Strategic Collaborative Partnering

Strategic Collaborative Partnering

By Shelly Caref

Copyright 2012

Smashwords 2nd Edition 2016

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Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 Analysis of Strategic Alliances

Partnering Problems

Everything Fails Eventually…What's in Place to Mitigate It?

Services Strategy and Model of Operations

Solutions

Ecosystems

Summary of the State of Alliances

Two Critical Success Factors

Partner Taxonomy and Governance

Governance Framework

Chapter 2 Strategic Collaborative Partnering – A Governance Model

Value Proposition - Purpose

Strategic Initiatives

Governance Implementation

Strategic Collaborative Partnering, An Overview

Chapter 3 An Understanding of Human Learning

Why it Works

How We Learn

How We Think

Team Success Factors

The Social Brain and Emotional Intelligence

Conclusion

About the Author

Acknowledgment

Bibliography

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Preface

there’s no success like failure. And that failure’s no success at all.

Love Minus Zero/No Limit, Bob Dylan

Since the beginning of time, man has been using strategic alliances as a method to survive. Our human ancestors began their mission in life over 200,000 years ago starting from the fertile crescent valley in northern Africa, primarily wandering throughout Africa, Eurasia, Australia, and after the last ice age receded 13000 years ago, populated the Americas within 8000 years. We began as hunters-gatherers in small bands of 30-50 related kin during the Paleolithic Stone Age era, all living dependent of each other and by the end of the Paleolithic era, bands grouped into tribes. These groups were formed to strengthen and improve their ability to hunt and gather.

The bands had no formal organization, were very egalitarian, and decisions were made by consensus with the older and wiser members providing guidance. Tribes were the beginning of organization and led by councils. Bands coming together to form tribes marked the beginning of strategic alliances and we have been using alliances ever since. Social collaboration enabled man to learn and apply best practices.

There is a long history to strategic alliance bonding and so it continues both politically and in business. In general, alliances do not last long. Of course there have been exceptions and they were generally political, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance since 1949 between the US and Europe. Two other well-known alliances occurred during World War II with the Allies known as US, Northern European nations, the USSR and the British Commonwealth in a battle against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan. At the end of the war, new alliances were formed and new cold war battle lines are created separating the global power centers.

As the geopolitical world changes, so do the alliances formed between countries. The same has been true in business for many of the same reasons – power, markets, economy of scale and survivability.

There is a natural evolution to this dynamic process of alliances being formed and then dissolved. This is due to the external and internal contradictions that change with each new successful stage of an alliance lifecycle. Yet with all of the extraordinarily deep-rooted history, experience and knowledge gained throughout the millennia, we still succeed at only a little more than half of all business alliances.

The current global and national economic environments have forced more corporations to use this tactic to grow business through expanded use of the partner’s markets, products or customer base. Just as companies use machinery to increase productivity for greater profit, an alliance is the building of a larger virtual machine that combines the capital and operating assets of several companies to further increase profits, increasing productivity. An alliance between engineering firms basically gives both companies access to the other capital whether engineering resources or production machinery. The same is true for intellectual property, sales organizations, etc.

As the economic world crisis increases, companies are forced to engage in developing alliances more and more. Yet while our success rate has improved slightly, still almost a third of these alliances fail. Economists have studied the use of capital and all of its economic and financial tools, but hardly anyone does this for alliances.

The typical current business alliance rarely lasts longer than five to seven years, which by definition, makes them temporary arrangements. This is because they are generally based on very narrow and specific goals. When alliance goals are attained, its usefulness is complete and usually terminates or advances to new goals, unless the alliance advances into a joint venture or a merger.

At the same time there are new types of alliance partnerships have been created resulting from a natural evolutionary process unique to corporate cultures and financial requirements that allow for the creation of ever changing models of strategic alliances. This requires analysis and in-depth understanding of how we can take this business tactic and make it a predictable model for success to ensure that the constant creation of new alliance forms achieve expectations. The high degree of failure presents an ever pressing need for a successful new alliance model.

The growth of strategic alliance partnering comes at a time in modern business culture of contradictory forces between traditional hierarchical rigid corporate structure and the requirement to create open collaborative relationships. The question that needs to be resolved is this, can companies that are dominated by a command and control environment, top down decision making, and deploying fierce competitive actions be successful in an open, transparent partnership that requires a very different corporate culture model to succeed? A model needs to be created that solves those contradictions and also creates the kind of culture that prevails to support alliances with companies that are sometimes both collaborative and competitive.

We have built a very complex enterprise society as our organizations in commerce need to increasingly compete and collaborate with each other globally. Competition and collaboration do not naturally lead to alliance partnering as an outcome and in fact, is why they are very likely to fail. The trick is to create an overlay above or a virtual organization to convert the legacy characteristics of a competitive company so that collaboration becomes the external characteristic of work and both partners win in the process.

Companies enter into partnerships primarily for strategic reasons but can strategy alone ensure success? A partnership of companies is really a strategy that is based on relationships between people within the companies who need to translate it all into achievable, quantifiable tasks for expected results. Even if