Kerma Partners Quarterly Interview with Ron Baker

This past June, while I was in London, I received the following email from Friedrich Blase of Kerma Parnters, a boutique consulting firm for professional knowledge firms.

Ron:

On Amazon, I saw an announcement of your new book on IC to be published in November 2007 [Mind Over Matter]. That finally causes me to write this email that had been on my mind for a good while.

Your work has left a major impression on my colleagues' minds and mine. We are a boutique consulting firm working with law and other professional services firms on their strategic and competitive issues. Despite our size, we work globally, mainly in North America and in Europe.

For the past two years, we have also been working on assessing the intellectual capital base of law and other professional services firms through collaboration with the originators of the IC Rating (www.intellectualcapital.se).

I am currently writing an article with their CEO on the case studies (which caused me to look for new books). At the initial meeting which involved one of the pioneers in IC, Leif Edvinsson, I argued for the case of IC in professional services and mentioned your and Paul Dunn's book—The Firm of The Future. We have published a number of pieces on IC management in the law firm context, which you can find on our website, mostly as resources under my name.

Now, I am very keen to understand the focus of your upcoming book. It would no doubt have an influence on our article, which is ultimately going for submission at Harvard Business Review, where the editor, Thomas Stewart, is one of Leif's early collaborators in the birth of understanding intellectual capital. If you are interested, I would be honored to review it prior to publication and thus allow it to influence our thinking even earlier than normally possible.

Furthermore, I am very interested to learn more about your work and the VeraSage Institute in general, and explore whether there are possibilities of collaboration between our organizations. As I am sure you travel frequently and I happen to be in California occasionally, we may even find the time to meet. I would greatly enjoy that.

Please let me know your thoughts and accept my thanks for your excellent work that has helped me and others become better.

Kind regards

Friedrich

Since then, I have had the great fortune of talking with Friedrich and his colleague, Michael Roch. They are quite enlightened when it comes to intellectual capital, Value Pricing, and the uselessness of timesheets, even though we may still have areas where we disagree.

Friedrich was kind enough to read my manuscript, Mind Over Matter, and offered many cogent comments, insights, and areas for further research. I will post these sometime in the future.

I was honored when they interviewed me for their firm's publication, Kerma Partners Quarterly, 2007, Issue 3. You can download a pdf of the entire newsletter here.

There are a lot of thought-provoking articles in this newsletter that any leader of any type of PKF would be wise to read. I look forward to further collaborations between Kerma Partners and VeraSage, as we spread our intellectual capital over the landscape of the professions to improve posterity.