Don't just talk business

China Staff, Mar 2009 by Gratton, Lynda

This was the kind of disciplined conversation we heard at BP. Rodney Chase, who was deputy chief executive at the time, commented: "We are a deeply questioning team. We constandy inspect what we do in order to find out if in fact it is the exercise of laziness or prejudice."

The focus on intellectual rigour is a reflection of Lord Browne's deeply held convictions. As he himself says frequently: "Unless you can lay out rational arguments as the foundation of what you do, nothing much happens." We found the same focus on disciplined debate at RBS. This is how Mr Goodwin described the morning meetings, which are the locus for many critical conversations: "My direct reports and I meet at 9.30 every day for about one hour . . . the presumption is that anything that has happened the day before or something that is happening in your diary for the coming day, you will share it with your colleagues . . . Generally you are not allowed to take papers to the morning meeting, so you have to know what you are talking about."

Disciplined debate is crucial to the "soft bonds" that hold companies together. But to be effective, it needs to have both a "Soctates" to pose the questions, and information to underpin it.

At BP, Lord Browne embodies the belief in rigour and rationality: "Rigour implies that you understand the assumptions you have made - assumptions about the state of the world, of what you can do, and how your competitors will interact with it."

The second requirement for disciplined debate is relevant conversation. "There is no point in just changing a process," explains David Watson, a group vice-president at BP. "It has to start with changing the fabric - the information. If it is the same information, we will get the same conversations. So we have to provide different information for different conversations."

Soft rewards

Executives in these high-performing companies believe that rationality and analytical rigour are crucial. But they also understand that the soft bonds that bridge boundaries with empathy, mutual understanding and trust need something else.

Intimate exchanges are the foundation for building such deep, trusting relationships. This is particularly crucial when the relationship is being built across company boundaries.

Prior to the acquisition of NoHo Digital by OgilvyOne in 1999, for example, we heard a series of deepening exchanges between Nigel Howlett, chairman of the London office of OgilvyOne, and Tim Carrigan, founder of NoHo Digital.

Over a period of five weeks, Mr Howlett and Mr Carrigan met for at least half a day each week to talk about their families and children, their personal hopes for the future, their fears and apprehensions, the way they liked to work and their philosophy of leadership.

Amazingly absent from these conversations was any mention of commercial issues.

Those were dealt with separately, through the more rational and disciplined conversations between the finance professionals of both companies. What Mr Howlett and Mr Carrigan had were deep, intimate conversations about themselves and their relationship. As Mr Howlett reflected: "We invested a lot of time before we even signed the letter of intent." Only after the management teams were on board did the two of them proceed to the full-scale acquisition.