On Billable Hours Mania

For all the consultants around, from Signs In the Times from Andrew McAfee

As I wrote in an earlier post titled "The Pursuit of Busyness," many organizations emphasize (in ways both formal and informal, overt and subtle) that their people should engage in activities that are directly, obviously, and immediately 'productive.' Within law and consulting firms, working billable hours is the clearest example of such an activity. 

So downplaying or doing away with billable hours provides leaders at these firms with an interesting and perhaps unique opportunity to communicate to the workforce what kinds of activities should take the place of billing the client upward of 2,000 hours per year. If these leaders are serious about improving collaboration, knowledge capture and sharing, innovation, and information flow, they can take advantage of both the novel tools of E2.0 and the novel work environment they've just created as they de-emphasized billability.

.. they could do this by putting the use of their company's emergent social software platforms 'in the flow' of work for their people. A major change in corporate culture like the decline and fall of billable hours presents a major opportunity to reshape what the culture measures, values, and esteems. This will in turn, of course, affect what people do during a workweek. Would a law firm or consulting company be better off if it went from having a standard of 40 hours of billable work each week to a standard of spending half a day (or a day, or whatever) each week helping colleagues and the enterprise as a whole via the modern social digital toolkit of blogs, wikis, mashups, prediction markets, comments, ratings, votes, RSS feeds, etc.?