Partnering Ready?

A colleague of mine, Francine Allaire, just tweeted about a new article in the LA Examiner blog. With commercial partnering the article states the end result is for 85% dependent on human activity. That is significant, because in the partnering community, we all know that 50% of partnerships and alliances started still fail within to generate meaningful results within 2 years. If we can actually address the reasons for failure because they are under our control, that brings hope to a lot of us. I suppose at least to those that have to sign off on future investment decisions. For everyone else it is hard work.

I have seen similar studies and remember seeing the major reasons that failure occurred, according to the respondents. And that is where the chicken comes and lays an egg. Because no work gets done effectively without a framework of guidance, tools, rules and measures, etc.. In other words, the dreaded ‘best practices’. Look at what is happening in the Pharma industry. Excellent people, but the business model is changing around them, preventing them from achieving historical results.

So I prefer a more balanced outlook, one in which systems enable humans to shine. A 2009 survey by the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (“ASAP“) and several European Universities highlighted one interesting fact: companies that have begun to make investments in practices considered relevant to positive outcome in partnering are seeing significant improvements in their overall partnering successes. These companies have realized that partnering is a capability that impacts all areas of the organization. And so, it must be regarded a corporate capability, one that must be managed and cultivated like all others that we are familiar with: Marketing, Sales, R&D, Accounting, Strategic Planning, etc.

Most companies are not deriving this insight yet, and so they are not able to move their partnering to a higher level of quality with greater corporate success. Unfortunately, the body of knowledge regarding partnering is itself still maturing and counts relatively few major thought leaders, consultants and successful enterprises. The ASAP organization has played a strong role in promoting this subject and growing the community of practitioners since its formation in 1998.

One of the significant hurdles is a lack of ‘standards’ as you will typically find in other professions (accounting being a well known one with its GAAP rules). But standards are tough to sell, they receive a lot of push back when introduced. Standards do not uniformly apply to every company (pushback 1) nor do they apply across industry (pushback 2), and certainly we don’t agree with all the standards others have dreamt up (pushback 3). So why bother?

Because it is necessary to be able to compare your achievements with that of your peers and have the ability to draw conclusions, be stimulated to introduce improvements, etc. I am advocating the introduction of  “Generally Accepted Partnering Practices” (GAPP) for Strategic Alliances and Partnerships, Collaboration in general. Surely we can agree on relevant practices that have shown their merit over the recent past? Can we agree on the essential practices that everyone seems to benefit from? Let’s work with those and enhance the results we may see from our partnering activities. If you have a moment, share your experience by taking this brief survey: core practices leading to partnering success.

We owe it to our Alliance Managers and Partner Account Managers to give them the enabling environment that brings out the best of their talent. Let’s give them GAPP, let’s help them to be partnering ready and to work each partnership to bring out the potential we saw in it when we strategized about the benefit for all organizations involved.