De provincie Friesland gaat subsidieaanvragen en de archivering van bijbehorende stukken automatiseren met een document- en dossiermanagementsysteem op basis van Microsoft Sharepoint. Het gaat om het product 360 van de Zweedse leverancier Sofware Innovation. Het pakket is door Microsoft-dienstverlener Wortell uit Lijnden in het Nederlands vertaald en aangepast aan de in Nederland geldende wet- en regelgeving van de Archiefwet. De subsidie-aanvragen werden voorheen handmatig verwerkt.
Voor de provincie Friesland is dit het eerste project volgens de methode zaakgericht werken. Bij die werkwijze worden alle officiële documenten die bij een subsidiezaak horen, zoals inkomende en uitgaande brieven, besluiten, controlelijsten en mailwisseling in één digitaal dossier opgeslagen.
360 (360 graden) is gebaseerd op Microsoft Sharepoint en maakt het mogelijk de complete informatiehuishouding van een organisatie te digitaliseren.
De provincie werkt aan de implementatie van een servicegeoriënteerde architectuur om aan te kunnen sluiten op de Nederlandse Overheid Referentie Architectuur (Nora). De provincie heeft de ambitie om steeds meer te gaan samenwerken met andere instanties. Daarnaast wil de provincie bezuinigen door zo efficiënt mogelijk te werken en hebben de Friezen tot doel gesteld om zoveel mogelijk zonder papier te werken.
Vijfduizend subsidie-aanvragen
Het contract heeft een looptijd van drie jaar. Het zaaksysteem wordt gebruikt door zeventig medewerkers van de afdeling subsidies. Jaarlijks worden vijfduizend subsidie-aanvragen gedaan. In totaal werken ongeveer duizend mensen bij de provincie.
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Read more: http://www.computable.nl/artikel/ict_topics/ecm/3751888/1277020/friesland-kiest-sharepoint-voor-subsidies.html#ixzz1C3Sc0z9Z
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Your task for today is doing more with less
By Stefan Stern
Published: February 1 2010 22:11 | Last updated: February 1 2010 22:11
If only more people could live up to the standards set by the new Nokia N900 handset. You may have seen one of the adverts for the Nokia N900. A picture of the smart black device is supported by the one-word slogan (and neologism): “Multimultitasking”.
In 2010 we need all the multimultitaskers we can get. Headcount has been reduced in many workplaces, and there is only limited (if any) rehiring going on. People are being stretched. Whether in the public or private sectors, we all have to do more with less.
I predict that “more with less” is going to become the key management mantra of the decade. But as with most of these buzzwords or phrases, the simplicity of the language conceals the difficulty of making it happen. Worse, there are dangers for those who enthusiastically adopt the mantra without thinking through all the possible consequences.
Some managers might have hoped that the start of the new year, with its incipient recovery, would mean that the worst was behind them. But leading a business in slightly better times with limited resources will be just as hard as the period of retrenchment that preceded it.
Large parts of the workforce, while relieved at still having a job, will be worried about the future. Trying to get higher productivity from anxious colleagues is not easy.
And it is not as though traditional “performance management” is being carried out well in the first place. The annual management survey conducted by the UK’s Roffey Park, a management institute, published last month, showed that the number of managers who felt that their organisation handled performance badly has more than doubled in the last year. Recession has tested some basic management skills – and found them wanting.
The response to this among employees is clear, to judge from the large number of workplace attitude surveys that have appeared recently. In the US, Right Management, an HR consultancy, reported that many workers are unhappy with their present jobs, with 60 per cent intending to leave and another 25 per cent actively networking and updating their CVs.
In the UK, job satisfaction has fallen to record lows, according to research published last week by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
But feeling sorry for ourselves is not an option. Customers want and demand more. Businesses have to provide it. How can managers achieve this?
Employees cannot be battered into producing more. They have to be persuaded. That persuasion can be forceful and urgent. But it will also have to make sense. So managers need to be able to tell a convincing story about the future.
Then there is the need for technology taming. Of course new technology makes a lot of things possible: new ways of working, and a chance, genuinely, to do more with less. But new technology can also be, as Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, pointed out recently, an unruly child. “Technology ... has its own agenda,” he said. “[It] can deliver tremendous benefits to us, but the downside is that it’s selfish.” As with children, boundaries have to be set. We are supposed to be in charge of technology, not the other way round. Many of us can achieve more with less, but not if we are “always on”, 24 hours a day.
What if, in our anxiety to drive the business harder, we end up destroying the quality of what we do? It is a real risk. Budgets cannot be cut or frozen indefinitely without there being an impact on the organisation. “More with less” may not mean doing more of everything. It may also mean choosing which things we have to stop doing altogether.
Only last week Toyota, that former paragon of quality, was forced into announcing humiliating product recalls, a sure sign that even the best companies cannot push harder and harder without something going wrong. With glorious symbolism, Toyota’s problem turned out to be a faulty accelerator pedal. It shows that business leaders cannot just “step on it” unthinkingly.
In the end, though, there is not really much choice about this. In the 21st century we will have to work smarter and harder. That means efficiency savings and increased productivity. It is the great management challenge of the age.
“So much to do, so little time,” a Facebook friend complained on her updated page the other day. She soon received some helpful advice from her social network. “Get off Facebook then,” someone responded, almost immediately.
For more on management, visit www.ft.com/managementblog
stefan.stern@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Published: February 1 2010 22:11 | Last updated: February 1 2010 22:11
If only more people could live up to the standards set by the new Nokia N900 handset. You may have seen one of the adverts for the Nokia N900. A picture of the smart black device is supported by the one-word slogan (and neologism): “Multimultitasking”.
In 2010 we need all the multimultitaskers we can get. Headcount has been reduced in many workplaces, and there is only limited (if any) rehiring going on. People are being stretched. Whether in the public or private sectors, we all have to do more with less.
I predict that “more with less” is going to become the key management mantra of the decade. But as with most of these buzzwords or phrases, the simplicity of the language conceals the difficulty of making it happen. Worse, there are dangers for those who enthusiastically adopt the mantra without thinking through all the possible consequences.
Some managers might have hoped that the start of the new year, with its incipient recovery, would mean that the worst was behind them. But leading a business in slightly better times with limited resources will be just as hard as the period of retrenchment that preceded it.
Large parts of the workforce, while relieved at still having a job, will be worried about the future. Trying to get higher productivity from anxious colleagues is not easy.
And it is not as though traditional “performance management” is being carried out well in the first place. The annual management survey conducted by the UK’s Roffey Park, a management institute, published last month, showed that the number of managers who felt that their organisation handled performance badly has more than doubled in the last year. Recession has tested some basic management skills – and found them wanting.
The response to this among employees is clear, to judge from the large number of workplace attitude surveys that have appeared recently. In the US, Right Management, an HR consultancy, reported that many workers are unhappy with their present jobs, with 60 per cent intending to leave and another 25 per cent actively networking and updating their CVs.
In the UK, job satisfaction has fallen to record lows, according to research published last week by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
But feeling sorry for ourselves is not an option. Customers want and demand more. Businesses have to provide it. How can managers achieve this?
Employees cannot be battered into producing more. They have to be persuaded. That persuasion can be forceful and urgent. But it will also have to make sense. So managers need to be able to tell a convincing story about the future.
