It's Not the How or the What but the Who

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Lone Wolves Starving

As a member of Egon Zehnder’s global executive committee, I’ve thought a great deal about how to compensate our partners. The best advice I ever received on the matter came from a Harvard Business School program called Leadership in Professional Service Firms. I took it in early 2000. At that time, our firm was doing very well, but I was nonetheless concerned about the imminent retirement of our founder, the rise of the internet in the search profession, and the fact that some of our major competitors had recently gone public and begun to pursue aggressive global expansion.

In one of the sessions, the professor, Ashish Nanda, explained that there were two basic compensation models in firms such as ours. The prevalent ...