Partnerships can be amazing - will Elon and Linda have a good one?

Co-ceos or co-founders are a superpower if it works

As the mother of identical twins, I have a deeply ingrained love of pairs.  Yet even my belief in the power of two was tested when Elon Musk announced he had recruited a new CEO to run Twitter. As I was  a board member until he took it over, this should have been good news. But it quickly emerged that Elon was still going to oversee all the product development and technology while Linda Yaccarino would be responsible for everything else, particularly the area of ad sales which has  been so successfully massacred since he took over.  Two bosses is hard in any scenario, but two bosses when one of them is arguably the most renowned and vocal business leader on the planet feels a stretch.

The most successful implementation of this co-ceo structure in a large corporate I can think of is Oracle. For several years, Safra Catz and Mark Hurd worked together.  Catz has strong financial acumen and is adept at operations, while Hurd has a deep understanding of sales, marketing, and customer relations. They were able to shepherd Oracle through the competition and deliver substantial profits. It is a  partnership that stands as testament to the power of well constructed, diverse shared leadership.

There are, however, car crashes too. In 2019 SAP announced that it would no longer operate with two bosses after the co-CEO structure was deemed ineffective. Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein had only been in their positions for six months when the company announced the change.  Employees had noticed a slowdown in decision-making - having two equal leaders was causing confusion and hindering progress. 

The startup world has always been full of co-founders or founding teams. Investors have historically liked double brain power and when they work, they can be phenomenal. Think of Sergei Brin and Larry Page at Google or Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Microsoft.

I much prefer working in partnership. In my experience it leads to better outcomes if you can get some fundamentals right.

Firstly, and by far the most importantly, you have to share similar values and vision. I am not talking about a common view of the product strategy, I am talking about a common view of what impact you want to make in the world, how you treat the people around you and what your motivations are. 

When Brent Hoberman asked me to start lastminute.com with him in 1997, I never had any hesitation about working with him. He has immense integrity, loyalty and intellect. We had also worked together for three years in a previous job so he knew how annoying I could be. 

I know the business handbook view is that opposites attract and you need to find complementary skills in a team to be successful but I think this is only true up to a point. It is, of course, vital to have two separate areas of focus and priority.  Brent was unbelievably good at unpicking the technical questions at lastminute.com while I was good at choosing neon pink for the branding. Brent was fantastically good at excel spreadsheets, while I was good at firing people. 

Ultimately however I knew the company was his brainchild and I was working for him.Of course we had disagreements and of course we got frustrated with each other, but we could always laugh and rely on our shared belief in what we were building. In my opinion no amount of complementary skills will fill the void if there is an absence of mutual respect.

But I have also failed at creating the essential clarity in roles and responsibilities. When we started Lucky Voice, the private room karaoke chain, Nick Thistleton, the co-founder and I did not map out our jobs clearly enough. I was part chair, part executive and this was completely unhelpful. Things were compounded when I had a massive car accident and spent two years in hospital. It must have been totally dementing for Nick as I tried to direct micro decisions from my hospital bed - high on morphine and low on sanity. Luckily, the business grew and thrives today with me safely away from the action in the Chair role.

Finally, it is impossible to over communicate. Sounds easy, but can be hard to do well. This doesn’t just mean sharing the good, bad and ugly of your daily workload. It means sharing how you are feeling about the future - if  you're struggling or if you're happy. It means being able to give feedback to the other person and being honest if you want to change up the partnership. 

Going back to Twitter, you can see the downsides of not communicating well. The original founders always wrestled with who wanted to be in charge, who was actually in charge and who wanted to leave. For a while there was a revolving door of founders in leadership roles. 

A decade on, Elon and Linda have started again. I hope they can pull off their double act and give the company the stability it deserves. I also hope Linda and her new boss have had some of these tough conversations and she is not communicating with him solely by tweet.