Print Solutions Magazine

Editor’s Note: The author of this column will present an education session entitled “Partnering for Success,” at the 2005 Print Solutions Conference & Expo in Orlando. See the conference schedule for details.

Many consultants, including myself, have determined that approximately half of the alliances created in the United States fail. Developing successful and profitable alliances is rarely easy. If it were, everyone would do it successfully. The key is to determine if the synergy is worth the energy. If you believe it is, you can open the door to new business possibilities. When partners share their complementary core competencies, you can accomplish things you may have imagined were impossible.

The reasons you may enter into alliance relationships are generally based on need and competencies. Need is usually represented in areas where you consider yourself or your organization to be lacking or weak. Competencies are the strengths you share. An ideal alliance is with a person or organization that exhibits competency in your weaker areas or need in your stronger ones. This is where our circles of interest strongly overlap, and where we have the greatest chance to benefit one another.

To build successful collaborations, you and your alliance partners must possess six personal qualities: curiosity, vision, communication, leadership, organization and compassion. Let’s look at them individually:

Curiosity. You must be open to new and frequently missed opportunities. You must be inquisitive about alliance possibilities to get started.

Vision. What synergistic goals do you visualize as possible? Developing an alliance simply because it’s trendy is hardly a reason to put forth the effort. Additionally, you must see into the future and not become dependent on your alliance partner. Doing so will make you weak. On the other side, if you are too independent, you will no longer be desirable as an alliance partner to others. Your vision needs to work toward that elusive sweet spot where you become interdependent and develop time-effective synergies.

Communication. Through my research, I’ve discovered that the leading reason for alliance failure is communication. A great example of the need for quality communication is the fact that Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant, writes into many of its alliance agreements a mandatory, quarterly face-to-face meeting for each company’s principals. While Lilly executives sometimes complain they don’t have the time, the meetings are contractually mandatory. There’s usually a social dinner the evening before the meeting, at which many issues and problems are discussed openly.

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, some Lilly executives tried fulfilling the contractual obligations via videoconferencing. It seemed to work, and they continued substituting videoconferencing for the mandatory face-to-face meetings. But it didn’t take long for alliance problems to magnify. As soon as they returned to live face-to-face meetings, they again began to solve challenges before they became problems.

Leadership. In order for your alliances to succeed, you must exhibit leadership qualities. Here, more than in any other area, your willingness to focus on getting things done, rather than on being right, will determine alliance success. In a corporate environment, the paradigm of partnering must start at the top. The executive must drive the philosophy through both word and deed. Even if you’re a single-person practice, you must be an alliance champion throughout all the areas of your business.

Organization. Your ability to organize, in the form of alliance structure, procedure and process will have a huge impact on the ultimate implementation and longevity of your alliance relationships. Lilly’s alliance implementation process is so sophisticated that they measure the perceptions of all key players in their alliances. The perceptions they measure are what everybody thinks about one another. This allows Lilly to correct its course when it discovers that partners’ perceptions of each other’s performance are distorted.

Compassion. As you meander through the process of alliance development and implementation, you need compassion and tolerance for the foibles of others. This quality allows you to maintain sanity in what sometimes can seem like an insane alliance. As you develop relationships, your alliance partner might let you down. One alliance success secret is to give your alliance partner a break once in a while, especially if your expectations are unrealistic.

Below, you will find the three key topics for you and your alliance partner to address in writing about the value of your alliance with one another. Then, mail your answers to each other. You can review the information in the privacy of your own office, a far less threatening method than face-to-face value meetings (which can be done later). This tactic is your best help for avoiding perception challenge issues and dealing with small issues before they get out of hand.

• The value I’m getting from the relationship

• The value I think you’re receiving

• Your suggested improvement strategies

Written agreements are crucial to the success of an alliance. No matter how trusting and loyal each partner operates, people forget their promises over time. They may even come to believe they promised something different than they actually did. You may have heard this before: “The palest ink is far better than the most retentive memory.” By putting to paper your expectations of one another, along with promises and a list of who is responsible for what, you both will have a living document to use as an alliance guide. This guide agreement naturally can be adjusted at any time based on new information, market conditions or a change in the level of partner commitment.

Most people are in such a hurry to build their alliance that they don’t choose their partners well. Skip the necessary due diligence, and you’ll be crying about conflict resolution and exit agreements instead of focusing on opportunities and possibilities.

Ed Rigsbee, CSP is president of Rigsbee Research, an alliance research and implementation organization in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He is the author of PartnerShift—How to Profit from the Partnering Trend, Developing Strategic Alliances & The Art of Partnering. Email him at ed@rigsbee.com.