Then there is the need for technology taming. Of course new technology makes a lot of things possible: new ways of working, and a chance, genuinely, to do more with less. But new technology can also be, as Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, pointed out recently, an unruly child. “Technology ... has its own agenda,” he said. “[It] can deliver tremendous benefits to us, but the downside is that it’s selfish.” As with children, boundaries have to be set. We are supposed to be in charge of technology, not the other way round. Many of us can achieve more with less, but not if we are “always on”, 24 hours a day.
What if, in our anxiety to drive the business harder, we end up destroying the quality of what we do? It is a real risk. Budgets cannot be cut or frozen indefinitely without there being an impact on the organisation. “More with less” may not mean doing more of everything. It may also mean choosing which things we have to stop doing altogether.
Only last week Toyota, that former paragon of quality, was forced into announcing humiliating product recalls, a sure sign that even the best companies cannot push harder and harder without something going wrong. With glorious symbolism, Toyota’s problem turned out to be a faulty accelerator pedal. It shows that business leaders cannot just “step on it” unthinkingly.
In the end, though, there is not really much choice about this. In the 21st century we will have to work smarter and harder. That means efficiency savings and increased productivity. It is the great management challenge of the age.
“So much to do, so little time,” a Facebook friend complained on her updated page the other day. She soon received some helpful advice from her social network. “Get off Facebook then,” someone responded, almost immediately.
For more on management, visit www.ft.com/managementblog
stefan.stern@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
A little knowledge is deadly dangerous
A little knowledge is deadly dangerous
By Stefan Stern
Published: January 11 2010 23:23 | Last updated: January 11 2010 23:23
It is the “unknown knowns” that can kill you. But this was the category of information which Donald Rumsfeld, the former US defence secretary, left off his famous list (“known knowns”, “known unknowns”) a few years ago.
A pity. One of the lessons of the September 11 2001 hijackings, as well as the recent attempt to blow up an aircraft on Christmas day, is that organisations may already possess the information they need to avoid disaster. It is just that they do not know that they know.
In criticising his security services last week, Barack Obama summed up this management dilemma well. “This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” he said. “It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.” His colleagues had neglected to “connect the dots”, he observed.
This is a familiar story to business leaders. “If only Unilever knew what Unilever knows,” went the old lament. And you can substitute the name of almost any other company into that last sentence.
It was this lingering sense of unconnectedness, of dots not being joined up, that led to the emergence of “knowledge management” as a business discipline two decades ago. It was based on the idea that all sorts of valuable information – about customers’ preferences or what employees knew – was simply disappearing into the cracks that separated teams and business units. People within their silos could not or would not share knowledge.
Tom Stewart, chief marketing and knowledge officer for consultants Booz, moved the debate on with his 1997 book Intellectual Capital – the New Wealth of Organisations, which described what properly managed knowledge could do for businesses. Surely things were about to change?
Maybe knowledge management was too drab a label to hold people’s attention. Perhaps it all sounded too much like hard work. But “KM” soon fell prey to the curse of the management fad. It was talked about, popularised, then – too often – forgotten. Today too few companies can be confident that their employees share the knowledge and information that they need. Do their people know what they know?
The events over Detroit this Christmas confirmed the danger of ignoring the information that circulates, whether unprocessed or imperfectly understood, within organisations. In a blog post last week, Harvard Business School’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter said that dispatching e-mails or entering comments into databases is not enough. Only “relentless follow-up” would hold colleagues accountable for what they were supposed to be doing.
Smart knowledge management involves spotting useful patterns in the data that you have. Leaders should reward “pattern recognisers”, she said. They should also “stress the importance of passing on items of value to others”.
But while Prof Kanter is hopeful that social networking technology will lead to a greater sharing of information, others are not so sure. Morten Hansen, professor at Berkeley and Insead and author of last year’s well-regarded book, Collaboration, sees other factors at play. The failure of colleagues to communicate effectively “requires a change in culture and incentive systems, not an IT fix”, he says.
Obama’s first year
Obama Barack
In depth: news and analysis of Barack Obama’s first year in office as US president
It is not always easy to recognise the value of the information you have. The father of the alleged Detroit bomber, a former banker from Nigeria, warned US officials about his concerns over his son. For whatever reason – fatigue, overwork – the crucial tip-off was ignored. Too casual by half. The son’s name was even mis-spelled by one official, confusing his identity.
But information must be taken seriously. Managers need more than gut instinct and past experience to help them make good decisions. This means that knowledge has to be seen as an asset, something to be both respected and exploited.
This is why the collective corporate memory is so important. People forget – or just never get to learn – crucial details about the markets they are operating in. Veteran CIA officers understand this. As one former field operative, Bob Baer, told the BBC last week, it is no wonder his former colleagues seem “clueless” about where the next threat is coming from. “You’re seeing the price the CIA is paying for getting rid of so many people in the 1990s,” he said. “We fired people or let them retire.”
If we didn’t know then how unwise that approach was, we know now.
For more on management, visit www.ft.com/managementblog
stefan.stern@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
By Stefan Stern
Published: January 11 2010 23:23 | Last updated: January 11 2010 23:23
It is the “unknown knowns” that can kill you. But this was the category of information which Donald Rumsfeld, the former US defence secretary, left off his famous list (“known knowns”, “known unknowns”) a few years ago.
A pity. One of the lessons of the September 11 2001 hijackings, as well as the recent attempt to blow up an aircraft on Christmas day, is that organisations may already possess the information they need to avoid disaster. It is just that they do not know that they know.
In criticising his security services last week, Barack Obama summed up this management dilemma well. “This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” he said. “It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.” His colleagues had neglected to “connect the dots”, he observed.
This is a familiar story to business leaders. “If only Unilever knew what Unilever knows,” went the old lament. And you can substitute the name of almost any other company into that last sentence.
It was this lingering sense of unconnectedness, of dots not being joined up, that led to the emergence of “knowledge management” as a business discipline two decades ago. It was based on the idea that all sorts of valuable information – about customers’ preferences or what employees knew – was simply disappearing into the cracks that separated teams and business units. People within their silos could not or would not share knowledge.
Tom Stewart, chief marketing and knowledge officer for consultants Booz, moved the debate on with his 1997 book Intellectual Capital – the New Wealth of Organisations, which described what properly managed knowledge could do for businesses. Surely things were about to change?
Maybe knowledge management was too drab a label to hold people’s attention. Perhaps it all sounded too much like hard work. But “KM” soon fell prey to the curse of the management fad. It was talked about, popularised, then – too often – forgotten. Today too few companies can be confident that their employees share the knowledge and information that they need. Do their people know what they know?
The events over Detroit this Christmas confirmed the danger of ignoring the information that circulates, whether unprocessed or imperfectly understood, within organisations. In a blog post last week, Harvard Business School’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter said that dispatching e-mails or entering comments into databases is not enough. Only “relentless follow-up” would hold colleagues accountable for what they were supposed to be doing.
Smart knowledge management involves spotting useful patterns in the data that you have. Leaders should reward “pattern recognisers”, she said. They should also “stress the importance of passing on items of value to others”.
But while Prof Kanter is hopeful that social networking technology will lead to a greater sharing of information, others are not so sure. Morten Hansen, professor at Berkeley and Insead and author of last year’s well-regarded book, Collaboration, sees other factors at play. The failure of colleagues to communicate effectively “requires a change in culture and incentive systems, not an IT fix”, he says.
Obama’s first year
Obama Barack
In depth: news and analysis of Barack Obama’s first year in office as US president
It is not always easy to recognise the value of the information you have. The father of the alleged Detroit bomber, a former banker from Nigeria, warned US officials about his concerns over his son. For whatever reason – fatigue, overwork – the crucial tip-off was ignored. Too casual by half. The son’s name was even mis-spelled by one official, confusing his identity.
