Next, Wylie introduced a measurement system he calls TRAC. It's a meter (an imaginary one) with four parameters: Trust, Respect, Affection, and Confidence. "If any of those four start to weaken, then you don't have a partnership," explains Cosor. "We were flatlining."
By way of boosting those readings, Wylie then asked each partner to look at the other and say what he admired about him. Silence. At length, Cosor said, "I'm not in a position to believe what Jeff says, anyway." As it happened, he didn't have to: Studley declined to say anything complimentary about him.
It was a sad moment for two first cousins who had considered each other "surrogate brothers" as kids. Who as 16-year-olds had spent a summer together working as bellhops in the Catskill Mountains. Who had gone into business with the dream and expectation of fun and good fellowship--of, as Cosor puts it, "establishing a business bond in concert with a family bond." Says Studley of that long silence: "It was sort of a shock to both of us. It was like, 'Wow, this is how far apart we've gotten."
Perhaps, Wylie began to think, this partnership could not be saved at all.
What distinguished Cosor and Studley from the vast majority of partners, though, was their determination, as Wylie puts it, "to keep whacking away" at their problems. At first, that took the form of sheer venting. But as the litany of offenses poured forth a story emerged as well.
Looming large in the story was the brick wall that partitions CPR's offices like an iron curtain, lending literal form to a commercial reality: that CPR was, in fact, two businesses. All the company's employees, with the exception of a few accounting people, were wholly engaged in either Studley's rental division or Cosor's systems division. Says colleague Garrett Moore, "If you'd locked a couple of doors and changed a couple of signs, you'd have two companies"--two companies, he might have added, with very different business models and operating philosophies. Rentals was all about logistics and execution: making sure the projection screens at a corporate event didn't suddenly go dark. Systems was about innovation and long-range vision: creating breakthrough products that would secure a competitive advantage down the line. The latter embraced risk; the former eschewed it.
Nowhere had that clash been more apparent than in Cosor's four-year-long struggle to create a new product line--a dauntingly complex multimedia system that he hoped would allow CPR to leapfrog past its competitors. The project seemed to exacerbate the partners' existing differences. Not only had Cosor repeatedly missed the deadlines he'd set for himself ("A lot of my estimates were full of crap," he admits), but his singular focus on the goal meant his day-to-day management had grown even more desultory than usual.
And Studley's carping about Cosor's managerial deficiencies had grown even more caustic. He'd excoriated Cosor, for instance, for failing to reward his star salesperson with an enclosed office. "Jeff would come storming in and accuse me, without enough knowledge to know if I had done it or not," says Cosor. "It was 'I gotcha."
Messy as it was, all that "whacking away" at least helped the partners better articulate the feelings and motivations behind their actions.
Studley, it became clear, was frightened by what he saw as Cosor's runaway enthusiasm for a project of uncertain outcome. "Over time, I began to interpret every single thing Brett did as more sales than analysis," he says. "I came to the conclusion that Brett had lost his objectivity, and I viewed everything he did or said through that filter."
Cosor, for his part, had come to a conclusion of his own: that Studley was a "pinhead" who didn't appreciate the blood and sweat he was spilling, who couldn't understand that a creative undertaking couldn't be reduced to one of Studley's managerial routines.
Their analyses of each other's defects completed, both Cosor and Studley then engaged in a classic pastime of warring partners: gathering evidence.
For instance, there had been that employee in Cosor's division who had to be fired. On the day the ax was to fall, Cosor had been suddenly absent with an appointment--further proof, in Studley's eyes, that Cosor was shirking his managerial responsibilities. Not only had Studley been stuck with the unsavory role of executioner, but Cosor had returned just in time to give the departing worker a big hug in the parking lot. "I got to can him, Brett got to console him," says Studley. "It rankled me."
Of course, if Studley had bothered to confront Cosor about the incident, he would have learned why Cosor was (unavoidably) late. But the lines of communication had long since gone down. "It was much easier to manufacture the conversation in my head, declare him a jerk, and go on," explains Studley. "I'd rather keep convicting Brett of being Brett." Thus, the episode became yet another brick in what Studley calls his "edifice of evidence."
Now that wall stood so high it seemed impregnable, both to Wylie and to the two partners. Says Studley, "We realized we needed some trauma medicine, not just long-term chronic care."
Their "trauma medicine" of choice was a workshop Elaine Studley had been sent to during her Philip Morris days: the Landmark Forum, "where being profoundly related leads to cooperation, harmony, appreciation, and mutual understanding among people"--or so says Landmark's literature. Maligned by some as being too cultish, the three-day workshop focuses on the stories that people tell themselves--the stories they've constructed to explain their unhappiness, as in "My overly strict father ruined my life" or "My overly critical partner is ruining my business." In one Landmark program exercise, participants are asked to tell their story and then repeat it. And repeat it again. And again, until at last the story takes on a canned, comical ring. Some people giggle. "They don't allow you to hide inside your interpretations," says Cosor.
