A successful long-term partnership requires shared values and complementary skills: partners can't have fundamentally different risk tolerances or ethics, and each partner should be able to do things the other can't, making the relationship additive rather than redundant.
Marks credits his 39-year partnership with Bruce Karsh to shared values, complementary skills, and mutual appreciation, warning that mismatched values (a 'cowboy' paired with a 'chicken') doom partnerships. ✦ AI generated
Howard Marks · My First Million · 2026-07-15 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 21:40
“If you were going to teach me and Sam... what do we got to get right to do that?”
I said the key to a successful partnership is shared values and complementary skills. If you don't share values, I don't think you can have a successful partnership... The other thing is you have to have complementary skills. So the beauty of a partnership is when your partner can do things you can't. That means that you are both additive to each other, synergistic.
verbatim transcript · starts at 21:40
21:40our relationship is mutual respect. And I think it would be very hard to have a successful long-term relationship with the partner if you didn't have respect for each other. And that ties into something I wrote in '02, I think. But in '02, I wrote a memo called The Most Important Thing. And there was a section in there which talked about having a successful partnership. And I said the key to a successful
22:09partnership is shared values and complementary skills. If you don't share values, I don't think you can have a successful partnership. Let's say one person is super aggressive and the other is a chicken. One person is super ethical and the other one likes to cut corners. I don't think you can have a successful relationship partnership. And I've seen many, many, you know, I mean a friend of mine
22:40when I was a kid, AT&T went public. Can you imagine the days before AT&T was was public? But anyway, they went public. They It was the biggest deal in history and and they had a full-page tombstone ad in the newspaper. And it listed all the investment firms that were the investment bankers. And there were probably 40. And a friend of mine, Ed Ramsdell he used to carry that out around and
23:04every time one went out of business he would mark it off. And eventually I think they almost all disappeared except for Goldman Sachs. But why do they why do they go under? You have some cowboys and some chickens. And you know and when in bad times the chickens say the cowboys are getting us killed. And in good times the cowboys say the chickens are holding us back.
23:30And they disparage each other. So you have to share values in my opinion. The other thing is you have to have complementary skills. So the beauty of a partnership is when your partner can do things you can't. That means that you are both additive to each other, synergistic. If I can do everything you can do or if I think that, what do I need you for? It's not going to last very long cuz