Strategic Collaborative Partnering

Understanding the failure points in strategic partnering is more important today than ever before, only because the commercial world is using this business model to solve global crisis capitalism problems through the joint process of expanding new markets, creating new products and selling. All published strategic alliance surveys tell us that almost half of all partnerships will either fail or never fully achieve the expected results. This is an unacceptable number for any business or organizational leader. Strategic Collaborative Partnering was written to provide a) the scientific theoretical explanation of why this happens and, b) a successfully demonstrated practical approach to increase the success rate for these complex partnerships.

This book provides a dialectical approach to understanding strategic alliances. It demonstrates that while it is an art to manage these complicated relationships, it requires the scientific understanding to connect the two processes. It starts with a scientific analysis of the key components to strategic partnering, and then a synthesis of what is required to govern and build them successfully, concluding with an understanding of human ecology.

It is divided into three sections starting with the analysis of the basic building blocks to complex partnering relationships, which are political, social, economic and culture. The analysis helps the reader understand where the problems are and why understanding these elements are important. The key problems illuminated are the contradictions internal and external to companies. One is that we ask employees and leaders to be competitive and then ask the same people to act collaborative with others. A second one is that most, if not all, companies are built organizationally with a silo infrastructure reporting up to a pyramid hierarchy and then we ask those same people to act with interdependence across silos.

The second section is the synthesis of the same elements but based on successful best practices, how to assemble them correctly. This section is about the construction of a governance model for any strategic partnering relationship, large or small, local or global. The contradictions mentioned above are barriers to success and what we will find is that only a governance model that is built as an umbrella over the partnership based on collaboration and interdependence can work. Based on these two elements, an alliance manager can create a governance model that includes the joint value proposition, shared strategy, leadership teams, communications and how to apply metrics for all of the elements.

The last section is something very novel and is about the human ecology. All problems in partnerships or alliances are human made and human solved. It is in the organization of humans that the problems and solutions are exhibited, so this section is dedicated to understanding how we learn, how we think, how we use our social intelligence and what makes up good teams.

When taken all together, the analysis, the synthesis and the human ecology components, this book seeks to both explain how partnering can be built successfully and why it works well when organized based on collaboration and interdependence.