Opposites Attract -- Business Success
By Naseem Mariam 

Opposites attract - they sure do. We have often heard romantic tales of romances where the tall, dark, handsome boy meets a pale, fair complexioned girl and they fall in love with each other. After a lot of obstacles, fighting and misunderstandings they finally realize that they love each other and live happily ever after. This happens both in novels and also in real life.

Now lets leave the mushy world of romance behind and walk over to the hard reality of business life. Do opposite attract here also? And is the outcome positive when the alchemy starts working? You got it wrong - here I am not talking of boy meets girl.

In the business world we need to marry management styles and personalities. The aim is to achieve faster better decision making, risk-taking and business growth. When the Board of a company is filled with like-minded people there is not much creativity, no originality and therefore not much room for spectacular successes!

It is when complements come together in the Board Room that we see the sparks of genius fly and companies reach up to the stars. These differing personalities respect one another ... mostly because they realize that they depend on one another’s psychological strengths and weaknesses to attract success.

Let us take the example of two managers Larry and Kit. Larry was slow of speech, he had a tremendous memory and would remember all the details of the statistics, the reports and emails that he had received even a year back. When asked for a decision he would take his time, evaluate all the various bits and pieces of evidence he had been sent with respect to the issue on hand ... and then he would give his opinion.

Kit on the other hand was very dynamic, very aggressive and fast in making decisions. He depended on his decisions on how the issue had been presented to him, what he knew of the issue and what he felt with his heart.

Now place both Kit and Larry in the same Board Room to make the crucial decisions about a company. The discussion was about the design of the latest version of the motherboard for a switch. How much memory should it have?

The software team as usual wanted a huge amount of memory and faster speeds. Was it possible to provide it in the hardware? Kit did some fast calculations and said Yes; hardware could provide the desired speeds.

Then Larry slowly nudged Kit, told him a few statistics and after consulting with each other both Kit and Larry came up with the decision that only 70% of the speed requested could be provided because of reasons a, b and c. The software team was asked to revise their design to make do with the new hardware specifications.

One other day when one team wanted a quick decision and Larry was pondering about it, Kit walked in. Kit gave a few leads and triggered off the links in Larry’s mind and together they were able to make the decision immediately.

This marriage of logical thought and empathetic heart-felt manner of making decisions gave the company a very good balanced management. The impulsive, on-the-spot decision making, risk-taking attitude of Kit could achieve outstanding success when it was combined with the logical thinking and slow deliberations of Larry.

Take the case of Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Here too we have a case of opposites complementing each other and the rest is history with the successful sustenance of Microsoft during its formative days.

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