For Taylor, coming into the business from a law career, there was a kind of culture shock that he eventually confronted by becoming increasingly focused on his own talents and interests. Starting in 1986, when he first opened the doors of his own firm, he began to use his writing talent to gain a name for himself as an advisor.

But it was his interest in family law and in helping to reconfigure the financial advisory landscape that set him on a journey to become a change agent in the financial services world.

As an advisor himself, Taylor says he is "privy to all of the tensions and secret conflicts of interest that beset this industry. I see what works and what doesn't work."

He sees financial advisory work as product-oriented work, which includes charging fees for assets under management. But he thinks this structure eventually will recede in significance and be superceded by one in which fees are generated through "knowledge work."

What is knowledge work? Financial advisors are among the purest and most energetic of entrepreneurs, Taylor contends, and over time their knowledge base of financial services becomes both broad and deep. Couple this with a series of professional programs that financial advisor can implement with appropriate clients and you have the beginnings of a new industry, or at least a reinvention of an old one.

Taylor himself is not stopping with the Divorce Mediation Process. He has two other programs in the works, one of which deals with children after divorce and the other with a turnkey financial privacy system that advisors can offer clients. He hopes to market both systems to other advisors as he intends to market his DMP. "Everything I am developing is based on the idea that the advisor himself or herself is the possessor of a unique process, service or specialty," he says, "or can master the skills involved in a useful program and then charge a fairly weighty fee for the application of that information."'

And he adds, "Advisors are still persuaded to believe that it is their relationship with a firm, preferably a very large securities or insurance firm, that gives them the ability to generate income. This may have been true once, but it's certainly not true now. The microchip has allowed financial advisors to place all of the resources that they need at their fingertips."

For Taylor, the financial services industry is a pressure cooker that keeps the lid painfully shut on a broad group of competing agendas. Government bureaucrats, including securities regulators, have pushed the envelope of what is in their power to oversee; financial firms, squeezed by increasingly onerous regulation, attempt to discipline the financial advisors in their network; financial advisors view much of the regulatory agenda aimed at them as unworkable and even counterproductive. Each group involved is suspicious of the other-and the result is a fairly dysfunctional industry, a wary waltz among power brokers that goes round and round but never makes progress.

What the industry finds valuable is inevitably product related. That's no accident, according to Taylor. By playing up products and downplaying advisor expertise, the financial services industry attempts to maintain control over what it views as a freewheeling distribution channel.

"Why should it be this way?" Taylor asks. "Say you want to learn to paint, so you pay a visit to a local artist who does that sort of thing. You talk and agree you will pay a visit once a week for several hours at a time. Wouldn't you be surprised if the artist sat you down and told you that he wouldn't charge for his or her expertise, just for the paint and brushes provided to you? That's how it is right now in the financial industry. No matter how much the individual advisor or agent knows, when he sits down with a client, the chances are he's locked into a payment schedule that is product based not knowledge based."