• Star: Hires came from elite universities, were very well remunerated and given “huge amounts of autonomy.” VC’s tended to be very enamored of “star” culture firms, believing that funding the A-team held the highest promise.
• Engineer: “This is your stereotypical Silicon Valley startup, with a bunch of anonymous programmers drinking Mountain Dew at their desks; they’re young and hungry and might be stars some day but right now they’re focused on solving technical problems.”
• Bureacratic: Thick with middle managers, extensive job descriptions, org charts, and handbooks.
• Autocratic: Close cousin to bureaucratic, but driven by a single person, usually the founder and/or CEO, one of whom reportedly described it thus: “You work. You do what I say. You get paid.”
• And finally, the Commitment model. Firms where people could, even if most actually did not, work their entire lives. You might think this stodgy-sounding model would be antithetical to the Silicon Valley ethos, but Baron and Hannan found many examples. “Commitment CEOs believe that getting the culture right is more important at first than designing the best product.”

If we overlay Baron & Hannan’s pentagonal model onto Law Land, I suspect we’d find something very much like this:

• The engineer model is effectively the null set.
• The bureaucratic model contains almost zero inhabitants and those in this sector tend to have very short life expectancies or to emigrate away.
• The autocratic model characterizes some young boutiques led by one or at most a very small handful of charismatic founders; their prospects of surviving the wildness of their youth and adolescence is open to question. The half-life of firms in this sector, in other words, is relatively brief. They emigrate away or dissolve when they encounter succession planning.
• The star model is what many firms either are or desperately aspire to be.
• And the commitment model finds firms in quite rarefied company; it’s antithetical to lawyers’ powerful autonomy-seeking instincts, and requires profound and unwavering commitment to a “firm first” faith and mentality.

Baron and Hannan followed their start-ups for a decade. So what happened?

In short, about half ceased to exist, but a few of the other half became enormously successful: Perhaps no earth-shattering surprise here. What they weren’t expecting was how powerfully the management style correlated with success—even after correcting for all sorts of other presumably germane variables such as company age, size, access to VC funding, senior executive turnover, and the macro-economy.

As you’d expect, the star model produced some of the biggest winners: Putting all the smartest people in the room could indeed produce outsize results. But stars also failed in record numbers, and were #5 out of all five styles in making it to an IPO. (The professors’ hypothesis, which seems valid, is that star firms can succumb to infighting because everyone wants to be the star.)

Another of the five models, amazingly, outperformed every other management style in almost every way that mattered. Firms following this style, among other things:

• were fastest to get to their IPO;
• had the highest profitability ratios;
• by and large were leaner, with fewer layers of management and fewer managers at each layer—committed, long-term staff generally excel at being self-starters and self-directed, and they’ve internalized what the firm’s about and where it should be going;
• wasted less time on internal rivalries and internecine competition, because the firm’s interest trumped personal agendas;
• and were more committed to and more closely in touch with their customers, which served both to provide superior service and to act as highly attuned antennae sensitive to impending shifts in the market.

OK, OK, I won’t prolong the suspense: These were the commitment firms.