Faster Horses

I was in a brainstorming session with colleagues recently to come up with messaging to the field on developing a playbook for working with a partner/competitor. The facilitator led with the below quote from Henry Ford:

"If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses'".

The point was that to harness the value of co-opetition we have to think differently.

It occurs to me that as alliance managers, we're charged with collaborating with our partners in ways that drive innovation and create value for both companies. Doing this requires creative thinking, busting up the status quo and thinking outside the box.

Getting beyond "faster horses" thinking isn't easy, but that's one of the advantages collaboration with a partner can bring to the table. A fresh perspective and new thinking. And that's what makes our roles as alliance managers so valuable!

Best Practice Makes Perfect?

There was a recent thread on the ASAP (Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals) LinkedIn group about best practices. Here are my thoughts on "best practices in applying best practices"!

• Tailor to the culture of your company. Company culture provides the "current" for implementing best practices. What works at one company, may not work at yours and vice versa. Be sure to think about cultural dynamics when applying best practices and adjust accordingly.
• Use your tailored best practices to develop your alliances playbook. You need some kind of consistent framework for qualifying, developing and executing partner initiatives. The playbook defines how you "get alliances work done around here".
• Combine your best practices playbook with professional development. A great playbook in the hands of unskilled alliance managers will not get you very far. Build a training and professional development plan for the alliances team to help them to understand why these are best practices and how to apply them.
• Build in flexibility. Once size does not fit all alliances. Mike Leonetti, Chairman Emeritus of ASAP, used to say "when you've seen one alliance, you've seen one alliance". 
• Align measurement and comp. Beware the law of unintended consequences. Make sure that your teams are properly incented and that you are measuring what you expect. 

What say you?

Go Ugly Early!

I was speaking to a colleague today and we were comparing notes on the difficulty some alliance managers have in asking the tougher questions in the qualification process. I told him that a sales executive I worked with long ago told me something that has stuck with me ever since.

He told me that the best thing you can do in these situations is to "go ugly early". He told me that he always wants to know what the show stoppers are in month 1 of discussions, vs. month 9.

I told my colleague this story and he laughed. He said that he believed that this was exactly the right perspective. If you're having discussions with a partner about joint development, don't you want to know their position on IP, pretty early in the discussion? It's amazing to me that some alliance folks will say - "oh, I don't want to bring that up now, I might scare them off". I think that's the completely wrong approach. You should be thinking, I want to find out their position (and tell them mine) early, because if we're far apart, I need to know that now.

Being afraid to have a tough conversation, doesn't make the need for the discussion disappear. All you're doing then is kicking the can up the road, only to have to deal with it later, when both parties have invested a lot of time, and perhaps also reinforced some bad assumptions.

Now that's ugly!