Bob Kodzis' QUEST column in the Summer 2006 issue of Create Magazine.

A great creative partnership has the power to change the world. Dynamic duos throughout history have impacted every major industry and professional discipline known to mankind.

Throughout my career, I’ve found wellsprings of creative inspiration in teams of two. Examples can be found everywhere. Hanna and Barbera’s cartoons changed the face of animation. Watson and Crick unraveled the mysteries of DNA. What would the modern musical be without the influence of Rodgers and Hammerstein? And how many waistlines would be smaller if Ben had never met Jerry?

There’s something truly magical about great creative partnerships. Somehow, we are better when we work together. The right creative partner can bring out the best in us. They can raise our creative spirits and quadruple our impact.

This “Quest” seeks to distill the essence of truly great creative partnerships. Whether you are seeking the right creative partner or assessing the partnership you’re in, read on. I’ve spoken to some amazing creative teams and researched dozens of others to find out what it takes to make a great creative team.

Friends First If you are seeking the perfect creative partner, look first among your friends. Friendship is a very common and solid foundation for a good creative partnership.

While some people argue against mixing business and friendships, the late Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, was a strong proponent of working with friends. “When you work with your friends,” said Henson, “it doesn’t feel like work at all. It feels like fun. I like to work with people I know and trust. With them, the ideas come naturally.”

Evidence supports Henson’s contention. The list of famous creative duos that started out as friends is long and diverse. Simon and Garfunkel have been friends since middle school. Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer were buddies long before they founded Imagine Entertainment. The founding fathers of Microsoft, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, were friends for many years before they became business partners.

Unity of Purpose Never underestimate the power of common goals. They can move mountains…even when creative partners don’t like each other. Consider the basketball wizardry of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal. During the eight years that they played together as a part of the L.A. Lakers, they regularly expressed contempt for each other off the court. Yet they combined their on-court talents so effectively that they emerged as one of the highest scoring double-teams in NBA history.

Another example involves Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to Google lore, Page and Brin did not like each other at all when they met at Stanford University in 1995. They disagreed on almost every topic they discussed. Yet they went on to build the most popular search engine and data organizer on the Web.

The key to the success of these two very different creative teams is that each had an extraordinary singular focus…a driving force…a common goal. For O’Neal and Bryant, it was winning basketball games; for Page and Brin it was finding a way to simply and quickly retrieve useful information from an enormous set of data.

This overriding unity of purpose is essential to any solid creative partnership.

Like a marriage So many phenomenal creative partnerships are like professional marriages. Creative commitments tend to run quite deep. In many cases, partners actually love each other, but probably more important, they share a deep and abiding passion for the work.

As in marriage, great professional partnerships are based in communication, trust and respect. Award-winning lyricist Tim Rice understands the power of trust and respect in a creative partnership. While collaborating on the “Lion King” and “Aida” with Elton John, Rice would write the lyrics and then send them to John. “All of my work was then in Elton’s hands.” says Rice. “I know him well enough to trust that he’ll take my work and make something wonderful.” He adds, “I’ve found very few of his musical contributions to be anything but just right.”

Yin and yang In most of the great creative teams that I have encountered, the partners are more different than they are similar. They each bring unique skills to the table and they display very divergent thinking and personalities. While this may seem like a recipe for disaster, it has just the opposite effect. Great creative partners know how to celebrate their differences. They employ their unique characteristics to create synergy.

The team of Hanna and Barbera is a perfect example of the yin and the yang of creative partnership. Joe Barbera was a gifted illustrator while Bill Hanna had a knack for comic timing and gags. During their 60-year partnership, they parlayed their different, but complementary, skills to create more than 2,000 cartoon characters. Together, they earned seven Academy Awards and eight Emmys. A MGM studio executive once remarked, “Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera could not have been more different, but they somehow saw in each other the talent and potential they needed to become a great success.”

