Last Sunday was LexThink, organized by Dennis Kennedy, Matt Homann and Sherry Fowler and attended by about 50 people, primarily a mixture of lawyers and bloggers. Matt and Dennis were at BlogWalk and were so inspired by our use of Open Space that they decided to go with Open Space for LexThink. This confused people initially, but once we got talking, we could barely stop. The focus of the day was on building the (perfect) 21st century services firm.
By the second regroup session, I was amazed to hear a common theme across many of the conversations: passion. Given that the topic of the day was around creating the next form of service firm, I think this starts to make sense. Service firms are all about doing what they love to help their clients, whether that is some form of legal assistance, marketing, troubleshooting, or consulting. (And aren't these things all inter-related anyway?) The people running these firms had better be passionate about what they do, both because that is what will keep them motivated and their clients will be thrilled with passionate service.
There has to be more to it than this, however.