Last week’s conference in New Orleans brought the glitzy ideas. That can be the most fun part of any virtuous cycle of improvement, the vision exercise of what is possible and where you’re going. This week’s theme is consolidation. Consolidating is much less sexy than having the big idea in the first instance, but it is more important in producing actual results. This round of consolidation is going to continue for a few more days at least, but it’s not the same integration hell that I’ve written about previously. That is partly the result of knowing how to use tools better to create things with fewer problems. Yes, several of our shiny new toys are software. My extracurricular focus is on making the new toys connect and play well with the existing toys so that everything works and we see a net benefit. Then once those gains are consolidated, we’ll start working on the next batch of shiny new toys. It’s astounding how much work has changed in the past year as we’ve adopted some of the new tools that are available.

I’ve also opened the tap of new ideas again by bringing dedicated nonfiction reading back into my life. This is something that is AI-assisted also and something I wrote about not too long ago, but it is already helping expand my thinking. One of the books that I’ve begun is Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book published in the mid-1980s but one that I suspect will be even more powerful in the streaming and smartphone age. Creating the space to be able to take in new ideas is one of the big early results of the last big wave of process improvements that we implemented for the law firm, so I’m excited to see how far we’re able to get with this round. There are certainly a point of diminishing returns and an outer limit to what is possible, but it doesn’t feel like we’re approaching either yet.