Alan Waxman

So we were never employees at TPG.

We never gave up control of our business.

We always controlled investments, hiring decisions.

We were kind of a firm within a firm.

TPG had a minority equity stake and were great partners for while we were together.

But that's how it all started.

Our view on business building is if you don't have a compass, it's hard to know where you're going.

And more importantly, it's hard to get everyone on your team matched up with that five-year strategic plan.

We just finished our five-year strategic plan.

It's an 18-month process, was 200 pages.

I mean, this is hundreds and hundreds of hours of all the partners debating and trying to really narrow down what it is, the direction of the firm.

We first started our 2015 plan, what we wanted it to be, and most recently our 2030 plan.

We typically have 80 ideas.

We narrow it down to 40, what we call subplanks, and those are organized under five strategic planks.

We'd actually just present it to our entire firm.

But what we try to do, and this is something we learned at Goldman, is we basically take that five-year strategic plan, we break it up into one-year increments, and then we have every person at the firm do their own personal business plans.

What we always say, and this is from day one, is that we want the summation of all those personal business plans to equal the five-year strategic plan.

So we're matching every single person in the firm with the clear mission of what we're trying to do and what we'd say in our parlance, climbing up the mountain together.

And that's just been a process.

And it's something that we take very seriously.