Someone you can be stupid with Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that one of the blessings of old friends is that you can afford to be stupid with them. The same can be said of good creative partners. They create a safe environment for innovation; an environment in which it is OK to be silly and launch outrageous ideas. A former creative mentor once described this concept beautifully. She said, “A good creative partner acts as a safety net, but a great creative partner acts like a trampoline. When you bounce stupid ideas off of them, the concepts bounce higher than you could ever imagine…and they make you want to keep bouncing.”

Put away your egos Individual egos can really mess with a great partnership. Many a famous duo have fallen victim to dueling egos. One advertising creative director offered an interesting perspective. “Overblown egos are not good for any team effort. But I believe a healthy ego is necessary to survive the slings and arrows of this business. What I recommend to my micro teams is to let go of their individual egos and replace them with a team ego. Don’t just promote your own contributions. Stand up for each other and be proud of the whole team effort.”

A great example of this is found in the Vaudevillian comedy team of George Burns and Gracie Allen. When they started their partnership, Burns wrote all of the funny punch lines for himself and wrote Allen’s character as the “straight man.” When it came time to perform, however, the audiences laughed at all of Allen’s supposed straight questions and responded to Burns’ funny answers with utter silence. It was a true test of ego for Burns. As Burns put it, “It broke my heart, but I was young, hungry and not a dope.” He rewrote the routine to take advantage of Allen’s natural gift for comic delivery. That was the beginning of three-and-a-half decades of fame and success for Burns and Allen.

Flying kites One of my favorite creative partners and a brilliant entertainment designer, Cindy White, once described the shifting roles that great partners play for each other. “When you start coming up with great ideas, you’re like a kite caught in a creative wind and you just want to go with it, get lost in it…fly free,” she says, swirling her hands skyward. “A great partner let’s you soar without drifting away. Sometimes they are the wind that’s hoisting you up. Sometimes they are the ones on the ground, holding the kite string. We need to play all of these roles for each other.”

Shut up and play Throughout the years, I have grown to value the roles of play and humor in the creative process. Both appear to play an even bigger part in creative partnerships. Frolicking, laughter and humor seem to be mainstays of many great creative relationships.

I remember, early in my career, brainstorming with an amazing design team in Boston. When we ran into a block, I continued to talk about the creative challenge when one of the partners threw a Nerf basketball to me and said, “Bob shut up and play. The ideas will come.” He was not avoiding the work. He and his partners understood that often the best solutions and the greatest ideas come to us when we play together. And play we did, until the creativity began to flow again. It was a lesson that has changed the way I deal with many creative challenges.

As agency partner and creative director Vince Demarinis once put it, “I have the hardest time convincing people that when we are playing, we are actually working. When we play around, we are not just playing; we are changing the way we think.”

You can feel it When you find the right creative partner, you know it. Ask Lily Tomlin. Playwright Jane Wagner has been writing hilarious and insightful vehicles for the comic brilliance of Tomlin for more than 30 years. Tomlin has described Wagner as her creative soul mate. “When you find your creative soul mate, you just know it,” says Tomlin. “You can feel it. You love how you feel about yourself when you are around them and you marvel at the ideas that come out of their minds. They offer you ideas that you want to work on and they really appreciate your gifts and add value to your contributions.”

That sums it up quite nicely.

Thanks to all the amazing creative partners who contributed their wisdom and experience. They have made it clear to me that, with the right talents, attitude and relationship, two heads really are better than one.

Bob Kodzis is an award-winning artist, keynote speaker and performer. He has been contributing ideas and articles to Create Magazine for five years. Kodzis is also a facilitator and founder of the wildly creative thinktank Flight of Ideas, Inc. - a company whose mission it is to unleash a new level of fun and creativity throughout the world. His clients range from the United Way to Kennedy Space Center to Vekoma, the largest rollercoaster manufacturer in the world. You can contact Kodzis directly online at Bob@flightofideas.net, or check out his cool web site at Click to Open Web Page