The Borrowed Card: Partners Who Cover Your Weaknesses

Business is like the game of Poker

Every card discussed in this chapter so far was dealt — by family, by geography, by the year on the calendar. But there is one good card at the Big Table that is not dealt at all. You choose it. It is the partner whose strengths cover your weaknesses, whose judgment corrects your blind spots, whose presence in the hand changes what your own cards are worth. I have come to think of it as the borrowed card, and pound for pound it may be the most valuable card in this book, because unlike the others, it is available to almost anyone willing to go looking for it.

Start with the most famous partnership in investing. Warren Buffett built his early career buying mediocre businesses at bargain prices — cigar butts, he called them, good for one last puff. It was Charlie Munger, his partner, who pushed him to change the play: to pay fair prices for excellent businesses instead, whose advantages would compound for decades. The purchase of See’s Candies in 1972 was the turning point, and Berkshire Hathaway as the world knows it is largely the product of that correction. Buffett’s cards were his own. Munger changed how he played every one of them. The right partner does not merely add his strength to yours. He edits your weaknesses out of the game.

The pattern repeats so often in the record that it stops looking like coincidence. Hewlett had Packard — the engineer and the man who could run the business. Phil Knight, selling shoes out of a car trunk, had Bill Bowerman, the track coach whose experiments with soles gave the product its soul. Gates had Allen, there at the terminal at Lakeside and at the founding of Microsoft. Jobs, the supreme recognizer of other people’s inventions, had Steve Wozniak, the engineer who actually built the first Apple computers. In each case, look closely and you find two incomplete players whose cards interlocked — one holding what the other lacked, each making the other’s hand playable at a level neither could reach alone.

Poker, played honestly, is a solitary game: one player, one hand, no consultation allowed. Business is under no such rule, and it is strange how many owners play it as though it were — guarding sole control as though sharing the table were a weakness. In my own working life, in a law practice and in development deals, I learned the arithmetic from both sides. The matters I handled alone were limited by exactly one man’s knowledge, temperament, and hours. The ventures that went furthest were the ones where a partner held a card I did not: the local knowledge I lacked, the construction skill I never acquired, the patience in a negotiation I would have settled too early. My cards did not change. The hand did.

Borrowing a card is not free, and honesty about the price belongs in the lesson. A partner takes a share of the pot and a vote in how the hand is played, and a bad partnership is worse than a weak hand played alone — I have unwound enough of them, in my practice, for clients who chose a partner the way they would choose a friend. The borrowed card pays only when it is genuinely a card you lack. A partner who holds the same strengths you do adds nothing but another mouth at the split; a partner chosen for comfort will agree with you at precisely the moments you most need to be argued with. Borrow for the gap, not for the company.

There is a discipline to it. Name your weakest card honestly — not the weakness you admit at dinner parties, but the one your results keep confessing: the follow-through, the numbers, the selling, the patience. Then look for the person who holds that card strong and plays it naturally, and whose values survive money. Most people do this backwards: they inventory partners by availability and affection, and never inventory themselves at all.

Here is the takeaway. Write down the single skill or temperament your business most needs and you most plainly lack. That sentence is the description of your borrowed card. Then ask who, among the people you actually know, holds it — and whether a hand you are currently playing alone would be worth more played together, even at half the pot. Some of the best hands in business history were not held by one player at all. They were held by two. The deck will not deal you a partner. That card, alone among the good ones, you have to go and get.

Business is like the game of Poker

Every card discussed in this chapter so far was dealt — by family, by geography, by the year on the calendar. But there is one good card at the Big Table that is not dealt at all. You choose it. It is the partner whose strengths cover your weaknesses, whose judgment corrects your blind spots, whose presence in the hand changes what your own cards are worth. I have come to think of it as the borrowed card, and pound for pound it may be the most valuable card in this book, because unlike the others, it is available to almost anyone willing to go looking for it.

Start with the most famous partnership in investing. Warren Buffett built his early career buying mediocre businesses at bargain prices — cigar butts, he called them, good for one last puff. It was Charlie Munger, his partner, who pushed him to change the play: to pay fair prices for excellent businesses instead, whose advantages would compound for decades. The purchase of See’s Candies in 1972 was the turning point, and Berkshire Hathaway as the world knows it is largely the product of that correction. Buffett’s cards were his own. Munger changed how he played every one of them. The right partner does not merely add his strength to yours. He edits your weaknesses out of the game.

The pattern repeats so often in the record that it stops looking like coincidence. Hewlett had Packard — the engineer and the man who could run the business. Phil Knight, selling shoes out of a car trunk, had Bill Bowerman, the track coach whose experiments with soles gave the product its soul. Gates had Allen, there at the terminal at Lakeside and at the founding of Microsoft. Jobs, the supreme recognizer of other people’s inventions, had Steve Wozniak, the engineer who actually built the first Apple computers. In each case, look closely and you find two incomplete players whose cards interlocked — one holding what the other lacked, each making the other’s hand playable at a level neither could reach alone.

