Guy Kawasaki on why most business partnerships fail the excel test
Guy Kawasaki was Apple's second software evangelist, is now chief evangelist at Canva, and hosts the Remarkable People podcast. He believes the majority of corporate partnerships are theatre, built for the press release rather than for results. His test is simple: a real partnership forces you to open your financial model and change it, either the top line or the cost of goods sold. If you can announce a partnership without revising a single line in Excel, you have bought publicity, not leverage. The second test is harder to game. Draft the other organisation's press release in their CEO's voice. If you cannot make their side of the argument, the partnership will not survive contact with either company's operating pressures.
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The need-to-know:
Run the Excel test before you sign anything. If a proposed partnership does not change a line in your forecast, you are spending legal fees and executive attention on an announcement.
Draft the other CEO's press release before you commit. Writing their version of the deal exposes whether value flows both ways, which is the only condition under which a partnership survives its first difficult quarter.
If evangelism feels hard, the problem is usually the product. Kawasaki's position is that marketing something genuinely great is straightforward, so persistent difficulty selling is a signal to go back and improve what you are selling.
Let’s go a little further
Guy Kawasaki has spent four decades inside technology's defining moments. He joined Apple as its second software evangelist, left to build startups, returned, and now serves as chief evangelist at Canva. He has written fifteen books, most recently Think Remarkable, and hosts the Remarkable People podcast.
What makes him useful to founders is not the résumé. It is that he built a career selling things he had no formal training to sell. He was a psychology major counting diamonds for a family-owned jewellery manufacturer before he ever touched software, and he learned to sell face to face, before the internet made it possible to hide behind a funnel.
When I asked him about partnerships, he did not soften it. "Most partnerships are bullshit," he said, and then explained the failure mode with precision.
It is familiar to anyone who has sat through a partnership announcement. Two CEOs stand up. A release goes out. Inside both companies, people read it and quietly ask what it means for their work. The answer is usually nothing. The relationship exists in the announcement and nowhere else.
His test cuts through that. A partnership that matters should have caused you to open Excel and redo your forecast. Revenue should move. Cost of goods sold should move. If you announced something and never had to touch the model, the deal was publicity.
He offered one example he considers the mother of all partnerships: Apple, Adobe and Aldus. Aldus built PageMaker, which made beautiful documents. Adobe built PostScript, which printed them. The Macintosh ran both. Remove any one of the three and desktop publishing does not exist. Kawasaki's view is blunt: without Aldus and Adobe, there is no Apple today. That is what a real partnership looks like. Each party supplies something the others cannot build fast enough alone, and the combination creates a market none of them could have created independently.
The second test is the one most leaders skip. Put yourself in the other organisation's chair and draft their press release. If you cannot articulate genuine value from their side, you have a problem you have not named yet. Kawasaki's framing is that one-sided partnerships fail in both directions. If only you benefit, they will disengage. If only they benefit, you will resent it and stop resourcing it.
The leadership lesson underneath both tests is that partnership discipline is really forecasting discipline. Most partnership conversations feel productive because they are pleasant. Two capable people find common ground, imagine adjacencies and leave energised. None of that is evidence. The forecast is evidence, because it forces you to state which number moves, by how much, and by when.
For a CEO, the application is narrow and immediate. Before the next partnership conversation, decide in advance which line it is supposed to change. Name the number. Assign an owner on both sides. Put a date on it. If you cannot name the line, the meeting is still worth having, but call it what it is: a relationship conversation, not a commercial one. The cost of mislabelling it is that partnership work quietly consumes the attention of your most senior people while producing nothing you can measure.
There is a second thread in the conversation that connects to this more than it first appears. Kawasaki said he has come to believe that everybody you meet can do something better than you can. That is usually read as a comment on humility. It is also a negotiating position. If you assume the party across the table holds capability you lack, you look harder for what they actually need, and you build the kind of arrangement that survives. If you assume you are the valuable one, you build the kind that gets announced and then forgotten.
Look at every partnership currently on your books. How many of them changed a number in your model, and what have you been telling yourself about the ones that did not?
Question for you
If you are carrying a partnership right now that you cannot tie to a specific line in your forecast, what is keeping it alive? Email Phil and describe it in three sentences.
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