The Practitioners Guide to Partnerships and Alliances
Tony Lendrum
In brief:
Never before has the world seemed so small, the marketplace so competitive, change more rapidly and the pressure to perform so intense.
Confrontation is turning into cooperation, competition into collaboration, separate and often conflicting strategies into shared visions with common goals. No longer can a single organisation, public or private sector, be all things to all people.
Going it alone is clearly not the smartest option and the business landscape is lit- tered with poorly performing firms that have refused to share. However, attaining genuine and sustainable competitive advantage has never been more challenging to understand or more difficult to achieve.
Partnering is really a logical response to the globalisation of markets, increasingly intense competition, the need for faster innovation, and the growing complexity of technology. It makes good common sense that connected people, departments, companies, customers, and suppliers, who don’t have to compete with each other, should actually work with each other for some agreed common purpose.
This same common sense applies to traditional competitors who now see the opposition, not as existing individual firms but competing markets and supply chains. Past adversaries are quickly becoming collaborative colleagues.
Since the publication of the first edition in August 1995 and the second edition in 1998, The Strategic Partnering Handbook has been used successfully by organisations worldwide as a model and practitioners’ guide for building partnering relationships and alliances with selected customers and suppliers both internal and external to the organisation.
The level of interest in strategic partnerships and alliances has never been greater, with estimated numbers growing at 25 percent each year. However, the results to date have not matched initial expectations. With recent surveys in the United States suggesting that less than 50 percent of partnerships and alliances are successful, for many there needs to be both a redefining of the definition and a rethink of the approach. As occurred with total quality, many organisations find the language, principles, and concepts of partnering compelling, but have great difficulty ‘walking the talk’ …
Buy now on Amazon.com: The Strategic Partnering Handbook: The Practitioners’ Guide to Partnerships and Alliances
You may also be interested in Tony Lendrum’s Building High Performance Business Relationships: Rescue, Improve, and Transform Your Most Valuable Assets
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