Run with a healthy majority
While solid communications come from a guiding principle and
an effort to push the message in multiple formats, you also have
to respect the fact that there is a timetable on decision-making. It
may only take one person to hang a jury, but you cannot let one
naysayer to your plan destroy your business. Culvahouse would
love to get a vote of 100 percent confidence in everything that he
does, but he knows that getting everyone on the same page means
running with a healthy majority instead of constantly circling
back and changing plans.
“Once you reach a confidence level that is 66 2/3 percent or
greater, and this is in respect to a particular course of action or particular strategy, then all other time is best spent on executing rather
than trying to reach a higher confidence level,” he says.
So while O’Melveny is constantly pushing the firm’s value messages and trying to keep everyone in touch, Culvahouse is looking
for that magic two-thirds majority of his senior decision-makers
before he pushes a decision. Working for a higher than normal
majority will help keep people on the same page with what you’re
doing because you’ll have high support, but not waiting for everything to come in at 100 percent will keep you nimble. O’Melveny is
a juggernaut in the legal world, but Culvahouse knows that its success leans heavily on the fact that the firm can quickly get everyone on the same page and get strong execution on an idea.
“It’s really appropriate for O’Melveny, because we as lawyers,
being conservative, not politically but in terms of running our own
business, being very good at imagining unimaginable horribles,
would want to really try to achieve a much higher confidence level
and that detracts from being nimble and decisive and opportunistic or strategically opportunistic,” he says. “So … while I think as
lawyers we should always be very careful, but we need to run it
like a business, and frankly, fierce execution has been one of our
strengths over the past eight years. There’s nothing in our strategic
plans that is so extraordinarily creative that anyone would be surprised by what’s there. A lot of what we try to do is pretty obvious
in many respects. It wouldn’t knock people out, but we’ve been
pretty darn good at execution.”
HOW TO REACH: O’Melveny & Myers LLP, (800) 635-2189 or www.omm.com
