At Blackstone, investment committees are about discussion and discovery, not about getting a deal approved. Because the decision to move forward or not is made together, no one feels pressured to sell a deal just because he or she brought the idea. Similarly, there is no pressure to approve a suboptimal deal as consolation for a deal team’s hard work in sourcing and analyzing the investment in question. If we make an investment and it goes wrong, we all got it wrong, and we are all responsible for fixing it. And when we are right, which is more often the case, we reap the rewards together.
