Our Blog – Collaboration Strategy
Culture of Collaboration
Posted Monday, August 23, 2010 at 09:00 AM by Norma Watenpaugh
Is your company partner friendly? Or is every attempt at collaboration an uphill battle? I heard one partner manager describe her partnership with one company as “hand-to-hand combat.” Another partner manager described his partner as “infested with partnering antibodies,” -- not surprisingly this was from the life sciences sector. On the other hand, some companies stand out as “partners of choice” where collaboration is infused into the corporate culture, “It’s in the DNA.”
The Collaboration Imperative
Collaboration is emerging as a crucial competency for long-term business viability. Collaboration is a source of growth and innovation. Collaboration is essential in optimizing business processes internally and business relationships externally.
Proctor & Gamble, a company known for innovation and excellence, dramatically changed its innovation model after a near-death experience in 2000. Today half the company’s new products come from innovation originating outside of P&G labs. This hails not just a change in business model but also a significant change in culture, in the mindset of their engineers, researchers, and product managers. How do you achieve in-sourcing 50% of your innovation? Through collaboration with external partners!
“Our vision is simple. We want P&G to be known as the company that collaborates – inside and out – better than any other company in the world.” -A.G. Lafley, CEO, P&G
Collaboration is Not Technology
Web 2.0, social media, and collaboration technologies are exploding in adoption rate. Facebook just announced 500 million users. Companies are rushing to put up Facebook pages and tweeting their company news. Web conferencing is now main stream. All these technologies are supposed to somehow improve collaboration, but they are only the medium.
Collaborate is a verb. It is a conscious act of working together.
Alliance and partner managers are in essence collaboration professionals. Our roles are about creating corporate value from collaboration. We can develop our skills at collaboration through training and education, but most of us learn by doing on the job. We can benchmark our personal skills through the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals credentials: CA-AM and CSAP certifications. There are books written on how to manage partnerships and even an emerging standard on managing collaborative business relationships, which will establish a model for the business practice of partnering. But what do we know about building a culture for collaboration?
Benchmarking Culture
How does one measure collaborative culture? How do measure the antibodies or the capacity for collaboration embedded in a company culture beyond the processes and technology or the skill of the individual alliance managers? What is it about partner friendly organizations that make collaboration the norm? Do we just know it when we see it? We definitely know it when it is absent!
Two respected colleagues, Prof. Ard-Pieter de Man and Prof. Dave Luvison, have researched alliance performance and behaviors. Most recently, they have created a baseline for benchmarking collaborative culture working with the Quintiles alliance organization and the membership of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals. More importantly, they have begun the work of validating that collaborative attributes do matter and have a positive impact of alliance performance. I invite you read their work in the PhoenixCG resource center: “Alliance Culture: It’s in the DNA!”
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Collaboration Philosophy
Posted Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM by Norma Watenpaugh
Launching new website turned out to be much more of an involved exercise than I imagined. In this day and age, the website is the face of the company and so a new website caused us to rethink the business, the practice areas, and the positioning of PhoenixCG for the future. Since the founding...
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Creating Value from Innovation and the Role of Alliances
Posted Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 11:52 AM by Norma Watenpaugh
Innovation takes many forms. We often focus on innovation as technological breakthroughs and indeed those are important to fuel corporate growth. But there are other forms of innovation which can be just as powerful and just as disruptive to the status quo in creating strategic competitive...
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Tags: alliance, Collaborative innovation, competitive strategy, innovation, partnering, partnerships, value creation
Collaborative Capability
Posted Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 05:52 PM by Norma Watenpaugh
Certification assures Collaborative Capability: Taking Partnering to the Next Level
I was fortunate to be featured in an interview for the Marketing Thought Leadership series with Linda Popky, Marketing Master and recently named one of Silicon Valley's Top 100 Women of Influence...
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Tags: alliances, collaboration, collaborative capability, partnering
Social Media at Your Service
Posted Monday, October 12, 2009 at 02:50 PM by Norma Watenpaugh
One area in which social media is gaining traction is support services.When you combine partners in an interactive forum they become a self-help community.When you add customers to the mix, your partners become very competitive in demonstrating their expertise to the customer base.The result...
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Tags: Social Media, self service communities
Is Social Media Crossing the Chasm in Partner Management?
Posted Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 04:38 PM by Norma Watenpaugh
Findings from a Survey Conducted by Phoenix Consulting Group, June 2009Well, arguably yes and no. Some technologies that might be labeled early Web 2.0 were in pretty widespread usage. Others such as Twitter are caught up in the tornado. Some, such as MySpace, already seem...
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Tags: social media, partner marketing, ecosystem management, partner ecosystems
Strategic Alliances - More now than ever
Posted Monday, October 13, 2008 at 11:17 PM by Norma Watenpaugh
Strategic alliances are often viewed as a strategy for growth and perhaps not always a strategy for economically challenging times. But many of the reasons that make strategic alliances a good idea in good times make them an even better strategy for uncertain times. What are these reasons to partner...
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Tags: strategic alliances, importance
Coopetition - Sleeping with the Enemy
Posted Friday, April 25, 2008 at 11:17 PM by Norma Watenpaugh
The April meeting of the Silicon Valley/Norcal Chapter of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals featured a panel discussion on Coopetition. It turns out to be as hard to pronounce as it is to do. The panel often...
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Tags: alliances, cooperation, competition
Collaborative Innovation: Leveraging Partnerships
Posted Friday, March 28, 2008 at 11:17 PM by Norma Watenpaugh
"Collaborative Innovation: Leveraging Strategic Partnerships for the Global Playing Field" Sunday, March 30, 2008BlogTalkRadio: www.BlogTalkRadio.com/CoachforInnovation... » View Full Post and Leave Feedback Tags: partnering, innovation
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