The Barbarian Group’s Rick Webb ponders the tricky question of how agencies can create a lasting legacy and value system that defines them once their founders have left.

The confluence of a few things has gotten me to thinking a lot about how agencies can live on beyond their founders. One of the reasons for this is that sometime in the next few months, if all goes well, this dear company I help run will cross the 100 employee threshold. We just had our eighth birthday. Maybe I’m a wimp, but lately I’ve been feeling a lot like Ed Meyer. Okay, perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but as you push 40, and your life evolves, you start to wonder if what you’ve built can continue beyond your years.

This goes hand-in-hand with the scaling back of control that any control freak has to contend with as their firm grows. You simply can’t do everything anymore. I read a pretty great article in the New York Times a week or so ago, interviewing Cristóbal Conde, the CEO of SunGuard, wrestling with this very thing: how a micromanager allows his company to grow beyond what he can micromanage day-to-day.

I’m an Apple geek and a stockholder, so last year’s events with Steve Jobs really brought this to the forefront for me as well. I’ve been using Apple products all my life. And the period from ’85 to ’93 where Steve wasn’t with Apple was pretty bleak. But then I came across this article in Gizmodo last fall, and everything started to click.

What really gave me an epiphany was learning about the concept of the routinization of charisma, a term first coined by eminent German social theorist Max Weber. Quoth Leander Kahney in the Gizmodo article: ”Weber was interested in what happened to religious movements after the passing of their charismatic founders. Most religions begin with prophetic leaders, such as Jesus Christ, Mohammad or Buddha, who attract followers with their magnetic personalities and, often, their anti-traditional messages. But after those leaders pass, their charisma and message must be ‘routinized’ if the movement is to survive. Their teachings and methods must be institutionalized, becoming the basis of new traditions.”

In business, the routinization of charisma is the process of turning a charismatic business leader’s personality traits into a business method. One widely cited study by management experts J. Beyer and L. Browning focused on Sematech, a semiconductor consortium based in Austin, Texas.”

So! As the process guy at an ad shop, I was all over this. Process! Charters! Mission! By turning quirks into business methods, one can instill the company with the characteristics that made it interesting.

And, the more I look at the world of agency mergers, acquisitions and the like, the more I start looking at it through the prism of the prioritization of charisma. It raises some interesting questions. In my mind, the act of routinizing things involves not only documenting the processes, but occasionally stepping back a bit to see if things run just as well without you. Anyone rising through the ranks of management is familiar with this - if you can’t rely on your team and you have to do everything else yourself, then why do you have the team at all? So, interestingly, an agency that is likely to succeed beyond its founder is an agency where the founders have already stepped back a bit, at least in some aspects, and let others run the show.

This doesn’t sit well with the part of me that remembers my years as a grunt in the trenches. Absentee bosses were the subject of derision, of course. And furthermore, when we look at agencies that are purchased, merged, or evolved beyond their founders, we often subconsciously associate the likely contenders for future success with those that have some splashy leader still running the show. It’s an interesting paradox to think that perhaps the faceless agencies are the ones that may continue into the future with more success.

When I do a mental rundown in my head of the It agencies out there, I find it interesting how many of them are almost completely associated with one or two individuals, even as I know there are other great people at those agencies. I think, often, agency leaders are loathe to highlight the amazing talent just below them on the organizational chart for fear of increasing the risk of them getting picked off. That’s probably fine. The question is more: are they there? Is the agency dominated by one or two people, or is there a solid bench behind them?

So, then, the shocker: an agency running successfully while the boss is off in the Caribbean may actually be the better acquisition bet than the agency where the founder is involved in every single decision.

The other thing I’ve been looking at lately is documentation. Over the last year or two, we have spent untold hours trying to document how we do things at the company. At first, it was this ridiculous futile exercise in documenting every process step and every decision moment. It was like going into the rabbit hole - deeper and deeper into arcana and control freakiness. Now, I’m thinking more about documenting our philosophies, our approach, and what we believe in. The general guidelines for tackling our problems. The general guidelines for stating what we believe in. I find that many of the challenges in maintaining quality work as you step back are rooted in people not knowing your guiding principles. How many other agencies do this, I wonder? How many agencies can stand up and say exactly what it is they believe in and what they are going for? This is something I think we could all be better at, and those that are successful at it are one more step down the path of successful everlasting agency life, I’ll wager.

One last thing I’ve learned: this shit takes YEARS. At first, I thought this could be done in a year or two, but now I’m thinking it takes more like five or six. I suspect the agencies that have, throughout the course of their lives, taken the time to really state their beliefs at every step along the way are a much better candidate for durability than those that start doing it when the founders are in their sixties. Every time I think about this stuff, part of me feels old and wants to rebel. But it’s important, I think.

Us digital shops still feel young, and the media reinforces that. But they also reinforce that we need to grow up, and I think this is a big part of it: routinizing your charisma.

Rick Webb is co-founder and COO of The Barbarian Group.

www.barbariangroup.com