How - Dov Seidman [91]
And finally, if you are always on this TRIP and you constantly progress, then “P” stands for perennial prosperity as well. You’ll notice I did not say that “P” stands for profits. The pursuit of progress seldom flows from the pursuit of profit, but rather from the pursuit of creating something of value to others.
DOING TRUST
The $64 billion question (it used to be $64 million) of our time is how do we get this TRIP going? Where does it start? What’s the Big Bang? We’ve already shown that it’s not through rules, because rules can’t inspire that type of certainty and risk taking. If not with rules, then with what?
The answer, of course, lies in the realm of HOW. We tend to trust people who get their HOWS right, people who are transparent, forthcoming, and open, and honest; who share credit and opportunity with us; and who communicate fully, build strong interpersonal synapses, and keep their promises. In short, people with integrity. They collaborate, they embrace, and they engage. If you want trust, you need to find people and companies that create circles of trust around themselves. Like the Olympic rings, the more interlocking circles within a stadium, the more Waves you can make there. We live in a time when trust is the currency of the age. Trust is more valuable than ever before, so you should produce a lot of it. Those who can engender and wield more trust will win.
Mike Fricklas knows that from experience. “In the late 1990s,” Mike told me, “I was negotiating the terms of a major joint venture for Viacom. It involved the acquisition of a business from a major entertainment company in exchange for a stake in the venture. I was leading the team, and the deal had a number of moving pieces. The people on the other side were under a lot of pressure to get a transaction done, but between the time we negotiated the general deal and the time we were to close it, the valuations had moved. At the last minute, their negotiator came to me and said, ‘We really need something more on this because the numbers have really moved dramatically. ’ We weren’t prepared to renegotiate the price at that point because it wouldn’t have worked for our shareholders.”
“We had all the leverage, but were also under a lot of pressure to close, so the dynamic was tense. Someone on the other side of the table asked for a major price concession that I did not feel they were entitled to. The dynamic could easily have been somebody pounding away on the table and taking a hard line. I mean, in this sort of situation, you often see little more than efforts to assert every piece of obvious leverage that they have and not a view toward the bigger picture. But this guy had been really straight with us, and when you deal with someone like that, I am more inclined to say, ‘You have been reasonable with me, so let’s figure out a way to deal with your situation.’ I came up with a creative way of adding a lever that would give him a certain degree of additional protection. It allowed him to report to his team the change he had achieved and made his people more comfortable. I didn’t have to go back to my boss and tell him that the price was going to change, and, as it turned out, the protection we gave up didn’t cost us anything in the end.
“A few years later,” Mike continued, “I was negotiating the M&A side of a complicated deal involving a different Viacom asset to an entirely different company. Another Viacom team was negotiating a related but separate part of the deal. Across the table from our folks was that same guy I just told you about with whom I had done the deal years before. This negotiation, for a million complicated reasons, also got bogged down on some intractable point unacceptable