Editor's Note: Paths to Extinction

It's a familiar Hollywood screenplay: The camera maneuvers between a puddle of oozing purple goo and a brash young hero, who appears awestruck by the galactic weapon he has just discharged. Eager to turn another invading alien into purple residue, he's about to set his sights once more, when a wise and gray-haired elder urges him to stop wasting his high-impact ammo on Class D aliens and instead reserve it for Class A fare.
And so it was with the government's obstruction of justice charge against Andersen.
No matter how warranted or unwarranted the government's charge may have been, we can't help but believe that somewhere there's a government prosecutor awestruck by his weapon's performance. And the government regulator is not alone: The rapid pace of Andersen's disintegration also surprised the ranks of corporate CEOs and MBA professors alike.
However, today's industry elders remind us that Andersen was not an Enron, Global Crossing, Sunbeam, or any other high-risk swashbuckling corporate entity. It was instead a partnership — and as such was more vulnerable to the idiosyncrasies of a bottom-up culture, where the organization is led not by one leader but many, and where all are routinely dependent on their frontline partners to make the right decisions without supervision.
The speed with which Andersen succumbed to the prosecutor's weapon-of-choice is now fodder in the ongoing debate over the relative strengths and weaknesses of partnership consulting organizations and publicly held ones.
This is a debate that has drawn greater scrutiny to the unique quirks of partnership culture, including its tendency to hamper workforce diversity.