As you may know from reading some other articles in this blawg, I'm not a great fan of Partnerships.

Let me qualify that by saying, I'm not a great fan of partnerships where they involve more than say, 5 people.

I never really knew why, but for me there was always something sluggish about using a partnership as a way to conduct a modern business – and despite the incessant carping of some older lawyers, a law firm IS a business.

Using a partnership model seems to delay decision making akin to wading through treacle.

Anyway, I came across a story about the old proverb, Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth.  The short story was in an old Reader's Digest that I was flicking through whilst sitting in the Dentist's waiting room. 

I don't have the date of the article as I left the magazine behind and it was only after a few days that things began to gel for me.

The story was about a murder that took place in New York in 1964.

The gist of the story is this: on 13th March 1964 a young woman called Kitty Genovese was walking back to her flat in Queens, a borough of New York City, when she was attacked and stabbed by a total stranger. 

She managed to break away and scream for help but the attacker came after her and attacked her again and stabbed her to death.

The whole attack allegedly took 30 minutes.

Two weeks later on 27th March the New York Times printed an article describing how a large number (apparently as many as 38) of respectable, law-abiding citizens had seen this attack and done nothing about it. 

No one had called the police and on investigation, the police were unable to understand why so many witnesses had done so little.

The story was picked up by other journalists and of course grew arms and legs and the conclusion was that people no longer cared enough to get involved and was a damning indictment of modern society and an example that society was breaking down etc etc proper Daily Mail stuff.

However, when I searched online to remind myself of the details of the murder, I simply searched under the name "Kitty Genovese" and up popped lots of links referring to what psychologists call The Bystander Effect but is also known as Genovese Syndrome.

The Bystander Effect is a psychological phenomenon that refers to cases where individuals do not offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present.

The probability of help has in the past been thought to be inversely related to the number of bystanders; in other words, the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help.

In the last 30 years or so there have been numerous experiments to demonstrate the Bystander Effect in a variety of settings and the conclusion is nearly always the same; the more people there are, the less likely it is that the victim will get help.

So how does this impact on how a partnership works?

Well, with the information provided so far, it doesn't.  But after a little bit of digging into some other aspects of the Bystander Effect, you might begin to agree with me.

There are many reasons why bystanders don't react to emergency situations, but social psychologists have identified two major factors;

(1)     The principle of social influence; and

(2)     Diffusion of responsibility

Social influence is when people monitor the reactions of other people and where they work out in their minds if it's necessary for them to do something or nothing. 

Since most people do nothing, the conclusion is that it's better to do nothing.  Psychologists call this "social proof" or more imaginatively "pluralistic ignorance".

Diffusion of responsibility is where everyone assumes that someone else will intervene.  There is a hierarchy effect where people think that someone more suitable or better qualified (in their minds) will act or intervene.

And as someone else is probably going to step in then there's no reason to do so. Feeling less responsible means that they can refrain from acting.

Other obstacles to acting – bear in mind that this all happens in a split second in a bystander's mind – is that there are inherent fears;

The fear that someone better qualified might appear and therefore acting quickly could cause them to lose face.

They may also be afraid of being superseded by a superior helper, offering unwanted assistance, or facing the legal consequences of offering inferior and possibly dangerous assistance.

Out of all of that, the phrase I like best is "pluralistic ignorance".

In pluralistic ignorance, people privately disdain but publicly support a norm or a certain belief, while the false consensus effect causes people to wrongly assume that most people think like them, while in reality most people do not think like them and only on rare occasions will they express their disagreement openly.

Thus no one may take any action, even though some people privately think that they should do something.

When I talk to a number of partners of law firms, quite a lot of them say that they would prefer changing to a Limited Liability Company but they think that the other partners would disagree.

The reality is that they could all be struck by pluralistic ignorance.

I was discussing law firm growth with a friend of mine who grew his own business from nothing to "a few million" in the space of a few years and I asked him how he did it.

He said that in any business with more than 50 employees, there were two "killers" that had to be rooted out.
 
Bureaucracy and Office Politics.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy can often be invisible in an organisation that's growing because it's
never one big thing but death by a thousand cuts; it's the small things that can suck the life out of a business.

All business needs systems and processes, but over time or through a change in the market, some come become obsolete. Systems and processes are there to ensure that everyone knows what they are doing and to speed up the service to customers. 

If they don't do that or contribute to that, then they have to go.

But some people have a healthy (or unhealthy) attraction for certain formalities.
 
There is the case of a manager in a firm who sent out a memo outlining how all memos should be written.  All employees had to follow an exact format, font size and font style and the position of the employee in the firm determined the size of font they could use; 10 point for paralegals and trainees, 11 point for solicitors and 12 point for partners.

When another memo went out a few weeks later insisting on a uniform desk code, only four items on a desk at any one time - phone on the right and so on it was time to call a halt.

These proposed "procedures" did not contribute to or speed up the customers experience, they were far too inward looking and only served to annoy employees.

Politics

If bureaucracy can be a serious nuisance, it's usually just overly enthusiastic OCD sufferers who just need to be reminded of the purpose of the business; but office politicians are much worse.

They are people who hold bad and destructive ideas about how to get ahead.  If they are not rooted out of a business they can destroy it.

Bureaucracy is a curable illness but politics is like cancer.  Bad enough in one place but if it's allowed to spread it can be terminal.

As someone who's been self-employed for the majority of his adult working life I have a difficulty accepting any kind of office political activity. Probably because it's rooted in power and power corrupts.

Not all "politicians" are nasty, some are just plain naive.

If your idea of doing good is based on holding power over someone else then that is just nasty or naive.

Politics is the complete opposite of business and in almost every other area it's inferior. Politics and business should have the same aims and that is to make life or the world a better place, but the way they go about it is very different.

Politicians can't do any good until they get power.  Businesses can't make any profit until they do good.

If in your firm you happen to be right about your ideas for making the business a
better pace through innovative ideas that make the customer experience better and quicker then you are rewarded with customers paying you more money.  That money trickles down through the business paying off your operating costs, wages and expenses and ending up as profit which is the only true indicator of customer joy.

Profits are a measurable indication of the good that your firm is doing.

That's why profit is so vital in any business; it forces everyone to pay attention
to the ultimate purpose of the business.

Not bureaucracy or office politics but providing benefit to the customers.