Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. The late Steve Jobs and his wife Laurene. In this Rational Perspective Alec Hogg explains why successful partnerships are the secret sauce of business – and life. – Alec Hogg
By Alec Hogg
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One of my favourite authors, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, reckons the best way to judge a book is by the number of times one returns to it – not by how many copies are sold. He’s spot on.
I received some practical experience on this ahead of our relocation back to Johannesburg in May, after three years in London. Paying the removals company in pounds brings added attention to the details of what is going into the container.
For me, one of the biggest challenges was my rather excessive library. Half had been left in storage in SA, but even so, the bookcases acquired in the UK were overflowing.
Given my deep appreciation for the written word, deciding which books to bring home became an agonising task. So taking a steer from Mr Taleb, it eventually boiled down to which of the books I’d want to read again or, at worst, refer to in future.
Only after it was all over did it dawn something rather obvious had just happened.
My carefully worked “keep” pile was full of biographies. Almost everything else fell into the “donate” group. Although it was a surprise, it shouldn’t have been.
We learn most of what we know from others.
My own journey was typical: early on, development came from mirroring what I observed from role models. Then came learning by watching from afar those people who were universally admired.
With time the process has switched to studying those who have what I want for my life. An approach which quickly steers one towards biographies. And the consequent accumulation of a library that cost an independent fortune to transport – especially when moving between continents.
The more one absorbs biographies, the more often we pick up themes.
One that continually repeats itself among the successful of our species is partnerships. Very rarely does someone achieve much without having another person very close at their side – usually a partner happy to stay in the background.
Often the existence of these partners only registers once we get exposed through being immersed in the details of a biography. But do so and that silent partner is always there. It happens just as often among people we know personally. Try it out.
Steve and Laurene Jobs
The best biography I’ve read – probably because it had a major impact on my professional life – was Walter Isaacson’s marvellous work on Apple founder Steve Jobs. It also provides powerful support for this “partner” thesis.
Isaacson’s masterpiece makes it pretty obvious the youthful Jobs only broke through the crowd after getting close to his namesake Steve Wozniak. Where Jobs brought the marketing and business drive, it was Woz who possesses the technical genius to create the first mass produced personal computer.
Without Woz there would have been no Apple. And without Apple, the world would never have heard about Steve Jobs (or the iPhone, iTunes, iPod, iPad, iMac or Apple TV)
But by the same token, the geeky, relatively well-adjusted Woz was never going to be anything other than a very junior partner.
Lacking the counsel of an equal, the undisciplined Jobs followed the shooting-star trajectory of so many other precocious talents. That made him so unplayable that before the age of 30, he was ejected – justifiably – from the very company he had created.
It is only through careful attention to the pages of Isaacson’s biography that we come to realise Steve Jobs’s life only began changing for the better from 1991. And reason for the positive adjustment was his meeting and marrying a then 27 year old MBA graduate from Stanford University, Laurene Powell.
Laurene’s influence on Jobs turned him from an obnoxious boor who lived in an alternative reality, into the kind of person who could inspire, nurture and develop some of the smartest people on the planet. Their 20-year marriage (until he died in 2011) which produced three children, turned out to be the secret sauce that produced the phenomenon that is today’s Apple Inc.
Buffett and Munger
Given the exposure their partnership has received in recent years, you don’t need to read to reference the many good biographies of Warren Buffett to appreciate the role Charlie Munger has played in his success. But when you do read the best of them, Alice Schroeder’s Snowball, the seismic impact is obvious.
They met 60 years ago in the mid-American city of Omaha where they both born. Munger, then 35, was on a visit back home having moved to California ten years before. Buffett, who was 28, lived then as now in Omaha.
They hit it off from that arranged dinner date and have been closest of friends ever since.
Their business partnership created a company, Berkshire Hathaway, worth almost half a billion dollars – around one third more than South Africa’s GDP. Even today, at 89 and 96 respectively, they share the stage at the Berkshire annual general meetings, swap stories like an old married couple, and still call each other regularly.
Firstrand’s three musketeers
Among the most famous of South African business partnerships is the Laurie Dippenaar/GT Ferreira/Paul Harris combination which built from scratch the R400bn FirstRand financial services.
At FirstRand, each of them took a turn at being the chief executive. Now, even though all have now retired from the gigantic group they created, they remain close friends, holidaying together and having pooled most of their assets into their listed investment company RMBH.
What do we draw from this? A clear message: if you want to succeed, find yourself a partner. Someone you can trust; someone your equal; someone you respect; someone who compliments you with strengths where you have weaknesses.
And finding the right partner flows from a simple principle.
At one of the Berkshire Hathaway AGMs where Buffett and Munger are pinged with questions, a shareholder asked the older one how he could find himself a good wife.
“Deserve her,” said Munger. Quite