But information must be taken seriously. Managers need more than gut instinct and past experience to help them make good decisions. This means that knowledge has to be seen as an asset, something to be both respected and exploited.
This is why the collective corporate memory is so important. People forget – or just never get to learn – crucial details about the markets they are operating in. Veteran CIA officers understand this. As one former field operative, Bob Baer, told the BBC last week, it is no wonder his former colleagues seem “clueless” about where the next threat is coming from. “You’re seeing the price the CIA is paying for getting rid of so many people in the 1990s,” he said. “We fired people or let them retire.”
If we didn’t know then how unwise that approach was, we know now.
For more on management, visit www.ft.com/managementblog
stefan.stern@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Creative thinkers: innovative lawyers on the shortlist
Creative thinkers: innovative lawyers on the shortlist
Published: October 19 2010 13:10 | Last updated: October 19 2010 13:10
What defines the innovative lawyer? Three qualities: deep attention to client needs, respect for the way things have been done in the past, and an imaginative adaption of traditions to novel circumstances.
Last year’s Legal Innovator of the Year was Benedikt Wolfers of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, who provided a dramatic example of this. Mr Wolfers designed the legislation that enabled the German government to repair the banking system – no easy task in a country deeply sensitive, for historical reasons, to anything smacking of bank expropriation.
In 2010, we are dealing with the aftermath of the banking crisis rather than the crisis itself. Businesses are looking for ways to cut costs and protect their activities, while rethinking the ways they carry them out. The 10 shortlisted candidates reflected these priorities. All provided strong evidence of innovation, but four in particular attracted the judges’ attention.
Neville Eisenberg is managing partner at Berwin Leighton Paisner, which has taken over all the legal services of Thames Water. The firm intends this arrangement – familiar from the world of information technology – to be the template for further deals.
David Lowe, a partner at Wragge & Co, won plaudits for the range of his activities, including advising the Greater London Authority in its bid for the 2012 Olympics, and helping Birds Eye Iglo with the arrangements for its frozen-food warehousing.
Judging panel
Leah Cooper
Director of legal services outsourcing, CPA Global
Peter Cornell
Managing director of stakeholder relations, Terra Firma, and former managing partner, Clifford Chance
Michael Peel
FT legal correspondent
Michael Skapinker
FT special reports editor and chairman of the panel
Paul Solman
Lead editor, FT Innovative Lawyers
Geoffrey Timms
General counsel, Legal & General
The runner-up for our award was Sandra Esquiva-Hesse, a partner in the Paris office of US firm Paul Hastings. Ms Esquiva-Hesse has been involved in a number of restructuring operations, the most eye-catching of which was the reorganisation and sale of Acument Global Technologies’ French automotive fastener business to Lisi Automotive and Agrati France. She made use of the conciliation process normally employed to ratify agreements between debtors and creditors. For the first time, a French commercial court used this process to ratify a restructuring and sale.
But our winner was Kevin Jaquiss, a partner at Cobbetts, who has helped fashion a new form of ownership for mutual organisations, allowing them to be funded through shares rather than, as has traditionally been the case, through debt. Innovative aspects include shareholders not being able to buy control and being locked in for a set period of time. There is potential for investors to earn a return, but only after the community has benefited.
The model has been applied to FC United, an organisation formed by disgruntled Manchester United fans who want to take over a disused stadium and run it for the benefit of a deprived part of the city.
Mr Jaquiss has also helped establish a co-operative trust model that is being used for more than 100 schools, and developed a model for football supporters’ trusts. During a period of austerity that demands fresh thinking, Mr Jaquiss’s innovations captured the mood of the times. – Michael Skapinker
Kevin Jaquiss
WINNER: KEVIN JAQUISS
Partner, Cobbetts, Manchester
Kevin Jaquiss is an expert in community benefit societies. Described by a client as pioneering a form of “punk finance”, which enables people and community organisations to “do it themselves”, his work is creating new legal structures for community enterprises in sport, housing, care, utilities and leisure.
Community benefit societies are incorporated industrial and provident groups that conduct business for the benefit of their community. Traditionally, profits are not distributed among members or external shareholders, and the basic model has existed for more than a century. The law in this area has remained dormant since the 1960s.
Crucial to making the societies a viable future mode of social organisation was to transform the conditions under which they are financed. Historically, mutual organisations have not been able to issue shares and have been funded largely from debt. The recession has made affordable credit hard to find.
Faced with these issues, Mr Jaquiss worked to develop a form of share ownership for mutual organisations. This entailed heavy involvement in a Treasury working group, with Cobbetts the only law firm at the table helping to shape new legislation in this area.
Mr Jaquiss’s solution modifies the usual idea of share ownership in two ways. First, shareholders cannot buy more control with more shares, and the societies remain one-member-one-vote organisations. Second, shares cannot be easily traded, and shareholders are effectively locked in for a set time after their purchase. There is also a potential return on any investment, but only after the intended benefit has been accrued.
This has been applied notably in the case of FC United, a community benefit society formed by Manchester United supporters in the wake of continuing disputes with the Glazer family, owners of the football club. The new club aims to take over a disused stadium, refurbish it and run services for the benefit of the deprived local community.
These principles can be applied to energy, water and housing companies, schools and even foundation trusts.
Dimitry Afanasiev
DIMITRY AFANASIEV
Chairman, Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners, Moscow
Dimitry Afanasiev co-founded Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners in 1993, and has chaired the 180-lawyer partnership for more than a decade, overseeing offices in St Petersburg, Moscow and London.
He attributes his success to his western training, his connections and his creativity as a lawyer – a claim that could just as easily have come from the mouth of any successful international lawyer. But with Mr Afanasiev, this troika of legal attributes must be put in the context of a jurisdiction where he cites corruption as his biggest competitor.
After studying at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, Mr Afanasiev had his start in law when Jerry Shestack, a former president of the American Bar Association, hired him to join his Philadelphia law firm. Mr Afanasiev later followed his mentor to Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen. These formative experiences encouraged him to transplant the western-style law firm model to Russia.
Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners’ “east meets west” approach has helped the firm win instructions to act both for and against the Russian government.
But its success also stems from its ties to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, and Dmitry Medvedev, president, that stretch back to the firm’s roots at the St Petersburg Institute of Law. The firm’s clients also include the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, chief executive of Rusal, the world’s largest aluminium group.
Stephen Cirell
STEPHEN CIRELL
Partner, Eversheds, on secondment to Cornwall Council
Stephen Cirell is responsible for putting in place measures that will see the English county of Cornwall become energy self-sufficient by 2025.
In his non-legal role as director of Green Cornwall at Cornwall Council, this Eversheds partner has spent the past year designing and implementing a £150m ($240m) environmental programme for the newly created “super” local authority.
Mr Cirell’s initiatives relating to climate change, sustainable energy, low carbon and behaviour have ambitious designs on harnessing Cornwall’s abundance of wind, wave and solar energy (see page 16).
A new fleet of electric cars for council workers is one of the most highly visible aspects of his carbon-reducing proposals. The next challenge for the Green Cornwall programme is to obtain a grant from the Department for Transport to install recharging plug-in points across the county.
Mr Cirell spent 12 years working in the legal departments of local government before he joined Eversheds in 1993. He built up a leading local government practice at the firm, and has since managed to combine that with a personal interest in green issues.
