It was there, in the summer of 1997, that he and Studley were finally forced to examine the bricks in their walls of evidence. What they found surprised them. "The bricks were supposed to be events and things that had happened," says Cosor, "but they weren't what happened. They were interpretations."
On the Forum's second day, Cosor stood up before the room of 150 people to make a public avowal. "I came in here with my cousin and business partner, and we were ready to break the company in half," he began. "What I've seen is that the problem has very little to do with him and a lot to do with me. I'm ready to be his partner."
The effect was electric. Studley reciprocated with a similar statement, and that evening he called Wylie, saying, "We're willing to make a go of this."
Wylie calls the moment "pivotal." In the sessions that followed, Studley and Cosor dredged up incidents in the long-buried past--what Mardy Grothe calls "little murders"--for rescrutinizing, beginning with moments like the parking-lot hug. ("Brett was surprised that it had pissed me off so much," says Studley.) Cosor confessed, for instance, that during his system-invention project "there were days when it was so dark, I needed Jeff to say, 'Wow, what a cool idea. I'm so excited."
Says Studley of that admission: "I hadn't realized he needed so much affirmation. Brett as a salesman exudes such confidence. And I'm in general pretty thick-skinned....That was a big 'aha' for us: how different we actually were." Armed with that insight, Studley pledged to work on his diplomacy. "I have a tendency to say things very directly and bluntly, and sometimes very hurtfully," he says now. "I meant to be instructive, but whatever I said came out as nothing but criticism: 'I think you're a jerk."
A final breakthrough would come, once again, from Elaine Studley. In November 1997, Wylie asked her into one of the counseling sessions to present her analysis of the partners' roles. A graduate of Pace University's M.B.A. program, she made her presentation in the form of a business-school case study, sweating through the whole thing for fear she'd be perceived as a stooge for her husband's agenda. "You haven't really separated, yet you're not really together," she nervously told her audience. "I think it's all linked to a changing growth phase."
In other words, it was CPR's success that had nearly caused the partnership to fail. In the early days in Cosor's garage, she argued, the partners' close physical proximity had forced their personalities into an ongoing, low-level negotiation. Once the company expanded and that artificial pressure was removed, the negotiation stopped. (Indeed, says Wylie, the one thing that makes problems between partners more difficult than marital problems is that "it's easier for them to avoid each other than it is for husbands and wives," allowing frustrations to build up.)
Because the company's growth had outpaced its internal controls, moreover, there was never much hard information to settle battles of interpretation; the partners didn't even know whose division was making more money. "If you don't have objective measurement, then everyone's free to decide what the truth is," says Cosor. "It would be opinion against opinion. We had to feel about problems rather than to know about them."
Finally, the miscommunication had been compounded by the pair's tendency to use Nancy Eller as a conduit of information, as in a game of telephone. "I'd be trying to get information out of Nancy," Cosor recounts. "She'd tell me how Jeff felt. I'd blow up. She'd go back to Jeff and tell him I'd blown up." And all the while, Cosor felt that Eller was in league with Studley, combining the weight of her 10% ownership stake with Studley's 45% stake to gang up on him.
As Elaine sweated through her analysis, Cosor suddenly announced, "Damn, that woman is brilliant."
"As soon as he said that," says Elaine, "I started to breathe." And in a way, so did the two partners. Recalls Jeff, "It gave us both a handle to say, 'Aha, that's what started the problem."
That was a year ago. Now Brett Cosor sits at the head of an enormous oblong table, flanked by two giant projection screens: he's in the U.S. Coast Guard's Commandant's Situation Room, a command center from which terrorist threats and Exxon Valdez-scale oil spills are handled. "The number one problem with any system is wires," Cosor is saying. "It's not the gear. It's the way the gear is put together."
He's talking about the room's high-tech audiovisual system, which CPR workers are here today to fix, but he could just as well be speaking of his partnership with Studley. The "gear"--in this case, the personages of Cosor and Studley--is fundamentally sound. They are good people.
The trick is in the wiring--in the way they're put together.
That wiring isn't perfect yet. On a recent morning, Studley and Cosor gathered in a Washington restaurant with Peter Wylie. The session was spiced with plenty of recidivist verbal skirmishes--the abiding remnants of the partners' divergent interpretations of their history together.
