Season Two · Part Two · Episode 11 of 24
Renee refuses to let the easy version win.
Jason’s first proposal for how PRIME would assign sponsors took him four minutes to explain, and he thought it made sense.
They were back in the same conference room, the framed photo of Marcus finally gone from beside the credenza, though no one had mentioned moving it. Susan stood at the whiteboard, sketching the mechanics of Exposure, the PRIME piece that still lacked a working design. Margaret had a laptop open. Renee sat with her legal pad, which, by now, Jason had learned to watch as closely as he watched her face.
“Simplest version,” Jason said. “Every equity partner names one or two associates they’d be willing to formally sponsor. People they already trust. We build the tracking and the exposure-time requirements around whoever gets named. We could have a pilot group by next quarter.”
Susan didn’t say anything. She looked at Renee instead, the way a mediator looks at the party who hasn’t spoken yet.
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“That’s the fastest version,” Renee said. “It’s also the version that gives us the exact same nine names again, plus whichever new nine look similar enough to the partners doing the choosing.”
“That’s not fair,” Jason said. “Nobody’s choosing based on who they look like. They’re choosing based on who they trust.”
“I know you believe that,” Renee said. “Every partner on my list would have told you the same thing, with the same conviction, and every one of them would have been wrong in exactly the same way. Trust isn’t neutral just because it doesn’t feel like a decision. David Chen is one of the best transactional partners in this firm, and it took him five extra years to get here, not because anyone doubted his work, but because nobody’s instinct ever landed on him first. If we build PRIME on instinct, we’ve just given instinct a formal budget and a name.”
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Jason didn’t answer right away. He thought about Charles Whitfield and the fact that he still couldn’t, even now, picture Whitfield doing for someone else what he’d done for Jason. He thought about how easy it would have been for him, five weeks ago, to make exactly the proposal he’d just made and to believe, all the way through implementation, that he’d built something fair.
“Then what’s the alternative?” he said. “We can’t have a committee vote on every relationship in this firm. That’s not faster. It’s a different kind of stall.”
“I’m not asking for a committee vote,” Renee said. “I’m asking for friction in exactly one place. Right now, the easiest path is for a partner to name the first person who comes to mind. I want that path to require one extra step. Not a veto. A requirement.”
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Susan finally spoke, writing as she did. “Every partner nominates at least two candidates, not one,” she said. “It forces a second name onto the page before the first one feels inevitable. Each nomination is checked against written readiness criteria, the same way MLARD checks for judgment, efficiency, and ownership at the associate level, so a sponsor must specify why this candidate is ready, not just say they like them. And the full slate of nominations across the firm is reviewed together, once a quarter, by more than one person, so a pattern is visible the same quarter it starts, instead of five years later.”
“That’s still slower than my version,” Jason said, though without much conviction.
“It’s one extra step,” Susan said. “Not bureaucracy. The difference between a decision and a habit is usually exactly one extra step, taken at the right moment. You didn’t design MLARD to slow associates down. You designed it so nobody could mistake a guess for a standard. This is the same design, one level up.”
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Margaret, quiet until now, closed her laptop partway. “I can draft the readiness criteria by Friday,” she said. “I already have most of it from the exit interview patterns. We know what judgment, efficiency, and ownership look like at five years. We’ll need a version of what origination readiness looks like before then, so a nomination means something specific rather than just a partner’s word.”
Jason looked at the whiteboard, at Renee’s two extra words already written beneath his original four minutes of explanation, and realized the fast version had never actually been fast. It had just been familiar, and he had mistaken the two for each other, the way he’d mistaken instinct for merit for most of thirty years.
“Two candidates minimum,” he said. “Written criteria. Quarterly review of the whole slate.”
“That’s the fight,” Renee said. “Everything after this is just details.”
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Alone afterward, Renee kept the folder open in front of her a while. She thought, as she sometimes still did, about the partner who had made her, twenty-two years ago, prove herself twice over on every matter before anyone would trust her judgment on a third. She had never exactly resented him. She had simply promised herself, quietly, that if she ever sat at a table where the rule was written down, she would make sure it applied to everyone the same way it had applied to her.
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