Poker, played honestly, is a solitary game: one player, one hand, no consultation allowed. Business is under no such rule, and it is strange how many owners play it as though it were — guarding sole control as though sharing the table were a weakness. In my own working life, in a law practice and in development deals, I learned the arithmetic from both sides. The matters I handled alone were limited by exactly one man’s knowledge, temperament, and hours. The ventures that went furthest were the ones where a partner held a card I did not: the local knowledge I lacked, the construction skill I never acquired, the patience in a negotiation I would have settled too early. My cards did not change. The hand did.

Borrowing a card is not free, and honesty about the price belongs in the lesson. A partner takes a share of the pot and a vote in how the hand is played, and a bad partnership is worse than a weak hand played alone — I have unwound enough of them, in my practice, for clients who chose a partner the way they would choose a friend. The borrowed card pays only when it is genuinely a card you lack. A partner who holds the same strengths you do adds nothing but another mouth at the split; a partner chosen for comfort will agree with you at precisely the moments you most need to be argued with. Borrow for the gap, not for the company.

There is a discipline to it. Name your weakest card honestly — not the weakness you admit at dinner parties, but the one your results keep confessing: the follow-through, the numbers, the selling, the patience. Then look for the person who holds that card strong and plays it naturally, and whose values survive money. Most people do this backwards: they inventory partners by availability and affection, and never inventory themselves at all.

Here is the takeaway. Write down the single skill or temperament your business most needs and you most plainly lack. That sentence is the description of your borrowed card. Then ask who, among the people you actually know, holds it — and whether a hand you are currently playing alone would be worth more played together, even at half the pot. Some of the best hands in business history were not held by one player at all. They were held by two. The deck will not deal you a partner. That card, alone among the good ones, you have to go and get.

Business is like the game of Poker

Every card discussed in this chapter so far was dealt — by family, by geography, by the year on the calendar. But there is one good card at the Big Table that is not dealt at all. You choose it. It is the partner whose strengths cover your weaknesses, whose judgment corrects your blind spots, whose presence in the hand changes what your own cards are worth. I have come to think of it as the borrowed card, and pound for pound it may be the most valuable card in this book, because unlike the others, it is available to almost anyone willing to go looking for it.

Start with the most famous partnership in investing. Warren Buffett built his early career buying mediocre businesses at bargain prices — cigar butts, he called them, good for one last puff. It was Charlie Munger, his partner, who pushed him to change the play: to pay fair prices for excellent businesses instead, whose advantages would compound for decades. The purchase of See’s Candies in 1972 was the turning point, and Berkshire Hathaway as the world knows it is largely the product of that correction. Buffett’s cards were his own. Munger changed how he played every one of them. The right partner does not merely add his strength to yours. He edits your weaknesses out of the game.

The pattern repeats so often in the record that it stops looking like coincidence. Hewlett had Packard — the engineer and the man who could run the business. Phil Knight, selling shoes out of a car trunk, had Bill Bowerman, the track coach whose experiments with soles gave the product its soul. Gates had Allen, there at the terminal at Lakeside and at the founding of Microsoft. Jobs, the supreme recognizer of other people’s inventions, had Steve Wozniak, the engineer who actually built the first Apple computers. In each case, look closely and you find two incomplete players whose cards interlocked — one holding what the other lacked, each making the other’s hand playable at a level neither could reach alone.

Poker, played honestly, is a solitary game: one player, one hand, no consultation allowed. Business is under no such rule, and it is strange how many owners play it as though it were — guarding sole control as though sharing the table were a weakness. In my own working life, in a law practice and in development deals, I learned the arithmetic from both sides. The matters I handled alone were limited by exactly one man’s knowledge, temperament, and hours. The ventures that went furthest were the ones where a partner held a card I did not: the local knowledge I lacked, the construction skill I never acquired, the patience in a negotiation I would have settled too early. My cards did not change. The hand did.

Borrowing a card is not free, and honesty about the price belongs in the lesson. A partner takes a share of the pot and a vote in how the hand is played, and a bad partnership is worse than a weak hand played alone — I have unwound enough of them, in my practice, for clients who chose a partner the way they would choose a friend. The borrowed card pays only when it is genuinely a card you lack. A partner who holds the same strengths you do adds nothing but another mouth at the split; a partner chosen for comfort will agree with you at precisely the moments you most need to be argued with. Borrow for the gap, not for the company.

There is a discipline to it. Name your weakest card honestly — not the weakness you admit at dinner parties, but the one your results keep confessing: the follow-through, the numbers, the selling, the patience. Then look for the person who holds that card strong and plays it naturally, and whose values survive money. Most people do this backwards: they inventory partners by availability and affection, and never inventory themselves at all.

Here is the takeaway. Write down the single skill or temperament your business most needs and you most plainly lack. That sentence is the description of your borrowed card. Then ask who, among the people you actually know, holds it — and whether a hand you are currently playing alone would be worth more played together, even at half the pot. Some of the best hands in business history were not held by one player at all. They were held by two. The deck will not deal you a partner. That card, alone among the good ones, you have to go and get.

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