MarkFord.net

The Perfect Partnership Formula

October 29, 2018 No Comments

Saturday, October 27, 2018

Delray Beach, FL– Talk about teamwork… In 1995, a young man named Howard Marks got together with another young man, Bruce Karsh, and the two of them built a $100 billion asset management firm from scratch.

Tim Ferriss asked Marks: “So what was the secret to your partnership?”

Marks had an interesting answer, one that made a lot of sense to me. He said that the best partnerships are those in which “the partners have the same values but complementary skills.”

In their case, they had the same idea of the sort of business culture they wanted to create and they had the same ideas about how to treat clients. But they differed in skill sets. Karsh was a slow thinker, Marks said. And he was a fast thinker.

The combination of intuitive and analytical thinking, Marks said, made their decision making stronger.

But, he added, it “couldn’t have been done without trust and humility.” You need to trust that your partner has the firm’s best interests at heart and you have to trust his judgment. “You also have to understand the limits of your own capabilities. You have to accept the fact that you may be wrong about almost anything.”

I’ve often said that you can’t entirely trust what successful CEOs say about what did. You’ve got to wonder whether they’re telling you the truth or a burnished version of it.

Still, the Marks/Karsh formula rings true for me. I’ve had many successful partnerships in my business career and a few that went bad. Those that failed did so precisely because somewhere along the line we realized we had different values: different ideas about product quality, treating employees, and making deals.

And the successful ones were all unequal partnerships – unequal in terms of our talents and knowledge and skills, so that the sum of our two heads were better than two.

If you are in a partnership now or thinking about getting into one, it might serve you to think about whether you do, indeed, have similar values and different talents and skills.

Notes From My Journal

An Interesting Angle on Teamwork

October 1, 2018 No Comments

Monday, October 1, 2018

Delray Beach, FL– You don’t have to be friends with your teammates. You just need something that Michael Bar-Eli calls task cohesion.

According to Bar-Eli, when a team has a high level of task cohesion, each member will do whatever it takes to reach that goal as a group, even if it means sacrificing their own self-interest. In Boost!: How the Psychology of Sports Can Enhance Your Performance in Management and Work, he gives the example of the Bayern München soccer team in the mid-1970s. Members of the team were far from friends. And yet, on the field, they were all perfectly united in what they wanted to accomplish. As a result, they won three consecutive European Championships between 1974 and 1976.

Miscellaneous Essays

Are You a Leader or a Team Player?

May 1, 2013 No Comments

As TH began explaining the rules, I felt the clutch of anxiety. His brainstorming technique, said to have originated in the offices of Walt Disney, required a level playing field. There would be no criticism of anyone else’s suggestions. No challenges, questions, or refutations. Everyone’s contribution was to be given equal weight – and, in the end, we’d all vote equally on those we wished to keep.

I’m not wired for that sort of thing. When it comes to group activities, I like an active, competitive game. I like to test my skills against whatever is out there and see how I do – find out where I stack up.

To me, cooperating with a crowd feels like surrendering. If everyone agrees that door one is the right choice, I’m almost certain to knock on numero dos. But I had agreed to come to TH’s creative seminar, and I didn’t want to make an already challenging job more difficult for him. So I batted down my ego and played by the rules.

His game felt childish. It involved group stretching, scribbling phrases on index cards, shouting out suggestions, and pressing paper dots on a montage of sometimes childish ideas. The purpose was to “break out of the box” that our left-sided, overly analytical professional brains had been stuck in. We were trying to get ourselves to a state of mind where “breakthroughs” could evolve.

I didn’t like it, but it did work. In less than three hours, we had accomplished more than we would have in any other brainstorming session of the same length. We had, moreover, come up with some stuff I would have never come to on my own.