All teams rise and fall on the strength of their relationships. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top generals; Larry Summers and the faculty at Harvard University; Carly Fiorina and the Hewlett -Packard board; Michael Ovitz and Michael Eisner at Disney; Steve Jobs and John Sculley at Apple; Abraham Lincoln and his wartime cabinet. As far back as Agamemnon and Achilles on the beaches of Troy, relationships within teams have determined the fate of leaders and their enterprises.

After twenty years of observing and advising senior leaders, Diana McLain Smith firmly believes that every team is only as strong as its weakest relationships. In her book Divide or Conquer, Smith notes, “I kept watching organizations falter—not because their leaders failed to grasp the need to change, or to come up with the right strategy, or to inspire the troops, or to appreciate the importance of culture—but because relationships within their teams prevented them from doing what they needed to do to succeed.”

No one today would dispute the idea that relationships matter. Flatter hierarchies, tighter interdependencies, efforts to move decision-making down in organizations all depend on the quality of people’s relationships. Yet despite their obvious importance—perhaps because of it—relationships remain largely a mystery. Like a firm’s culture, relationships are part of the informal side of organizational life: the soft stuff that’s hard to see, grasp, or change. That’s why, despite our best efforts to create collaborative, high-performing teams or flatter, more flexible organizations, so many still look as territorial or hierarchical as ever. We know relationships matter, but not exactly why or how.

Based on over 25 years of research, Divide or Conquer remedies this problem by providing a navigational system with which to see and traverse—with far greater intelligence—that often unpredictable and sometimes treacherous terrain called “relationships.”

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