On Values in Business Partnerships

Business is impossible without partnerships: between founders, shareholders, colleagues, clients, suppliers, competitors, and so on. Since I’ve been in business for a long time, I’ve watched partnerships of varying success take shape and fall apart right in front of me. At some point I noticed I’d built my own checklist — a way of sizing up a potential partnership by how the other side’s values and view of the world show on the surface. I’m sharing it as a personal, subjective take. Everyone draws their own line for what’s acceptable and where their “red lines” run.

— The model of the relationship. I see two models: 1. We earn with each other. 2. We earn off each other. The first is about partnership, where people work to grow each other’s business. The second is about ego and consumption — usually with an appetite that keeps growing.

— Black-and-white thinking and abuse. The “my way or no way” stance. I’ve seen people who happened to hold a certain resource at a given moment hand out ultimatums to those who needed it. Say, we split the profit fifty-fifty. When asked, “For what, if I’m putting in more than 90% of the work?” they’d answer, “Either you agree, or you get nothing at all.” And someone would agree — out of having no alternative, or out of desperation. I can only imagine that once the resource was gone, those businessmen who’d caved were ready to tear such “partners” to shreds. And you can understand them.

— Negotiation strategy. When you need to settle something complicated and there’s a conflict of interest, I see two basic ways to behave. 1. Come and talk it through openly, and if no solution is found — then look for other options. 2. First engineer a situation where the other person becomes dependent on you, applying “leverage,” pressure, or a resource, and only then sit down to negotiate. So what’s wrong with the second one? After all, the books on power and negotiation are full of it. Yes, it works — just not when we’re planning to build a long-term relationship. Personally, when someone uses that method on me, I ask myself: “Why couldn’t they have just come and asked?” And I shape how I deal with such people accordingly. As they say, “all right — no hard feelings from here on.”

— How they treat the client. I often see employees speak unkindly about their counterparts at a client’s or customer’s organization — placing themselves above them, calling them incompetent, pinning every slip-up on them. They build the relationship around a constant tug-of-war over who’s right and who’s to blame, and over shifting responsibility. At times this becomes part of the informal corporate culture, which is deeply harmful to business and reputation, because other clients and customers eventually hear about that attitude too. How promising is a partnership with a company like that, especially if we’re the potential client? However tangled the relationships between people in two organizations may be, there’s shared work that has to get done together — while keeping and growing mutual respect.

— Deliberate harm. In competition, and sometimes out of personal gain or revenge, people may try to damage others. It’s one thing to stay inside the idea of “we’re not against anyone, we’re for ourselves,” and quite another to knowingly do harm. Is it worth building a partnership with someone who behaves like that? And how will they act the moment something doesn’t suit them? By doing this to others, they set a rule that such moves are fair game against them, too. Who, and how many, will return the “favor” down the road — and what odds will the instigator have left?

— Creating or destroying. Some people, when they take something on, build ecosystems where others get a chance to earn as well. Around them everything seems to bloom, breathe, and grow. Others walk into an established environment, drain the resources out of it, and in the end everything that used to bring income falls apart. Both approaches can be profitable. Sure, the wolf keeps the forest healthy. But do I want to take part in destruction — even just energetically, by standing nearby? I don’t mean transformations where, say, a new digital approach “kills” an old industry and reinvents it. That’s living competition. I mean the case where resources are drained and nothing new is created.

— Shared stakes and flexibility. In business, anything can happen: outside circumstances, force majeure, the human factor, illness. Sometimes not everything goes to plan, and one side has to ask the other for some give. If it isn’t a regularly repeating story, one person will find a solution — provided the concession doesn’t threaten their own business — while another will stand his ground, immovable. I’ve always tried to be flexible when the circumstances are genuine, but without the slightest hint that this can be done all the time.

— Systematically missing the goals. Sometimes one result is planned and a far worse one arrives. You hear the excuses: something went wrong, someone’s to blame. That’s normal — until it becomes a system. Why be a partner in stories where breakdowns, troubles, and misfortunes keep happening?

— How they talk about former partners. When I hear stories of repeated, painful splits with past partners — quarrels, conflicts, an aggressive carve-up of assets — it puts me on alert. Especially if, by their telling, the others are the only ones to blame, the ones who betrayed and acted unfairly. How did this person choose such partners? How did they choose him? What if someone has a kind of unconscious partnership program wired in? Do I want to be part of that program?

Here’s to successful, long-term partnerships! 😎