The saying goes that the team that plays together stays together. Of unknown origin, this advice has caused untold havoc in the world of work, as it has been seized upon by a bunch of vacuous chancers peddling their team bonding experiential training. Socialising more together, or playing in the corporate colours, is supposed to create the conditions where good workspace neighbours become good friends. With the enhanced understanding that only friendship provides, performance improves. Don’t believe a word of it.

Only the briefest perusal of history is necessary to reveal that superior performance might benefit not from friendship, but at the very least, from some real personal distance, if not downright antipathy. The world of show business and show business for ugly people (politics) provides ample illustrations in the past century.

The greatest comedy double act of all time (and subject of a forthcoming Steve Coogan Biopic) Laurel and Hardy, worked together for more than 30 years. Yet, while they got along, they tended to live very separate lives, with Oliver Hardy to be seen on the golf course most days, something Stan never enjoyed. In politics, there are those that said Bob Hawke and Paul Keating made a great team in the top job and treasurer respectively. Similarly from the other side, there are those who praised the work of John Howard and Peter Costello in the same roles. Neither of these pairs were said to be exactly the greatest of friends.

These working partnerships were, in the opinion of many informed judges, highly successful despite the participants not living in each other’s pockets. However, there is personal distance and then there is outright hostility. We need look no further than Peter’s namesake in the American comedy duo of the 1940s, Abbott and Costello (all that “who’s on first” shenanigans). They actively despised each other so much that in their later films they insisted on shooting their scenes separately wherever possible. Despite this, the pair enjoyed enormous professional success. Seems you do not have to be great friends to be successful in politics or comedy. I wonder if there is any link between these two endeavors?

Music being a more dramatic art, provides for some spectacular and enduring personal feuds and bust ups that seem to have had little impact, or perhaps even propelled professional success. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the granddaddies of rock and roll, appear to have given a passable impression of Jack Lemon and Walter Mattheau in the Grumpy Old Men series of films. It does not seem to have stopped them.