{"id":1410,"date":"2017-06-15T11:00:29","date_gmt":"2017-06-15T10:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/?p=1410"},"modified":"2017-06-30T17:06:04","modified_gmt":"2017-06-30T16:06:04","slug":"brokentransmission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/brokentransmission\/","title":{"rendered":"Broken transmission"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was at a recent training event at a top-tier law firm. I addressed a group of scary-smart, predominantly junior associates. While the core of the event was about a slightly different topic, a bit of Q&A back and forth led me\u00a0to the general comment that to be a successful and effective transactional lawyer, it is indispensable\u00a0to have an interest in and at least some\u00a0knowledge of what drives the client, what the client’s day-to-day is all about – business. <\/span><\/p>\n

We spoke about commercial knowledge and awareness, what it entails at a most basic level, how it can be built and expanded and how it\u00a0can be leveraged to improve client relationships, provide better service, give more relevant advice and so on. I encouraged the group to invest time and effort and suggested, as part of a longer list of potential actions forward, to at least spend some time regularly reading business news, updates and commentary.<\/span><\/p>\n

So far so good, I said to myself, admittedly a bit queasy about stating something so blatantly\u00a0obvious. Or so I thought.<\/span><\/p>\n

One quite\u00a0junior\u00a0associate wrote to me after the seminar. It was a very nice email, which in addition to other aspects referenced to my semi-rant about regular business-related reading. The associate thanked me for the suggestions and basically said that this sounded like a good idea that could\u00a0actually help explain and unlock an area that\u00a0individual had apparently been wondering about or even struggling with. At first it sounded like nice but somewhat cheap praise, after all I had simply recommended to read some news…but then it\u00a0hit me like a ton of bricks: something has really changed. And this something requires us more experienced guys and gals (notice, how I didn’t say older?!?!) to invest more time and conscious effort into training and helping the young ones. What I’m referring to is…newspapers. The ones made from real dead trees, newsPAPERS.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is why:<\/span><\/p>\n

I vividly recall how, when I was a little kid, my dad used to read his newspaper. It was always the same newspaper. He wasn’t to be disturbed while reading it. And he always read the same parts of it, mostly in the same order. Of course that took me a while to figure out.<\/span><\/p>\n

Later, in my first job, the head of the division I was working in first thing in the morning fetched a newspaper from the low coffee table where the internal mail delivery would leave it in the wee hours, sat down at his desk, got a cup of coffee from his assistant (back in the day…) and read. He also read the same newspaper every day. And just like my dad, he read the same sections every day.<\/span><\/p>\n

Same thing when I started my legal career: Partners would come in, pick up their favourite newspaper from the newsstand near the reception, get their coffee or tea and sit down with the whole thing. The same paper every day. And the same sections every day.<\/span><\/p>\n

How I know that my dad, my first big boss and the partners read the same or very similar sections every day? Those of you experienced (again!)\u00a0enough to have witnessed real newsPAPERS as the major source of information will know. It’s very simple. Every newspaper has a certain structure, a certain order in which the blocks of folded paper that ultimately combine to form the entire newspaper are ordered. For example, sports might always be on the rear of the business section. Or\u00a0the backside of the title page could\u00a0always international politics. And art, music and literature might also always be in the same location.<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s very much like the landing page of CNN is always ordered in the same way.\u00a0The thing is – with newspapers you could\u00a0actually see it without holding or reading the newspaper yourself. Knowing the main newspapers, you could at least take an educated guess at what somebody was\u00a0reading, based on the part of the newspaper one could see, what was on the back\u00a0and where in relation to the entire stack the open page was approximately located. And if you sat at the same table or otherwise looked from not too far away,\u00a0you could even read those big black headlines, definitely confirming which\u00a0topics were\u00a0so interesting and relevant.<\/span><\/p>\n

This\u00a0is how I first picked up that certain people actually read a fair amount of business news and commentary even if the actual news\u00a0didn’t directly relate to their business. And that almost everybody was into at least one of either sports or the arts. Nobody had to tell\u00a0me. I saw it. Just like everyone around me saw it. By way of mere example and a kind of implicit, unspoken and likely not-thought-of transparency, we would be taught what made sense to\u00a0read in certain environments.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, with everybody looking at screens, that is in large part gone. Look at your smartphone, and your opposite can’t\u00a0really tell whether you’re reading a longer message, social media updates, cat videos, the latest sports news, tips on how to style your moustache on Wednesdays…or business news\u00a0and\u00a0politics.<\/span><\/p>\n

Don’t get me wrong, I’m neither against smartphones nor social media nor the lighter muse. My point is that the transmission mechanism of easily „showing“ and „seeing“ and thereby learning what matters is at least in\u00a0large\u00a0part broken and gone. We can no longer rely on the next generation to simply pick it up by watching us leaf through newspapers. They simply see people\u00a0looking at screens. No\u00a0way to really find out what is being read, at least not\u00a0without taking the awkward extra step of interrupting and asking. Or of sneaking a peek, which can be even more awkward when discovered. And while you can even without invitation have a closer look at another person’s newspaper with limited potential for embarrassment, the person with the smartphone could easily be looking at some more or less revelatory\u00a0private message. Even more room for awkwardness, keeping the distance and less room for asking.<\/span><\/p>\n

All this leads me to one conclusion, one request and one To Do. <\/span><\/p>\n

The conclusion<\/span> is that very likely it’s not only about newspapers. In times where outward manifestations of what we’re doing and thinking are decreasing and more and more activities just consist of dealing with\u00a0a screen, the burden is on those in the know to actively tell the next generation what it is they’re\u00a0looking at – because that is nothing but a proxy for what they’re thinking about and that is very much key. <\/span><\/p>\n

The request<\/span> is for the\u00a0young guns to actively ask when\u00a0they feel they’re missing a link rather than simply enduring the seeming weirdness of the previous generation. It’s not your fault that these gaps open up; but please, if you feel there is a gap and you can’t really nail\u00a0it, ask us. Otherwise, things that actually have an impact might fall through the cracks.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the To Do<\/span> is to actively watch out for similar constellations, for situations in which semi-automatic transmission mechanisms previously relied on get lost and we now need to make an active and conscious effort to replace them with deliberate action. It looks like this will require quite a bit of awareness – and that we’ll all not be off the hook for quite a while.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was at a recent training event at a top-tier law firm. I addressed a group of scary-smart, predominantly junior associates. While the core of the event was about a slightly different topic, a bit of Q&A back and forth led me\u00a0to the general comment that to be a successful and effective transactional lawyer, it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}