Joint venture has all the ingredients of a good deal
What makes a deal?
Chemistry. Trust. Personal relationships.
In my home state of Texas, we say you look someone in the eye and take their measure and then do a handshake deal that stays stuck.
Charles B. Wang is far from a Texan. He's a Shanghai native who moved to the United States with his family in 1952 when he was eight. And he talks with a Bronx accent, not a Texas drawl.
But what he described at last week's news conference was chemistry and trust. And that, more than anything, was what sealed the deal between his Computer Associates (CA) and Poland's homegrown Softbank, committing him and Softbank CEO Aleksander Lesz to create a new joint venture.
It was Wang's second trip to Poland. He was here a year ago for one of CA's show-and-tell management forays with computer entrepreneurs. But he didn't meet Lesz until three weeks before springing their joint venture on Poland.
There had been lower-level warm-up talks between both companies but when those looked promising, Lesz came to another of the CA executive exchanges, this one in Montreux, Switzerland. And they sized each other up and liked what they saw.
"It was really good. We hit it off. The chemistry was good. When you click, you click," Wang said afterward. "Being this quick it's very impressive."
In fact, he said, it reminds him of the swiftness of the deal he did some time back with Cable and Wireless Hong Kong Telecom. "That was January to March but then you also did the legal work," Wang said.
Of course, there could be hurdles ahead, perhaps in the fine-print legal agreements. One reporter pointedly asked, in essence, if there was going to be an agreement that would limit what Wang and CA could siphon out of the country in profit. If Wang was stunned he didn't show it just listened and listened some more to the interpretation.
But it was Lesz who didn't hesitate or flinch at the question. He complimented the reporter on his assumption that there would be profit generated in the CA-Softbank start-up. And then he said that they hadn't even gotten to that point.
(It sounded reminiscent of election time when the questions start being raised about the blood-sucking capitalists who siphon off profit.)
But, kidding aside, this ability to size up a partner, have some reasonable amount of trust in them not just as professionals but as people - that is a Polish plus. That is a characteristic that many expats talk about. They talk about it being missing elsewhere.
Not that there aren't horror stories with the rising evidence of corruption and money diversions, including from most political groups. But it doesn't seem as "systemic" as in other countries, such as the Czech Republic or Ukraine, where the legal structure remains flawed perhaps intentionally so that neither locals nor foreigners can afford to have too much faith in the law.
Asher Jospe is Wang's right-hand man. And when the handshake deal with Softbank looked as if it might become reality, Wang got Jospe to come to Poland to look around.
Jospe is based in Israel, where he ran his own company for three years and before that was CEO of Motorola Information Systems. He is now CA's mergers and acquisitions and joint-ventures chief for Europe and the Middle East.
"I was amazed. There is so much energy and so much going on," Jospe said during a lunch break.
He said CA's presence had brought forth lots of IT entrepreneurs, in many different fields, enough for him to conclude that the country really is almost at liftoff stage, in terms of being a significant IT player.
Wang flew back to New York the same day he flew in for the news conference. Jospe stayed and was likely to be here for awhile.
And Wang? He expects to be back here quite often, if the joint venture is put in place.
Is corruption really rising? Or is it the reporting about it?
Both perhaps. But it's worrisome because it can take on a life of its own. And given the low salaries and the options for under-the-table "back scratching," which either isn't monitored or isn't curbed, it's hard for any "regular order" to occur.
And it's not just bureaucrats. Some private businesses are on the take from their own colleagues and bosses. A group of athletes trying to raise money to go to the Olympics in Sydney approached one business executive for corporate support. No problem, he is reported to have said. As long as you give me a separate cut, and here's the bank account number. In other words, he would be on record as a company giving money to a worthy cause sending Poles to the Olympics but would be taking some of that money for himself, with no one the wiser.
Except the athletes had none of it. They're the ones who walked out.
