74 THE INVESTMENT TEAM
mentioned indicated that this group of investors had the lowest
scores in the entire company on the questions concerning trust,
respect, and openness. Apparently, the very people who needed these
skills the most had no interest in them. Puzzling as this may seem,
the New York Times article about overconfidence (cited in Chap-
ter 5) seems to explain it: we don’t know what we don’t know.
The people who talk too much don’t realize it, the people who
tell humorless jokes, the people who write boring investment books... oops. The reason for this might appear mysterious at first, but
the explanation is really pretty simple. To judge our performance
accurately, we would have to know what it means to perform badly.
Most investment teams that I’ve worked with are comprised of
talented, bright, ambitious people who are clueless about team-
work. Typically their bosses, who should teach and coach them,
don’t know either. Why? They got to be bosses by doing their
technical jobs well. One chief investment officer of a major firm
told me that if he had to choose between a technical expert and a
good generalist to run a department, he would take the technical
expert. That firm has been in disarray for years, with high turn-
over, low morale, and shrinking assets. Is it any wonder?
What can investment firms do to stimulate creative collabora-
tion in their money management teams? We’ll examine that ques-
tion in later chapters, but first Chapter 9 has another reason why
investment organizations tend to be poor environments for team-
work.
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