Working Together by Michael Eisner (Winter 2011)
I read this book about successful partnerships back in 2011. If I recall correctly, I thought the book was fine. I enjoyed learning more about some of the specific partnerships but I do not recall being disappointed when I reached the last page.
Still, I ended up including this on my 'life changing books' list for a thought in the chapter about Ron Howard and Brian Grazer's partnership at Imagine Entertainment. If I recall correctly (and this is total recall since I did not take any notes down for Working Together) the two decided that the best way to divide credit (read: money) was to go fifty-fifty. Fifty-fifty or it won't work, I believe the exact quote was.
Fifty-fifty or it won't work...imagine that, reader...how in the world would this ever work? Surely, these two gentlemen then drove the company straight into bankruptcy, perhaps bickering about credit all the while? I suppose at least in the end they could have split $0 fifty-fifty...
The thinking behind the even split was that sometimes Howard would be more responsible for a project's success and sometimes Grazer would be; having to decide just who got exactly what slice of the credit would be exhausting and likely lead to some unwanted disagreements. And what would happen in those cases when the exact split was impossible to determine? I guess both people would be right - and when everyone's right, the group is wrong.
There are a lot of credit-sharing situations I see that would benefit from the parties agreeing to an even split. It might not always work, of course, but if the contributions of everyone involved are close to equal then I recommend the even split. I think we've all had the experience of trying to divide things down to the smallest hair - if the even split applied, everyone could save some time from doing all the admin of calculating the little details involved in such an exercise.
This book was the first time I remember thinking about the idea after reading a book. So though the overall experience of Working Together was not so memorable, I'm glad to have gleaned this specific insight from it.