What began as advice to local authorities on setting up renewable energy companies soon evolved into an approach to Cornwall Council about a partner secondment, and the Green Cornwall programme represents the pinnacle of his 30-year career in local government. As his secondment at Cornwall Council draws to a close, Mr Cirell is turning his attention to writing a book on climate change for local government. This cross-fertilisation of theory and practice is consistent with his approach to the law.
Neville Eisenberg
NEVILLE EISENBERG
Managing partner, Berwin Leighton Paisner, London
Berwin Leighton Paisner consistently scores highly in the FT Law 50, and much of this achievement stems from the leadership of Neville Eisenberg. As managing partner of BLP, he has sought to maintain the momentum of the firm’s 2003 merger through an ambitious emerging markets strategy and a pioneering approach to efficiency.
In 2009, Mr Eisenberg identified the need for BLP to develop a presence in emerging markets. The resulting merger between BLP and the Goltsblat half of Moscow’s largest law firm, Pepelyaev, Goltsblat & Partners, created the first Russian international law firm, Goltsblat BLP.
Mr Eisenberg has since led the firm to develop a radical resourcing product, which is on the leading edge of an “arms race” towards more efficient ways of providing legal services to clients.
BLP’s Managed Legal Service, shortlisted in the client service section of this year’s FT Innovative Lawyers, involves the firm taking on and managing most of a client’s in-house legal team.
Mr Eisenberg believes the best way to engender an innovative environment within a law firm is to work on establishing a culture where lawyers feel comfortable experimenting, and are able to shift between the often risk-adverse mind-set of the traditional lawyer towards a more entrepreneurial one.
Sandra Esquiva-Hesse
SANDRA ESQUIVA-HESSE
Partner, Paul Hastings, Paris
The career of Sandra Esquiva-Hesse has been fuelled by the global cycle of refinancing and corporate restructurings. The current wave, as she puts it, began for her two years ago when she represented Marvel and Spider-Man Merchandising in relation to the insolvency of Smoby, the French toy manufacturer.
As the partner in charge of developing Paul Hastings’ finance and restructuring practice in Paris, her transactional work in the intervening period has culminated in one of her deals – the reorganisation and sale of Acument Global Technologies’ faltering French businesses – being shortlisted in the corporate section of this year’s FT Innovative Lawyers.
Ms Esquiva-Hesse has worked and studied in both the US and France, and she attributes much of her success to her training at Shearman & Sterling in New York. The early incentives and encouragement she received to be creative, and the knowledge she acquired of the more prescriptive US Chapter 11 bankruptcy procedure, moulded the legal approach she took back across the Atlantic.
This mixture of systems and jurisdictions is in keeping with her partnership role at a US firm in Paris, and her “yes you can” approach is pushing forward the nebulous insolvency law in her native France.
Mike Francies
MIKE FRANCIES
Managing partner, London office, Weil, Gotshal & Manges
Membership of Weil, Gotshal & Manges’ management committee has not damped Mike Francies’ appetite for doing deals.
His extensive career in corporate, private equity and restructuring has seen a number of achievements, including the first private equity bid in Europe and the first European private equity initial public offering. In 1998, he was one of the first “magic circle” partners to be poached by a US firm in London, when he left Clifford Chance for Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
But it is the restructuring arm of Mr Francies’ CV that he has been flexing of late. The management buy-out of Neuberger Berman, the former asset management arm of Lehman Brothers, was one of the bankruptcy sales that was highly commended in the FT Innovative Lawyers research last year. At the same time as Mr Francies was wading through the remnants of the US bank’s collapse, he played a critical role in the sale of a majority stake in Cobra Beer, the UK lager brand, to Molson Coors, the North American brewer.
The latter deal hints at the food and beverages flavour to his recent deal activity. He advised Patak’s on the sale of the Patak family’s Indian food brand to Associated British Foods; he has worked on various acquisitions, a placing and the initial public offering of Premier Foods, food manufacturer of Hovis bread and Mr Kipling cakes; and he acted for the Seafood Company on its acquisition of Pinneys of Scotland.
Much of Mr Francies’ work in this sector comes through his relationship with Lion Capital, the consumer-focused investment firm.
High-profile deals in other sectors include the $3.2bn IPO of Yell, producer of the Yellow Pages, which he says might not have happened without the lawyers’ contributions.
Alex Hamilton
ALEX HAMILTON
Partner, Latham & Watkins, London
Alex Hamilton has been a consistent presence in FT Innovative Lawyers, having led three of Latham & Watkins’ previous entries in the report.
Law firms traditionally lag behind other industries when it comes to embracing new technology, but Mr Hamilton, who co-chairs Latham & Watkins’ global technology transactions group, has pushed forward both his firm and the legal sector as a whole.
In 2006, he was behind the implementation of the Diamond Methodology, which enables clients to do better, quicker and cheaper deals, and redesigned the way the firm approaches contracts. In 2008, he led the development of a wiki-based knowledge management system that promotes better practice through increased sharing of data.
The following year, Mr Hamilton continued to push technological solutions within the firm with Capture, a set of dynamic documents to record client requirements in outsourcing deals where speed and cost are critical. The technology has boosted client instructions of the firm, including a recent $500m transaction.
His most recent initiative, an application to manage complex contracts, allows lawyers and clients to search contracts hosted on the firm’s private network, define terms and link any term to comment wikis.
The emphasis is on helping clients understand their obligations following the signing of multiple transaction documents, and users have described it as the “kind of tool that you get from consultancies such as Deloitte and Accenture”.
Known as Context, the application is the latest example of Mr Hamilton using technology as a catalyst for collaboration.
David Lowe
DAVID LOWE
Partner, Wragge & Co, London
David Lowe is a relative rarity in the highly specialised world of corporate law, because as a commercial contracts lawyer he operates in a swathe of sectors, ranging from food and drinks to real estate, outsourcing, the motoring industry, procurement, supply-chain management, manufacturing, logistics and international trade.
This breadth of experience is the spur to many of Mr Lowe’s best ideas, which can often be of critical importance to his clients.
His knowledge of supply-chain management has proven especially useful. When engaged by Birds Eye Iglo in 2008 to work on relatively routine logistical documentation, Mr Lowe spotted a risk that the company had yet to consider: the potential insolvency of its sole UK frozen-food warehouse provider.
Seeing law as more of a means to an end than an end in itself, Mr Lowe’s work frequently edges into operational and commercial advice. He is active in various international trade projects, including the development of Incoterms 2010, the terms of international freight delivery.
This gives him a big-picture viewpoint from which to advise his clients and help them devise the best possible supply chains, which he has done for Birds Eye in Turkey, and on a $30m export deal involving moving an automotive plant to China.
He has also been involved in two high-profile contract procurement agreements: advising Transport for London on its cycle-hire scheme, and reviewing the contracts for the Greater London Authority in its bid for the 2012 Olympic Games.
Volker Potthoff
VOLKER POTTHOFF
Of counsel, CMS Hasche Sigle, Frankfurt
Volker Potthoff uses his experience as both a lawyer and a company director to push for closer business relationships between Germany and China. At CMS Hasche Sigle, he co-ordinates the German firm’s expansion into Asia, and he was involved in the first German initial public offering by a Chinese company.
Mr Potthoff believes lawyers should see the profession as a support for business, and he has assembled a multidisciplinary group of investment bankers, auditors, former colleagues at Deutsche Börse, the German exchange where he was general counsel, and partners from the capital markets team of CMS Hasche Sigle to encourage the flow of capital from Europe to China.
