Books about trust and business partnerships

For an owner's account of trust in daily operations, start with Infinite Upside. If you are still choosing founding roles, investigate The Founder's Dilemmas. If an existing partnership needs clearer expectations, consider The Partnership Charter. The useful choice depends on which question you need to examine next.

These three choices cover an owner's account, founding-team decisions and partnership expectations.

1. Infinite Upside — Vijay Sheth

   Start here for an account of trust inside a working operation. In Chapter 7 of Infinite Upside: Building Wealth With Room to Live, Sheth examines the difficulty of delegating responsibility while retaining a view of the business that someone else can check. The operating partnership he discusses is distinct from share ownership.

   The reading interest is in holding two needs together: people need room to work, and the company needs knowledge that does not depend entirely on one person's explanation. Sheth considers how records can make an account checkable without pulling every decision back to the founder.

   Choose the memoir if you want to follow why that became important to an owner. It offers circumstances to examine, rather than a method for certifying somebody's character. For the practical application, the separate reading on trust and records follows an operating event through its evidence.

2. The Founder's Dilemmas — Noam Wasserman

   Investigate this book when the partnership is still taking shape. The Princeton University Press description and contents identify choices about founding alone or with others, choosing cofounders, dividing equity and sharing control.

   Imagine an invented pair of friends considering a company together. They enjoy working with one another, but have not decided what each person wants from ownership. Their next reading question could be: what are we agreeing to by becoming cofounders? Wasserman's stated focus gives them a different starting point from a memoir about an established operation.

   Take one unsettled founding choice into the contents or an available sample. Look for the question you need to discuss, rather than a passage that simply confirms your preferred partner. If your pressing concern is understanding work inside an established operation, the founding-team focus may be less immediate.

3. The Partnership Charter — David Gage

   Gage's The Partnership Charter: How to Start Out Right with Your New Business Partnership (or Fix the One You're In) is presented by Basic Books as a guide to establishing and maintaining a partnership. Its stated scope includes goals, expectations, responsibilities and resolving conflict.

   This is the choice to investigate when you want to make the relationship itself discussable. Perhaps both people expect to work hard, but one means a full-time operating role and the other means being available for selected decisions. Agreement on enthusiasm has left a consequential expectation unresolved.

   Use the sample to ask whether this approach helps you put that expectation into words. The reading purpose is different from checking a transaction or choosing a cofounder. It concerns the working relationship you intend to maintain.

Choose the unanswered question

Consider a second invented situation: established colleagues cannot explain a customer exception without the person who handled it. Their immediate question concerns what the operation knows. That points toward the memoir's visibility problem and the existing records exercise. The friends still choosing founding roles have a different reason to investigate Wasserman; colleagues trying to discuss incompatible expectations have a reason to investigate Gage.

Before sampling, finish this sentence: the partnership question I want this book to help me examine is ____. If the question concerns another shareholder's authority, follow the separate decision-rights example. Being partners and owning shares need their own descriptions.