demographic trend that I'd heard before in that by 2020, the ethnic minority will be the ethnic majority in either Birmingham or Leicester.

Now intriguingly enough looking at the Hispanic population by the same year 1 in 5 of Americans will be Hispanic or more pertinently $763 bn of disposable income to be tapped into.

I think that this is a great market for progressive law firms in Birmingham to consider tapping into by reviewing it's diversity policies to ensure that we encourage more people from ethnic minorities into our firms so that they can enhance our knowledge pool as well as provide insights as to how we in Birmingham can attract and retain our graduates as well as how to tap into this new and growing market with links not only in the region but also to other parts of the globe.

I believe that diversity is an important management issue to be grappled with to ensure the long term growth of the professional services firms in the Birmingham area. Digby Jones mentioned this at a recent talk in Birmingham at Aston University when he highlighted that Birmingham has been at it's best because it has welcomed people of diverse background to the city and has provided them with fertile ground on which to grow. Birmingham has done it before and I believe can do it again.

I was at my graduation ceremony on Tuesday for my MBA and 30 of us went up and shook hands with the vice chancellor and received a certificate that we were now a Master of Business administration. I was reflecting on this when talking to a potential client a few days later when he asked what I offered. It was if he was looking for a solution that he could quickly implement within his organisation.

To me what I've learnt over the years is that all I can offer with any training that I provide via Mazarin is to give those people a toolbox that they can use and that they have a better insight as to what tool to use when.

It isn't the case that you can use a hammer to butter a slice of bread - it is a case of harnessing the knowledge that you have gained or it has been highlighted to you and recognising when the right tool is required for which job.

So when i come and do the training, that is why I spend a lot of time talking to the firm so that I can tailor the course accordingly and give them the right tools.

Whilst iPods are considered by managers to be disruptive for work whilst people are listening to their music at their desk, have they considered that they might be connecting their iPod into their PC's and downloading confidential information at a fast rate and walking out of the building with it.

A commentator has highlighted that in under two minutes you can take 100mbs of Word,Excel & Powerpoint slides onto an iPod. considering that an iPod can hold 60 gb's of information that is enough to take every business document in a small and medium sized law firm.

It is called podslurping and a number of IT administrators whilst concentrating on firewalls and anti viral software may not yet have cottoned on to this threat.

According to security experts there is little that can be done at this time and according to the FBI - the average cost of data theft is £200k to a firm.

Of course the danger has been there ever since the invention of the floppy disc - however, it is the volume of information that can be stored that may be problematic. I once read of a journalist disguised as a janitor who went round a major firm pod slurping on machines which had not been logged out of and downloading client files off the system

Maybe something for a Managing partner to be asking his head of IT to be thinking about you might think.

But an additional thought is this.....

Remember, that it is people who are downloading the information, so don't blame the technology, just wonder at the culture in your firm that makes people feel that they have to behave in this way.

i talked in my last blog about stealth leadership and that in the next blog - i would return to the subject in terms of quiet leadership. last time I looked at the work that the very well known Jim Collins has written about.

The next writer on this subject is Debra Meyerson who to adjust Teddy Roosevelt's famous saying says "Lead Softly and carry a big impact" She looks at organisations who are going through cultural changes - always the most difficult and getting round the question - how is this push not going to damage my career.

Meyerson outlines some techniques but effectively it boils down to the saying above. Become what she calls a tempered radical as these people lead significant changes and reduce resistance by staying below the corporate radar screen.

So what is a tempered radical - they tend to be informal leaders who very quietly challenge the status quo and thus become the change they want to see in the organisation.

They use some subtle techniques which includes 'disruptive self-expression where they undertake behaviour or actions that support change. this can be through your language, dress and behaviours. People in the organisation do talk and a bit like meeting a nice girl at the dance - once one brave soul has crossed to the other side of the room others will follow. Verbal ju jitsu where radicals possess not only self-control but also emotional intelligence to assess the situation around them to redirect negative statements or actions by people into the means to deliver positive change.

They can also be just opportunists. I was looking at ways of saving waste in an organisation and by just showing and providing people with a set of instructions about how to set their laser printers how to do double sided printing and reducing font size by one point started to save the organisation money and by introducing that in one office and disseminating it through the organisation meant that paper waste was reduced. If you add up the little things that people in your organisation can do - sooner or later you get real change.

Finally - radicals look to work with allies who are of like mind and then look for opponents and rather than making them enemies - and being defensive - because they can be the best area for support and resources. I have to say that for myself this can be best done if you can show people the value that it will give them as well as the organisation.

The next article in this series will be in dealing with ethical challenges. I've tackled this as i heard an interesting talk last night (11th January) by Harjit Sekhon at Coventry University talking about his work on trust.

I think that companies failures to deal with ethical issues is one of the reasons that trust levels in the public perceptions of companies is why legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley has come in as well as a sense of unease in the the CEO as emperor that I mentioned in my earlier blog. I suppose this comes back every century or so as it did at the start of the 20th century with the Robber Barons. Microsoft and Wal-Mart are only the inheritors of Standard Oil in terms of public hostility.