His hybrid legal and business role at CMS Hasche Sigle follows an unusual legal career, going from private practice to in-house and back again.
He began at White & Case in New York and Leinen & Derichs in Cologne, before moving to a client-side legal position at BHF-Bank in Frankfurt, and taking up the role of chief legal counsel at Deutsche Börse.
But it is the management positions and directorships that Mr Potthoff has occupied – including a seat on the Deutsche Börse executive board – that sets him apart from other lawyers and goes some way to explaining his business-minded approach to the law. It was while at Deutsche Börse that Mr Potthoff kicked off his network of Chinese businesses with the People’s Bank of China.
With one foot in law and the other in business, it is not surprising that Mr Potthoff takes an interest in corporate governance, and he sees board advisory roles as falling within the remit of the modern lawyer.
Andrew Vellani
ANDREW VELLANI
Chief legal officer, director and management board member, Cofra Holding, Zurich
Andrew Vellani is included in the Legal Innovator of the Year shortlist for his dynamic approach to managing the global in-house legal function for Cofra Holding, a large conglomerate based in Switzerland.
Arriving at the company in 2002, Mr Vellani was immediately involved in transforming the shape of the business before he turned his attention to the in-house legal department.
As a member of the three-person management team, which operates directly below the supervisory board of the private company, he was involved in bringing together diverse multinational businesses under the auspices of a new holding company. He then created a dedicated group legal team by separating the legal affairs of the private company from that of its controlling shareholders, the Brenninkmeijer family.
Mr Vellani’s vision for his newly created group legal function was a seamless global team that united 13 previously semi-autonomous offices around the world. In doing this, his greatest achievement has been to take a new cross-border approach to managing his diverse team.
He led the introduction of intranet systems to help manage legal matters, and established a litigation reporting system to monitor progress of cases and to facilitate a more systematic assessment of risk. Mr Vellani has also put in place a training system that gives young lawyers experience of the conglomerate’s businesses.
Mr Vellani has been involved in a series of important transactions, including selling the London Mortgage Company, American Retail Group and a big Brazilian consumer bank.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Published: October 19 2010 13:10 | Last updated: October 19 2010 13:10
What defines the innovative lawyer? Three qualities: deep attention to client needs, respect for the way things have been done in the past, and an imaginative adaption of traditions to novel circumstances.
Last year’s Legal Innovator of the Year was Benedikt Wolfers of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, who provided a dramatic example of this. Mr Wolfers designed the legislation that enabled the German government to repair the banking system – no easy task in a country deeply sensitive, for historical reasons, to anything smacking of bank expropriation.
In 2010, we are dealing with the aftermath of the banking crisis rather than the crisis itself. Businesses are looking for ways to cut costs and protect their activities, while rethinking the ways they carry them out. The 10 shortlisted candidates reflected these priorities. All provided strong evidence of innovation, but four in particular attracted the judges’ attention.
Neville Eisenberg is managing partner at Berwin Leighton Paisner, which has taken over all the legal services of Thames Water. The firm intends this arrangement – familiar from the world of information technology – to be the template for further deals.
David Lowe, a partner at Wragge & Co, won plaudits for the range of his activities, including advising the Greater London Authority in its bid for the 2012 Olympics, and helping Birds Eye Iglo with the arrangements for its frozen-food warehousing.
Judging panel
Leah Cooper
Director of legal services outsourcing, CPA Global
Peter Cornell
Managing director of stakeholder relations, Terra Firma, and former managing partner, Clifford Chance
Michael Peel
FT legal correspondent
Michael Skapinker
FT special reports editor and chairman of the panel
Paul Solman
Lead editor, FT Innovative Lawyers
Geoffrey Timms
General counsel, Legal & General
The runner-up for our award was Sandra Esquiva-Hesse, a partner in the Paris office of US firm Paul Hastings. Ms Esquiva-Hesse has been involved in a number of restructuring operations, the most eye-catching of which was the reorganisation and sale of Acument Global Technologies’ French automotive fastener business to Lisi Automotive and Agrati France. She made use of the conciliation process normally employed to ratify agreements between debtors and creditors. For the first time, a French commercial court used this process to ratify a restructuring and sale.
But our winner was Kevin Jaquiss, a partner at Cobbetts, who has helped fashion a new form of ownership for mutual organisations, allowing them to be funded through shares rather than, as has traditionally been the case, through debt. Innovative aspects include shareholders not being able to buy control and being locked in for a set period of time. There is potential for investors to earn a return, but only after the community has benefited.
The model has been applied to FC United, an organisation formed by disgruntled Manchester United fans who want to take over a disused stadium and run it for the benefit of a deprived part of the city.
Mr Jaquiss has also helped establish a co-operative trust model that is being used for more than 100 schools, and developed a model for football supporters’ trusts. During a period of austerity that demands fresh thinking, Mr Jaquiss’s innovations captured the mood of the times. – Michael Skapinker
Kevin Jaquiss
WINNER: KEVIN JAQUISS
Partner, Cobbetts, Manchester
Kevin Jaquiss is an expert in community benefit societies. Described by a client as pioneering a form of “punk finance”, which enables people and community organisations to “do it themselves”, his work is creating new legal structures for community enterprises in sport, housing, care, utilities and leisure.
Community benefit societies are incorporated industrial and provident groups that conduct business for the benefit of their community. Traditionally, profits are not distributed among members or external shareholders, and the basic model has existed for more than a century. The law in this area has remained dormant since the 1960s.
Crucial to making the societies a viable future mode of social organisation was to transform the conditions under which they are financed. Historically, mutual organisations have not been able to issue shares and have been funded largely from debt. The recession has made affordable credit hard to find.
Faced with these issues, Mr Jaquiss worked to develop a form of share ownership for mutual organisations. This entailed heavy involvement in a Treasury working group, with Cobbetts the only law firm at the table helping to shape new legislation in this area.
Mr Jaquiss’s solution modifies the usual idea of share ownership in two ways. First, shareholders cannot buy more control with more shares, and the societies remain one-member-one-vote organisations. Second, shares cannot be easily traded, and shareholders are effectively locked in for a set time after their purchase. There is also a potential return on any investment, but only after the intended benefit has been accrued.
This has been applied notably in the case of FC United, a community benefit society formed by Manchester United supporters in the wake of continuing disputes with the Glazer family, owners of the football club. The new club aims to take over a disused stadium, refurbish it and run services for the benefit of the deprived local community.
These principles can be applied to energy, water and housing companies, schools and even foundation trusts.
Dimitry Afanasiev
DIMITRY AFANASIEV
Chairman, Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners, Moscow
Dimitry Afanasiev co-founded Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners in 1993, and has chaired the 180-lawyer partnership for more than a decade, overseeing offices in St Petersburg, Moscow and London.
He attributes his success to his western training, his connections and his creativity as a lawyer – a claim that could just as easily have come from the mouth of any successful international lawyer. But with Mr Afanasiev, this troika of legal attributes must be put in the context of a jurisdiction where he cites corruption as his biggest competitor.
After studying at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, Mr Afanasiev had his start in law when Jerry Shestack, a former president of the American Bar Association, hired him to join his Philadelphia law firm. Mr Afanasiev later followed his mentor to Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen. These formative experiences encouraged him to transplant the western-style law firm model to Russia.
Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners’ “east meets west” approach has helped the firm win instructions to act both for and against the Russian government.
