This article by Patrick McKenna summarizes the "anecdotal research" undertaken by his consulting firm about the profile of managing partners.

Normally, we subscribe to Jack Welch's famous, strict, and certifiablly correct dictum that "anecdotes aren't data," but we're cutting Mr. McKenna a break this time because he at least dimensionalizes how anecdotal his (non-)data is:  The survey went to more than 100 managing partners randomly chosen from firms of from 150 to 600 lawyers in size, and had a response rate of 43%, supplemented by one-on-one interviews with some of those who responded.  This doesn't meet the test of statistically reliable quantitative research, but it's a heap better than your typical focus group, erego worth reporting.

Some of the key findings:

• only 24% are "full-time" as managing partner
• a surprising 15% say they're "50/50" between managing and serving clients, and this is not correlated with size of firm or size of market (in other words, it's equally likely to be a big firm in a big city as otherwise)
• 93% are white males (surprise!  but/and is this the 21st Century yet??)
• only 26% have a "job description"
• a vanishingly small 6% said they were subject to a formal annual review process (are these people really less strategically important to the firm than a typical associate?)
• a coincidentally vanishingly small 6% of firms have or are exploring establishing a formal succession plan (I served as an associate at the late, and in its time great, Shea & Gould, which imploded on the rocks of "no-succession-planning")

So here we have it:  Organizations with annual revenues from $50—$250-million with part-time CEO's lacking a job description, formal training, serious-minded evaluations, and realistic succession plans.  The devastating question this invites is:  What would you advise a client with this managerial structure to do?