When i started work back in September 1980, it was emphasised to me that the manager was the fount of all knowledge when it came to running the office. he was the leader he was the protector of the office from the dangers of a changing world - or at least it seemed that way to a very naive 18 year old at the time.

However one day I was re reading an article from an old history essay on Prince Metternich who was the diplomatic genius from 1815 to 1848 dominated European politics during this period. He acted as the restorer of the 'Old Regime' and the reconstruction of Europe after the Napoleonic wars. To safeguard the balance of power Metternich formed a 'Holy Alliance' between the monarchies of Austria, Russia, Prussia and France.

He was not in any official power yet dominated the emperors of his period and led Europe. One of the motivations was an abhorrence of the chaos that Europe's rulers felt that the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era had caused.

I was thinking about when reading an article recently about leadership. We do seem to be moving away from the model of the CEO as a charismatic and omnipotent leader on our magazine covers. I have noticed especially in management magazines from the USA highlighting the rise of 'stealth leadership' in top performing US companies rather than the Jack Welch/Ken Lay/Bernie Ebbers high profile CEO's.

One of the leading writers on this form of quiet Leadership is Jim Collins who wrote 'From Good to Great' Collins calls this type of leadership Level 5 leadership and highlights the paradox of managers with deep personal humility - who 'look out of the window rather than the mirror to apportion credit . What this means is that they take responsibility by looking in the mirror never citing bad luck or external factors when things go wrong.

Conversely, when things go right they look to give undue credit to another person or to factors outside of themselves. These leaders suppress their egos and disdain the lime light whilst using their 'Clark Kent' mild mannered but steely style to produce extraordinary but consistent results. This approach and setting these inspired standards rather than inspiring charisma to motivate.

I will come back to this area of stealth leadership again in my next blog and introduce readers to the concept of tempered radicals.

Watch this space in a couple of days time

I've recently been reading an article in Strategy & Business where they surveyed their readers on the ideas that they thought would last

The one concept that took nearly half of the votes was Execution.

It isn't just the fact that strategic choices are made by organisations it is their ability to implement them effectively. this doesn't mean just concentrating on the key indicators in your organisation it is as I learnt at Dunlop tyres and in Barclays many years ago finding the small ways to improve, implementing the improvements, monitoring how they bed down and then repeat the process.

We have over the last 25 years of my working life made massive changes in the way that we work and we have made tremendous improvements in organisational productivity, effectiveness and attentiveness to opportunities. organisations have found as i alluded to in my 'Big Beasts" article in December is to change both people and the organisational culture of their firms.

So many firms are wearied by the struggle that like a mammoth in the tar pits they find it occasionally easier to let matters slip.

As the law of diminishing returns applies so we in organisations are in danger of chasing management fads or hopefully the organisational equivalent of the silver bullet.

So if we concentrate on making it real and having the mental and organisational flexibility to bring new and relevant business models to meet the demands of the times even if it appears somewhat contrarian - then that I think is the key ability to running a company now and use the great organisational tools that we possess in our armoury.

The second idea that will be of interest to the professional services firm is that of the learning organisation.

Even the most bovine of managers has recognised the truth of the saying that I lead with on my front page of this web site. Sustainable competitive advantage only can be achieved now by developing the learning skills of the people within their organisation and providing them with the organisational structures and means to collaborate.

It means not only sharing knowledge and skills but in everyone up and down the organisational structure to be dedicated to continuos improvement and to accept that junior colleagues can help senior colleagues to handle data redundancy.

Organisations that provide this framework are the ones that will reap the benefits of the future.

I was talking to a colleague recently in a law firm and we got to talking about the recent skipping of the generation in the Conservative Party election.

I highlighted that this was probably the last hurrah for the supposed big beasts of the Conservative Party and my colleague highlighted the number of lumbering dinosaurs of partners in the firm that were also a real block to progress because of an unwillingness to adopt modern working practices. It will be interesting to see how the Clementi reforms and recently published white paper affect legal firms in the Birmingham area.

For me I think that law firm partners haven't fully appreciated what Clementi will do No more must firms be partnerships. They can if they want to, but the reforms will hand them the opportunity to structure themselves differently; as publicly-listed companies, multi-disciplinary practices or both.

I think that the smaller firms who deal in the bread and butter stuff that can be easily commoditised and dealt with by a call centre could well happen and sooner than we think. Just look at the strides that the Supermarkets made tackling the hitherto sacrosanct area of financial services.

I think that maybe lock step may be replaced by a kill what you eat model and partners are going to be appraised and have to lead more from the front and be more aware of modern management practices and there may need to be less consensual management if your practice is going to survive.

There will be a need I believe for lawyers to hire in a non lawyer CEO/COO to run the practice, while new partners are trained up to provide the more rounded skills that the new speed of business will demand.