But its success also stems from its ties to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, and Dmitry Medvedev, president, that stretch back to the firm’s roots at the St Petersburg Institute of Law. The firm’s clients also include the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, chief executive of Rusal, the world’s largest aluminium group.
Stephen Cirell
STEPHEN CIRELL
Partner, Eversheds, on secondment to Cornwall Council
Stephen Cirell is responsible for putting in place measures that will see the English county of Cornwall become energy self-sufficient by 2025.
In his non-legal role as director of Green Cornwall at Cornwall Council, this Eversheds partner has spent the past year designing and implementing a £150m ($240m) environmental programme for the newly created “super” local authority.
Mr Cirell’s initiatives relating to climate change, sustainable energy, low carbon and behaviour have ambitious designs on harnessing Cornwall’s abundance of wind, wave and solar energy (see page 16).
A new fleet of electric cars for council workers is one of the most highly visible aspects of his carbon-reducing proposals. The next challenge for the Green Cornwall programme is to obtain a grant from the Department for Transport to install recharging plug-in points across the county.
Mr Cirell spent 12 years working in the legal departments of local government before he joined Eversheds in 1993. He built up a leading local government practice at the firm, and has since managed to combine that with a personal interest in green issues.
What began as advice to local authorities on setting up renewable energy companies soon evolved into an approach to Cornwall Council about a partner secondment, and the Green Cornwall programme represents the pinnacle of his 30-year career in local government. As his secondment at Cornwall Council draws to a close, Mr Cirell is turning his attention to writing a book on climate change for local government. This cross-fertilisation of theory and practice is consistent with his approach to the law.
Neville Eisenberg
NEVILLE EISENBERG
Managing partner, Berwin Leighton Paisner, London
Berwin Leighton Paisner consistently scores highly in the FT Law 50, and much of this achievement stems from the leadership of Neville Eisenberg. As managing partner of BLP, he has sought to maintain the momentum of the firm’s 2003 merger through an ambitious emerging markets strategy and a pioneering approach to efficiency.
In 2009, Mr Eisenberg identified the need for BLP to develop a presence in emerging markets. The resulting merger between BLP and the Goltsblat half of Moscow’s largest law firm, Pepelyaev, Goltsblat & Partners, created the first Russian international law firm, Goltsblat BLP.
Mr Eisenberg has since led the firm to develop a radical resourcing product, which is on the leading edge of an “arms race” towards more efficient ways of providing legal services to clients.
BLP’s Managed Legal Service, shortlisted in the client service section of this year’s FT Innovative Lawyers, involves the firm taking on and managing most of a client’s in-house legal team.
Mr Eisenberg believes the best way to engender an innovative environment within a law firm is to work on establishing a culture where lawyers feel comfortable experimenting, and are able to shift between the often risk-adverse mind-set of the traditional lawyer towards a more entrepreneurial one.
Sandra Esquiva-Hesse
SANDRA ESQUIVA-HESSE
Partner, Paul Hastings, Paris
The career of Sandra Esquiva-Hesse has been fuelled by the global cycle of refinancing and corporate restructurings. The current wave, as she puts it, began for her two years ago when she represented Marvel and Spider-Man Merchandising in relation to the insolvency of Smoby, the French toy manufacturer.
As the partner in charge of developing Paul Hastings’ finance and restructuring practice in Paris, her transactional work in the intervening period has culminated in one of her deals – the reorganisation and sale of Acument Global Technologies’ faltering French businesses – being shortlisted in the corporate section of this year’s FT Innovative Lawyers.
Ms Esquiva-Hesse has worked and studied in both the US and France, and she attributes much of her success to her training at Shearman & Sterling in New York. The early incentives and encouragement she received to be creative, and the knowledge she acquired of the more prescriptive US Chapter 11 bankruptcy procedure, moulded the legal approach she took back across the Atlantic.
This mixture of systems and jurisdictions is in keeping with her partnership role at a US firm in Paris, and her “yes you can” approach is pushing forward the nebulous insolvency law in her native France.
Mike Francies
MIKE FRANCIES
Managing partner, London office, Weil, Gotshal & Manges
Membership of Weil, Gotshal & Manges’ management committee has not damped Mike Francies’ appetite for doing deals.
His extensive career in corporate, private equity and restructuring has seen a number of achievements, including the first private equity bid in Europe and the first European private equity initial public offering. In 1998, he was one of the first “magic circle” partners to be poached by a US firm in London, when he left Clifford Chance for Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
But it is the restructuring arm of Mr Francies’ CV that he has been flexing of late. The management buy-out of Neuberger Berman, the former asset management arm of Lehman Brothers, was one of the bankruptcy sales that was highly commended in the FT Innovative Lawyers research last year. At the same time as Mr Francies was wading through the remnants of the US bank’s collapse, he played a critical role in the sale of a majority stake in Cobra Beer, the UK lager brand, to Molson Coors, the North American brewer.
The latter deal hints at the food and beverages flavour to his recent deal activity. He advised Patak’s on the sale of the Patak family’s Indian food brand to Associated British Foods; he has worked on various acquisitions, a placing and the initial public offering of Premier Foods, food manufacturer of Hovis bread and Mr Kipling cakes; and he acted for the Seafood Company on its acquisition of Pinneys of Scotland.
Much of Mr Francies’ work in this sector comes through his relationship with Lion Capital, the consumer-focused investment firm.
High-profile deals in other sectors include the $3.2bn IPO of Yell, producer of the Yellow Pages, which he says might not have happened without the lawyers’ contributions.
Alex Hamilton
ALEX HAMILTON
Partner, Latham & Watkins, London
Alex Hamilton has been a consistent presence in FT Innovative Lawyers, having led three of Latham & Watkins’ previous entries in the report.
Law firms traditionally lag behind other industries when it comes to embracing new technology, but Mr Hamilton, who co-chairs Latham & Watkins’ global technology transactions group, has pushed forward both his firm and the legal sector as a whole.
In 2006, he was behind the implementation of the Diamond Methodology, which enables clients to do better, quicker and cheaper deals, and redesigned the way the firm approaches contracts. In 2008, he led the development of a wiki-based knowledge management system that promotes better practice through increased sharing of data.
The following year, Mr Hamilton continued to push technological solutions within the firm with Capture, a set of dynamic documents to record client requirements in outsourcing deals where speed and cost are critical. The technology has boosted client instructions of the firm, including a recent $500m transaction.
His most recent initiative, an application to manage complex contracts, allows lawyers and clients to search contracts hosted on the firm’s private network, define terms and link any term to comment wikis.
The emphasis is on helping clients understand their obligations following the signing of multiple transaction documents, and users have described it as the “kind of tool that you get from consultancies such as Deloitte and Accenture”.
Known as Context, the application is the latest example of Mr Hamilton using technology as a catalyst for collaboration.
David Lowe
DAVID LOWE
Partner, Wragge & Co, London
David Lowe is a relative rarity in the highly specialised world of corporate law, because as a commercial contracts lawyer he operates in a swathe of sectors, ranging from food and drinks to real estate, outsourcing, the motoring industry, procurement, supply-chain management, manufacturing, logistics and international trade.
This breadth of experience is the spur to many of Mr Lowe’s best ideas, which can often be of critical importance to his clients.
His knowledge of supply-chain management has proven especially useful. When engaged by Birds Eye Iglo in 2008 to work on relatively routine logistical documentation, Mr Lowe spotted a risk that the company had yet to consider: the potential insolvency of its sole UK frozen-food warehouse provider.
