Approach will be the key to the understanding how the practice of law will change.

The web site for the book Blur states:

Rather than linear supply chains, major firms now find themselves in the middle of “economic webs” made up of more players—and more kinds of players—than they ever dealt with before. The ability to manage relationships with all these players will be a key success factor in the BLUR economy.

Joe Katzman on the Blur Economy:

In a BLURred economy, one of the key strategic skills will be the ability to reach out from relatively "protected" niches to attack others. It becomes a battle of value webs (business ecosystems) more than individual products, a game much more like Go/Othello than the industrial-age strategic metaphor of chess.

Blur on the Health Care Industry: [what if the word healthcare was replaced with the word a law practice]

If you're working in healthcare today, you know about life in the Blur. Rapid change defines the industry. Intangible value is what health is all about. And connectivity is revolutionizing how care is delivered.

Sheryl Torr-Brown (sheryl.r.torr-brown@monsanto.com) on Blur:

The day is finally coming when the Jack of all trades, master of none, will come into his or her own. The Jack is better connected, more ready to see the value in diversity of input, more likely to see innovation in the unexpected, and more likely to enable the trust around him or herself that is an absolute requirement for the sharing of what we know.
I am a firm believer that it is not so much what we know that defines us, but the questions we ask.We must open our minds to the unknown and be brave enough to feel around outside of our field. There are treasures a-waiting for those who make the move.

USING THE i/t RATIO AS AN FORECASTING TOOL IN COMPETING FOR THE FUTURE

I was very intrigued by point number 3 in the 50 ways to blur one’s business: Grow your intangibles faster than your tangibles. What really interested me was the discussion of the i/t ratio. In my work, I have been exploring the role of the customer in aiding the development and implementation of corporate and business strategies. One issue that concerns me about the state of knowledge in business is the overemphasis on the supply side in shaping trends in the market and influencing the rate and success/failure of new product introductions, and a complete lack of attention to the demand side as an critical and useful source in determining tomorrows winners/losers. In this regard, I found the i/t ratio as a possible indicator of the success of today’s firms in tomorrow’s markets. Let me elaborate my point further.

I think it can be safely assumed for most industries that five years from now products introduced on the market will be very different in shape, form, and utility from those of today. This seems inevitable considering the pace of new product development and the rapidly shrinking product lifecycle. The interesting task then is to gaze into the crystal ball and attempt to predict, which of today’s firms are likely to emerge as winners 5 years from now, when all the products are likely to be very different from today’s products? Does current success offer us any insights into forecasting future success/failure?

To explore this issue further, one needs to evaluate the distinction between today’s products, yesterday’s products (say 5-10 years back) and tomorrow’s products (5 years from now). Today’s new products are increasingly becoming customer-leading innovations—that is, attempting to define and meet the unarticulated and unmet needs of the customers-, whereas new products of a decade ago were customer-led innovations. I think it is safe to assume that, based on the current trend of proliferating new technologies, rapid innovations and shrinking product life cycles, the trend of customer-leading innovations is very likely to continue. Thus the impetus is on firms to rapidly introduce new products and services that define their customer needs and more importantly, coax their customers into believing that their unarticulated needs will be best met by the firms’ new products and services. In other words, they have to ensure that customers will follow them and willingly adopt their new products and services, despite the obvious uncertainty associated with adopting them.

How can firms successfully do that? My theory is that they can ensure their future success by actively building a customer oriented culture that involves effectively meeting their customers current needs, constantly scanning and building knowledge of their customers’ current and evolving needs, cultivating their trust and loyalty, and introducing products and services to define/meet their needs—the i (intangible) in the ratio. The orientation and focus on customers should be institutionalized within the firm across all levels of the hierarchy. Without such an intangible knowledge, it would be very difficult for them to entice customers to follow their products/services. It is important to realize that customers do have a long memory of their previous interactions with the firm and unless their needs are currently met in an efficient and satisfying manner, they are loath to follow the firm into the uncharted terrain. Remember in today's world of blurring markets and rapidly proliferating technologies, "A Competitor is only a Click Away".

I see the i/t ratio as one that will aid in the complex task of predicting the future success of firms. The ratio is thus between the firm’s knowledge of its services, its customers, and their loyalty (the intangible) and the absolute number of customers using the product or service. Considering this, do the following scenarios make sense?