78 THE INVESTMENT TEAM
- The motivation of revenge explained the collaboration by
the two teams in the final round. (They had been betrayed
by the third team and were delighted to repay it in kind.
Clearly, an eye-for-an-eye strategy was at work.)
On a different occasion, we took a group of financial execu-
tives and divided them by their thinking and feeling preferences.
About two-thirds of the finance department had a preference for
thinking (nearly all the professionals); the other third (mostly the
support staff) had a preference for feeling. We played the Prisoner’s
Dilemma with the thinking team versus the feeling team. True to
form, the thinkers were competitive, whereas the feelers employed
a cooperative strategy. As the rounds were played, the feelers fell
farther behind in the score and began to voice their anger about
the thinkers’ style of play. The conflict came to a head in the last
round, and, during negotiation, the thinkers finally agreed to co-
operate—to go for the win-win solution. The teams separated for
their last declaration of “blue” or “red.” To the utter astonishment
of the feelers, the thinkers violated the agreement and chose to
compete! At that point, the room went semi-ballistic. There was
general chaos, with outbursts and name-calling. When we finally
got the group quieted, the feelers insisted on knowing why the
thinkers had broken their promise.
The response from the captain of the thinking team was simple:
“Hey, it was only a game. We were playing to win.” That rationale
made perfect sense to the thinkers and almost none to the feelers.
(For weeks afterward, department morale was shaky at best. Brian
and I thought of changing our slogan to “Team Morale: you build
it, we crush it!”) The ability of thinkers to be objective and factual
makes them excellent analysts and decision makers, but these same
attributes are liabilities when it comes to forming teams and main-
taining good relations.
Whether it takes the form of an investment club or a formal
group of investment professionals, would teamwork help in the08-13 ware 78 1/19/01, 1:10 PM