What Fits in the Removal Van
Boris Groysberg spent nine years studying what happens when star performers change firms. His subjects were equity analysts rather than lawyers, and partners are entitled to their customary objection that they are nothing like anybody else. But the finding is hard to wave away: performance declined after a move, sharply, and for a long time.
The useful part of his work is not the headline. It is the inventory. Groysberg separated what a star can take with them from what they cannot, and the second list is longer than anyone expects.
Goes in the van: education and training. Personal qualities. Technical competence. General knowledge. Leadership and business skills. Experience. Personal relationships with clients and outside contacts.
Stays behind: the firm’s reputation. The firm’s networks and connections. Routines and procedures. Internal relationships with colleagues. Internal support networks. Firm-specific knowledge. And all the capabilities at the old firm that quietly made the star’s work possible.
Look at the second list again. Almost everything on it is invisible. None of it appears on a CV, none of it is captured in a lateral partner questionnaire, and much of it is not consciously known even to the person leaving. Groysberg’s sharpest observation is that stars have a persistent tendency to undervalue how much their success depended on their firm’s resources, and, tellingly, on their own skill at using them.
The nuance worth holding on to is that portability is conditional rather than fixed. Those who moved to better-resourced firms saw little or no decline. Those who moved to weaker ones fell hardest and stayed down longest. Those who moved with their team did better than those who moved alone.
So the honest question is not “is this partner portable?” It is Groysberg’s: which stars are portable, under which circumstances, and why.
But there is a second question hiding behind that one, and it is the more useful of the two.
Look at the second list again. The firm’s networks. Internal relationships. Routines and procedures. Firm-specific knowledge. Internal support networks. None of that travels, which is why the performance dip happens. But none of it is unbuildable either. Every item on that list can be constructed again at the new firm. The only question is whether anybody sets out to do it deliberately, or whether it is left to accumulate on its own.
That is the whole of integration, stated as an inventory. It is not induction, and it is not a welcome programme. It is the deliberate reconstruction of everything the partner had to leave behind.
Firms tend to read the not-portable list as a warning about who to hire. It is at least as useful read as a work plan for the first year: here, itemised, is precisely what you have to rebuild.
Source: Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars (Princeton University Press, 2010).
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