Overview

Relationships are the lifeblood of today’s enterprises.

They determine how quickly decisions get made, whether change takes place, who gets what information, which issues get addressed or covered up, whether opportunities get identified, who has the power to get things done—all of it shaping the fate of leaders and their teams.

The power of relationships

Take the relationship between Steve Jobs and John Sculley at Apple in the 1980s. In 18 months, they went from the perfect match to mortal enemies, sending Jobs into exile and the firm into economic decline for 12 years.

Or look at what happened to Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon or Larry Summers at Harvard. In 2006, both leaders had so alienated people critical to their success they were forced to resign.

And what about Carly Fiorina’s demise, or Michael Ovitz and Michael Eisner’s $140 million dollar breakup at Disney—or the implosion of Bear Stearns, a firm so at war with itself, it became its own casualty?

Why the soft stuff is the hard stuff—but need not be

In each case, key relationships broke down, destroying enormous amounts of human, social, intellectual, and economic capital.

Why? Because each of these leaders believed relationships were feel-good stuff—nice to have, but not essential to performance. And like most of us, each of these leaders assumed that individual people were the problem, not relationships.

So despite their smarts, not one of these leaders could say anything even remotely intelligent about how relationships work, develop, or change. They just assumed that relationships were too soft to analyze, too difficult to change.

Not so.

A powerful new approach

Like any other vital aspect of business, relationships can be analyzed and changed. We’ve simply lacked the proper tools.

Why? Because we’ve spent so much time thinking and talking about individual people and their personalities that we’ve overlooked that people are a product of their relationships. Recent research, including my own, suggests that relationships have the power to develop or amplify some personality traits while stunting or  modifying others, leading us to bring out either the best or the worst in each other without even realizing it.

The approach outlined in Divide or Conquer remedies this problem by putting relationships front and center—and giving you a set of tools you can use to:

• Assess how relationships affect the performance of individuals and teams;
• Navigate even the trickiest relationships with far greater intelligence;
• Systematically analyze how relationships work and develop;
• Build relationships strong enough to handle even the most intense pressures;
• Improve or even transform those relationships at risk of breaking down.