Scenario two · The Challenge
Ashcombe Reeve LLP
Eighteen months as Managing Partner. Five disciplines. One plan that only holds if you do.
Ashcombe Reeve is an accountancy, tax and business advisory partnership. Three hundred and forty people, forty-two equity partners, and a client list that has watched the profession change around it since 1962.
The partnership voted through the Elevate Plan eight months ago: wind down the compliance work the market is commoditising, build the advisory practice that pays for the next sixty years, change how the profits get shared. They voted for it in a warm room, nodding. Then they elected you to carry it, and the warmth of the room does not survive first contact with a half-year that lands short.
What comes next arrives the way trouble actually arrives inside a partnership, one thing at a time and never at a convenient one: your best biller turning out to be a bully, a private equity offer with a faction of your own partners behind it, a data breach, a leak, and a requisitioned vote nobody wanted to call.
What is at stake
Every choice tests one of the five RESOLVE disciplines, and every discipline you let slip makes the next month harder. The forecast you smooth, the conflict you manage quietly, the exception you make for a Senior Partner: all of it comes back, and in a partnership it comes back to people who can vote. Reach month eighteen with the disciplines intact and you will have proved something worth proving to forty-two owners. Get there having quietly traded them away, and the score will tell you what it cost.
Ashcombe Reeve leans hardest on Anchored Conviction and Enterprise-First Accountability, the disciplines a vote of no confidence tests hardest.
You will pick a difficulty and, if you want, challenge a colleague to the identical run before you start. It plays in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.