Seeing law as more of a means to an end than an end in itself, Mr Lowe’s work frequently edges into operational and commercial advice. He is active in various international trade projects, including the development of Incoterms 2010, the terms of international freight delivery.
This gives him a big-picture viewpoint from which to advise his clients and help them devise the best possible supply chains, which he has done for Birds Eye in Turkey, and on a $30m export deal involving moving an automotive plant to China.
He has also been involved in two high-profile contract procurement agreements: advising Transport for London on its cycle-hire scheme, and reviewing the contracts for the Greater London Authority in its bid for the 2012 Olympic Games.
Volker Potthoff
VOLKER POTTHOFF
Of counsel, CMS Hasche Sigle, Frankfurt
Volker Potthoff uses his experience as both a lawyer and a company director to push for closer business relationships between Germany and China. At CMS Hasche Sigle, he co-ordinates the German firm’s expansion into Asia, and he was involved in the first German initial public offering by a Chinese company.
Mr Potthoff believes lawyers should see the profession as a support for business, and he has assembled a multidisciplinary group of investment bankers, auditors, former colleagues at Deutsche Börse, the German exchange where he was general counsel, and partners from the capital markets team of CMS Hasche Sigle to encourage the flow of capital from Europe to China.
His hybrid legal and business role at CMS Hasche Sigle follows an unusual legal career, going from private practice to in-house and back again.
He began at White & Case in New York and Leinen & Derichs in Cologne, before moving to a client-side legal position at BHF-Bank in Frankfurt, and taking up the role of chief legal counsel at Deutsche Börse.
But it is the management positions and directorships that Mr Potthoff has occupied – including a seat on the Deutsche Börse executive board – that sets him apart from other lawyers and goes some way to explaining his business-minded approach to the law. It was while at Deutsche Börse that Mr Potthoff kicked off his network of Chinese businesses with the People’s Bank of China.
With one foot in law and the other in business, it is not surprising that Mr Potthoff takes an interest in corporate governance, and he sees board advisory roles as falling within the remit of the modern lawyer.
Andrew Vellani
ANDREW VELLANI
Chief legal officer, director and management board member, Cofra Holding, Zurich
Andrew Vellani is included in the Legal Innovator of the Year shortlist for his dynamic approach to managing the global in-house legal function for Cofra Holding, a large conglomerate based in Switzerland.
Arriving at the company in 2002, Mr Vellani was immediately involved in transforming the shape of the business before he turned his attention to the in-house legal department.
As a member of the three-person management team, which operates directly below the supervisory board of the private company, he was involved in bringing together diverse multinational businesses under the auspices of a new holding company. He then created a dedicated group legal team by separating the legal affairs of the private company from that of its controlling shareholders, the Brenninkmeijer family.
Mr Vellani’s vision for his newly created group legal function was a seamless global team that united 13 previously semi-autonomous offices around the world. In doing this, his greatest achievement has been to take a new cross-border approach to managing his diverse team.
He led the introduction of intranet systems to help manage legal matters, and established a litigation reporting system to monitor progress of cases and to facilitate a more systematic assessment of risk. Mr Vellani has also put in place a training system that gives young lawyers experience of the conglomerate’s businesses.
Mr Vellani has been involved in a series of important transactions, including selling the London Mortgage Company, American Retail Group and a big Brazilian consumer bank.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Accessing the e-book revolution
By Steven Johnson
Published: December 27 2010 22:09 | Last updated: December 27 2010 22:09
In 1467, Peter Schöffer and Johann Fust published a translation of St Augustine’s The Art Of Preaching. They were old colleagues of Johannes Gutenberg, the pioneer of modern printing. But their true claim to fame is that they were the first commercially successful printers, and this success stemmed in part from their relentless innovation with the world’s newest communications technology: the book.
One such innovation appeared in the 1467 edition, which was the first printed book to include an alphabetical index. Schöffer and Fust were not only competing by releasing new titles. They were changing what it meant to use and read a book.
Some of the first book advertisements – and indeed some of the first modern adverts anywhere – talked up their “better arranged indexes” as a selling point. The publishers of the The Art of Preaching claimed that their indexes, along with other new cross-referencing features, were “alone worth the whole price, because they make it much easier to use”.
The phrase sounds like it could be from an advert for some 21st-century gadget: “Our books aren’t just informative. They’re also user-friendly!” The echo of today’s marketing language is no accident. Thanks to a series of interrelated technologies – but especially the web, the Kindle and the iPad – we are living through a radical reinvention of the tools and techniques of reading.
One of the most thrilling digital developments of 2010 was the arms race between e-book readers. The Kindle grew amazingly small and cheap; Barnes & Noble’s Nook was rolled out on Google’s Android mobile operating system; the iBooks and Kindle apps for the iPad added dozens of features after they were released in April; just a few weeks ago, Google launched a multiplatform e-book reader that allows you to browse and buy the millions of books the company has scanned in the past few years.
Of all these innovations, though, Apple’s iPad itself stands out as the most significant breakthrough, not just because it may be the fastest-selling new technology product in history but also because it does more than any device before to consolidate book reading and web browsing. I remember sitting down with the iPad when it arrived this spring, and thinking that for the past 15 years we had been surfing the web on the wrong kind of machine. Pointing and clicking on a screen seemed suddenly unnatural when you could sit back on the couch and hold the web in your hands.
The difference between our time and Gutenberg’s is, of course, the rate of change. It took almost half a century for the alphabetical index to become a standard; Arabic page numbers were not adopted until the 1500s. There were feature wars in the new platform of the book, but salvos were fired only every 20 years.
It may have taken a long time, but when all those features coalesced into the system of citation, indices, page numbers, footnotes, bibliographies and cross-references that we now take for granted, they helped usher in the scientific revolutions of the modern age. Entire ways of interacting with information became possible because we had agreed on how to describe where the information lived and how to point people towards it.
This is a story with a direct connection to our current situation. This year is the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web specification. The defining property of that standard was this: it established a way to describe where information lives and how to point people to it. The extraordinary run of innovation seen on the web starts with the breakthrough of web addresses and links.
For two decades, this new universe of linkable data expanded faster than any other form of information. But this year, for the first time in my adult life, unlinkable information began growing at a meaningful clip. This is part of a wider problem in the age of the iPad, captured in a much-discussed article this summer by Chris Anderson, Wired magazine editor-in-chief, entitled simply: “The web is dead”. The piece focused on the rise of “walled gardens” such as Facebook or apps created for the iPhone or Android. To give only the latest example, Rupert Murdoch is allegedly planning an app-only daily newspaper.
Of course, the overwhelming majority of apps do not contain much information that would benefit from being linked to other things on the internet. If we do not figure out a way to link directly to one level of the Angry Birds game, we will probably survive as a culture. But the danger lies in a region of the digital information landscape barely mentioned by Mr Anderson: books. Where links abound, a rich ecosystem of commentary, archiving, social sharing and scholarship usually develops because links make it far easier to build on and connect ideas from around the web. But right now, books exist outside this universe. There is no standardised way to link to a page of a digital book.
Books contain the most carefully crafted and edited text that we have – truly the richest source of information in the world – and yet all that information remains unlinkable. Google works as well as it does because people find interesting information on the web and link to it; Google then prioritises pages that attract a disproportionate number of inbound links. But if you find a fascinating passage in a novel or a book of history, there is no standardised way to link to it, which means that the rest of the web cannot benefit from your discovery.
