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Analysis Group
Prepared for Coreen McCool
Starting two new entities well
A first sketch of how we would approach the Management Committee and the board, and what we would most want to work out with you next.
August Public Inc. · September 2026 · A working draft, not a proposal. Everything here is open to change.
Our initial understanding
First, we want to check that we heard you correctly.
A firm that grew past its structure
Ninety partners, up from roughly thirty. Decision-making built for a small partnership, carried into one three times the size.
Two new entities at once
A thirteen-person Management Committee and a fiduciary board, with nine members sitting on both. Both close to a standing start.
Twenty-five committees already there
Some functional, some not. An unclear set of expectations about how engaged they are and which decisions are actually theirs.
Departments running alongside
HR and the other administrative functions, with a boundary to the partner committees that has never been drawn.
An elevation not yet named
The firm still describes itself as flat. This is a real change in who decides, and saying so is its own piece of work.
Partner time is the scarce thing
Eighty-seven client-facing partners whose best contribution is usually the client work, not hours in internal meetings.
“We're about to do something really important for the firm. We're about to kick off these two new entities. How do we do that well?”
Analysis Group · August
How we read it
The risk here is not failure. It is that nothing much changes.
Dilution
The committee meets, the agenda is good, and the decisions that matter keep being made where they were always made. Six months in, thirteen people are busy and unsure what they decided.
Boundaries found the hard way
The line between a department, a partner committee, the Management Committee and the board gets discovered one contested decision at a time, in public, with people's standing attached to the answer.
A structure people route around
Where a mandate is vague, the fastest path stays informal. Access becomes the real decision right, which is the thing a partnership least wants to be true.
Two rooms, one membership
Nine people sitting on both the committee and the board, with no stated difference between what each room is for. The overlap is an asset only if the seam is deliberate.
None of this is a reason to slow down. It is a reason to be deliberate now, while both entities are still forming and nobody has anything to defend.
Analysis Group · August
August's approach
Clarity and bureaucracy are not the same thing.
If you want a firm where partners are trusted to move without asking, you still have to be explicit about where the few real boundaries sit. When everyone knows where they are, people go faster inside them. Vagueness does not produce freedom. It produces a queue outside the CEO's door.
Analysis Group · August
August's approach
Five things we hold to in work like this.
Minimum viable structure
The fewest charters that remove the most ambiguity. Not twenty-five. The handful where the confusion is actually expensive.
Start inside a real decision
Not two months of diagnosis and a long deck. As early as you will allow, we get into a room where people own something live and help them get it done.
The room is the method
A charter on paper does not change how thirteen people behave with each other. Who talks, who goes quiet, who objects afterwards. Being there when it first runs does.
Written with, not for
Charters get drafted in conversation with the people who will live inside them, chair by chair, rather than written centrally and circulated for comment.
Design the exit early
A named internal owner, the practices written down, and a point after which you run this without us. We are not trying to become part of your governance.
Built for your allergy
If it reads as a consulting framework it will be rejected on sight, whatever its merits. The test is whether it sounds like your firm talking.
Analysis Group · August
A possible Phase 1
Three workstreams, sequenced so each one earns the next.
WorkstreamMonth 1Month 2Month 3Month 4Beyond
Orientation & mappingIncluding a day in Boston
Map the landscape
CharteringCommittee by committee
Management Committee, board, then the priority few
Launch & facilitationIn the room for the start
First real decisions
Handover
This is a shape, not a schedule. The sequencing is the part that matters: we would not charter anything before the mapping conversation has told us what is worth chartering, and we would not expect to sit in a partner meeting before the first two workstreams have made that unremarkable.
Analysis Group · August
A possible Phase 1
What each workstream might include.
Workstream one
Orientation & mapping
Key activities
Short conversations with you, with Pierre, and with a handful of committee chairs
A half day in Boston with a small group, in person
Put the current picture on one wall: committees, departments, the new committee, the board
Work the contested boundaries live rather than proposing them on paper
What you would have
A map of decision domains as they actually stand, and a clear view of which few things are worth chartering first.
Workstream two
Chartering
Key activities
Draft the Management Committee charter with its chair: purpose, domains, thresholds, what escalates and what returns to the partnership
Define the seam between committee and board, given the shared membership
Charter the priority partner committees, one chair at a time
Build a small reusable set: a charter template and a short guide to choosing a decision method
What you would have
Charters a partner can read once and know whether a given call is theirs, plus shared language for how a decision gets made.
Workstream three
Launch & facilitation
Key activities
Facilitate the Management Committee's first meetings as genuinely hard decisions arrive
Coach the chair, and whoever holds intake and follow-through
Name an internal owner and hand the practices over deliberately
Agree the point at which we step out
What you would have
A committee that has already decided something difficult together, and practices that hold once we are no longer in the room.
Analysis Group · August
Open questions
What we would most want to work out with you next.
These are the things we cannot answer from one conversation, and the places where being wrong would cost the most.
01
What does the Management Committee actually own?
Which decisions genuinely move to this group, and which stay with the CEO, sit with the departments, or return to the full partnership.
02
What is the board actually for?
Beyond CEO compensation, what would make it worth nine partners' time. And what changes now that its membership overlaps the committee so heavily.
03
Which of the twenty-five carry real weight?
Where is committee ambiguity actually costing the firm something, and where is it harmless and best left alone.
04
How plainly can the firm name the elevation?
What language the partnership can accept for a change it has already voted through, without anyone having to pretend the shape has not moved.
05
What makes this land with Pierre?
What framing makes this feel like doing something important properly, rather than fixing something broken. And where a good agenda genuinely is enough.
06
What would earn the room?
What we would need to have done before an outside pair of eyes in a partner meeting is unremarkable rather than an event.
Analysis Group · August
Where we would go next
We would rather test this with you than polish it.
This is a sketch built from one conversation, so the parts that are wrong are the interesting parts. Mike is two hours up the coast in Brunswick and glad to come down. An hour in Boston, with whoever else should be in the room, and we can turn this into something real.
August Public Inc. · Prepared for Coreen McCool, Analysis Group · September 2026 · A working draft for discussion