‘Working Together’; why great partnerships succeed’ by Michael Eisner and Aaron Cohen, published by Harper Collins

This is another book mentioned in the Schumpeter column and I chose it for review because I had previously read about Eisner and his roller coaster career as CEO of Disney. The book is easy to read and the quality of the writing leads one to believe that maybe Eisner provides the name while Cohen does the work.

Yet despite the quality of the writing and the interesting stories of ten successful business partnerships, this comes over as a rather lazy book; one factor is that there is no index but more important is the lack of any ongoing theme or theory. Similar books have concluding chapters that provide insights but this is missing here, apart from a short and inconclusive epilogue which leaves you wanting more.

The book starts off with a description of Eisner’s own successful partnership with Frank Wells at Disney, ended by Wells’ tragic death in a helicopter crash. Eisner no doubt feels this loss even more strongly because it was the beginning of the end for him at Disney. He failed to create such a relationship with anyone else and famously fell out with Jeffrey Katzenberg, the genius behind Disney’s success who moved on to even greater fame and fortune with Dreamworks. This story does not mention what I remember from another book about Disney; how Eisner’s close relationship with Wells was one of the factors that drove a wedge between him and Katzenberg.

This first story rather sets the scene and makes you wonder if the other nine have also left out some of the negative aspects; it is an interesting collection over a range of different sectors but all are American based and there are relatively few household names. As I went through I tried to pick up some common factors and ongoing themes; it was interesting to me that more than half - including Eisner, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates - had one partner who was prepared to stand back and let the other partner take the limelight.

It is also true that every partnership achieved success, which is obviously likely to be the case from the title of the book. But just as - to quote an Australian cricket captain - ‘team spirit is something you say you have when you’re winning’, maybe great partnerships are maintained and perpetuated by the mutual joy of success. There are few examples in the book of coping with failure along the way so one wonders how these partnerships would have withstood the battering of adverse circumstances.

Two other factors that were mentioned but not sufficiently pursued were the importance of partners delivering different but compatible qualities to the table and the need for them to have similar moral values and ethical codes. Also obvious from the stories was the importance of personal chemistry which is probably the factor that overrides everything else. It certainly seemed to me that it was the single ongoing and consistent theme. But it would have been good if the writers had provided more help for readers to arrive at this conclusion.

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