Fortunately, a solution to this problem exists, one that merely involves a commitment to use technology that already exists. Call it the mirror web. If you create digital information in any form, make a parallel version of that information that lives on the web. A magazine publisher creating an iPad app should ensure that each article has clear links to a mirror version of each article on the web. Then, if anyone wants to cite, tweet, blog or e-mail a reference to that article, it is always one tap away. The web version can be behind a pay wall or some other kind of barrier if the publisher chooses; what matters is that there is an address you can point to.
This is already happening in an informal way – many apps for news and magazines contain links to their equivalent web pages – but this technique needs to become a new convention. When publishers create apps without web mirroring, we should be quick to condemn them, because stripping valuable information of links limits the range of its potential influence. Writing articles in unlinkable environments in 2010 is like publishing a scholarly book in 1800 and refusing to allow it to appear in any library or bibliography anywhere in the world.
The most radical premise behind this idea of web mirroring, however, is that it should apply to digital books as well. In future, every page of every book should have a shadow version of itself that lives on the web. Imagine the possibilities for readers in this environment: you are halfway through Middlemarch on your iPad and you stumble across a link to Raymond Williams’ magisterial work of literary criticism, The Country and the City, which in turn connects you to an online reading group of George Eliot fans, where someone points you to a passage in Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radical that inspires you to read the whole book from the start.
Today there is a real danger that this art of linking to things – an art that dates back to Schöffer and Fust and beyond – will grow less and less relevant in an unconnected world of apps and e-books. But there is also an opportunity here. We could choose to become better at making connections, bringing together in a new way the two most transformative textual platforms of the modern age: the book and the web.
The writer is the author, most recently, of ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’, and co-creator of Findings.com. This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Published: December 27 2010 22:09 | Last updated: December 27 2010 22:09
In 1467, Peter Schöffer and Johann Fust published a translation of St Augustine’s The Art Of Preaching. They were old colleagues of Johannes Gutenberg, the pioneer of modern printing. But their true claim to fame is that they were the first commercially successful printers, and this success stemmed in part from their relentless innovation with the world’s newest communications technology: the book.
One such innovation appeared in the 1467 edition, which was the first printed book to include an alphabetical index. Schöffer and Fust were not only competing by releasing new titles. They were changing what it meant to use and read a book.
Some of the first book advertisements – and indeed some of the first modern adverts anywhere – talked up their “better arranged indexes” as a selling point. The publishers of the The Art of Preaching claimed that their indexes, along with other new cross-referencing features, were “alone worth the whole price, because they make it much easier to use”.
The phrase sounds like it could be from an advert for some 21st-century gadget: “Our books aren’t just informative. They’re also user-friendly!” The echo of today’s marketing language is no accident. Thanks to a series of interrelated technologies – but especially the web, the Kindle and the iPad – we are living through a radical reinvention of the tools and techniques of reading.
One of the most thrilling digital developments of 2010 was the arms race between e-book readers. The Kindle grew amazingly small and cheap; Barnes & Noble’s Nook was rolled out on Google’s Android mobile operating system; the iBooks and Kindle apps for the iPad added dozens of features after they were released in April; just a few weeks ago, Google launched a multiplatform e-book reader that allows you to browse and buy the millions of books the company has scanned in the past few years.
Of all these innovations, though, Apple’s iPad itself stands out as the most significant breakthrough, not just because it may be the fastest-selling new technology product in history but also because it does more than any device before to consolidate book reading and web browsing. I remember sitting down with the iPad when it arrived this spring, and thinking that for the past 15 years we had been surfing the web on the wrong kind of machine. Pointing and clicking on a screen seemed suddenly unnatural when you could sit back on the couch and hold the web in your hands.
The difference between our time and Gutenberg’s is, of course, the rate of change. It took almost half a century for the alphabetical index to become a standard; Arabic page numbers were not adopted until the 1500s. There were feature wars in the new platform of the book, but salvos were fired only every 20 years.
It may have taken a long time, but when all those features coalesced into the system of citation, indices, page numbers, footnotes, bibliographies and cross-references that we now take for granted, they helped usher in the scientific revolutions of the modern age. Entire ways of interacting with information became possible because we had agreed on how to describe where the information lived and how to point people towards it.
This is a story with a direct connection to our current situation. This year is the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web specification. The defining property of that standard was this: it established a way to describe where information lives and how to point people to it. The extraordinary run of innovation seen on the web starts with the breakthrough of web addresses and links.
For two decades, this new universe of linkable data expanded faster than any other form of information. But this year, for the first time in my adult life, unlinkable information began growing at a meaningful clip. This is part of a wider problem in the age of the iPad, captured in a much-discussed article this summer by Chris Anderson, Wired magazine editor-in-chief, entitled simply: “The web is dead”. The piece focused on the rise of “walled gardens” such as Facebook or apps created for the iPhone or Android. To give only the latest example, Rupert Murdoch is allegedly planning an app-only daily newspaper.
Of course, the overwhelming majority of apps do not contain much information that would benefit from being linked to other things on the internet. If we do not figure out a way to link directly to one level of the Angry Birds game, we will probably survive as a culture. But the danger lies in a region of the digital information landscape barely mentioned by Mr Anderson: books. Where links abound, a rich ecosystem of commentary, archiving, social sharing and scholarship usually develops because links make it far easier to build on and connect ideas from around the web. But right now, books exist outside this universe. There is no standardised way to link to a page of a digital book.
Books contain the most carefully crafted and edited text that we have – truly the richest source of information in the world – and yet all that information remains unlinkable. Google works as well as it does because people find interesting information on the web and link to it; Google then prioritises pages that attract a disproportionate number of inbound links. But if you find a fascinating passage in a novel or a book of history, there is no standardised way to link to it, which means that the rest of the web cannot benefit from your discovery.
Fortunately, a solution to this problem exists, one that merely involves a commitment to use technology that already exists. Call it the mirror web. If you create digital information in any form, make a parallel version of that information that lives on the web. A magazine publisher creating an iPad app should ensure that each article has clear links to a mirror version of each article on the web. Then, if anyone wants to cite, tweet, blog or e-mail a reference to that article, it is always one tap away. The web version can be behind a pay wall or some other kind of barrier if the publisher chooses; what matters is that there is an address you can point to.
This is already happening in an informal way – many apps for news and magazines contain links to their equivalent web pages – but this technique needs to become a new convention. When publishers create apps without web mirroring, we should be quick to condemn them, because stripping valuable information of links limits the range of its potential influence. Writing articles in unlinkable environments in 2010 is like publishing a scholarly book in 1800 and refusing to allow it to appear in any library or bibliography anywhere in the world.
The most radical premise behind this idea of web mirroring, however, is that it should apply to digital books as well. In future, every page of every book should have a shadow version of itself that lives on the web. Imagine the possibilities for readers in this environment: you are halfway through Middlemarch on your iPad and you stumble across a link to Raymond Williams’ magisterial work of literary criticism, The Country and the City, which in turn connects you to an online reading group of George Eliot fans, where someone points you to a passage in Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radical that inspires you to read the whole book from the start.
Today there is a real danger that this art of linking to things – an art that dates back to Schöffer and Fust and beyond – will grow less and less relevant in an unconnected world of apps and e-books. But there is also an opportunity here. We could choose to become better at making connections, bringing together in a new way the two most transformative textual platforms of the modern age: the book and the web.
The writer is the author, most recently, of ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’, and co-creator of Findings.com. This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco
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