A Joint Stock Company of Two

Something we’ve been thinking about

In Moby-Dick, when Queequeg goes down onto the whale’s slippery back to work amid the circling sharks, Ishmael is belayed to him by a monkey-rope made fast at both their waists. If Queequeg slips, Ishmael goes in after him; the rope has no release. Melville has Ishmael notice what the rope does to his attention: his “individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two.”

How we see it through leadership economics

Most of what matters between people runs on agreements no contract can fully capture. A contract is what you fall back on once a partnership has already failed. What holds people together before that point is commitment, and commitment only does its work when it is credible. In game theory, a credible commitment is one that binds you to an action even when, later, it may not be the choice you would make on your own. The monkey-rope is credible for the bluntest possible reason: it has no release. The shared outcome becomes the individual’s own outcome, and the question of who gets the credit stops being worth asking.

You could see it in Argentina’s World Cup opener this week. When Messi completed his hat trick against Algeria, tying Miroslav Klose’s all-time men’s World Cup scoring record, the whole team celebrated as though each of them had scored it. Messi’s success is theirs, and he plays as though theirs is his, investing as visibly in his teammates’ growth as in his own.

A leader’s task is to make that commitment credible. When your success genuinely depends on your people’s, you back their decisions as your own and tie your standing to theirs. A team that believes the rope binds them together stops competing for credit and unifies around the objective.

A line we’re sitting with

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”