Why Great Partnerships Succeed
Some of the most successful and accomplished people are really teams: Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, Bill and Melinda Gates, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard (who've won multiple Academy Awards), Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank (who started Home Depot), Joe Torre and Don Zimmer… the list could go on forever.
Why is it that sometimes you can take two people, add them together and get a more successful result than either would have achieved working alone?
You can't do this stuff on your own. "Even Einstein," says Charlie Munger, "wouldn't have been successful if there weren't other people he didn't talk to all the time. Total isolation does not work. You need interaction, putting your own thoughts into expression; you learn things just from doing it."
One of the reasons that partnerships fail is that the spotlight accommodates one person a lot better than two. "But," Eisner writes, "it takes real trust and understanding for both partners to be satisfied with that arrangement."
Everyone was telling Michael Eisner that partnering with Michael Ovitz, the head of Creative Artists Agency "and the media-anointed most powerful man in the entertainment business" was a great idea. Buffett advised Eisner to pass on the partnership.
The key to good partnerships, says Warren Buffett, is trust.
And this bit was key for me. You can play the alpha-role is some parts of your life but you need to know your role in the partnership. Consider the Buffet-Munger partnership:
Partnerships also encourage humility. "It's not letting ego or jealousy or your own personality take over," Munger says. "Intelligence takes over."
"Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed" argues that the values of effective partnerships run counter to the factors "that contributed to the sequence of economic messes of the past ten years." Now, then, is the perfect time to encourage partnerships "devoid of envy, jealousy, and rivalry as a way to escape from the toxic culture that has given the business world a bad name, and to instead help people chart a new, often overlooked path toward a better way of working."