ChristianThe Partnering Imperative Making Business Partnerships Work
There is no shortage of strategic reasons for taking partnering seriously in today’s converging and colliding marketplace. However, there certainly is a lack of credible explanations as to why so many fail.
This book provides the ingredients for successful business partnerships. It identifies the value that effective partnerships can generate, the reasons why so many run into difficulties, and the imperatives for leaders who want to make partnering work in a globalized, digital world.
A powerful series of insights into one of the major issues of our time: how to create a partnership that generates innovation and other key advantages. Original, perceptive, wise and easy to read. –Dr Charles Hampden-Turner, Cambridge University, Judge Institute of Management Studies
Deering and Murphy have written with great clarity and insight on a difficult subject. Partnering will continue to grow in importance as firms shrink in size and look outside their boundaries for some of their critical resources. This book offers clear and practical guidelines for the manager who has to grapple with the multilevel and multicultural complexities of the partnering process. I highly recommend it. –Max Boisot, Snider Center for Entrepreneurial Research, Wharton Business School
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars The Partnering Imperative makes sense of Business Developmen
As a line manager responsible for a small software company’s business development activities, what I like the most about The Partnering Imperative is that it helps me decide with what potential partners I should be persistent, and where it is best to be responsive to offers but guarded with resources. Like any small company, we need to focus to be successful. The Partnering Imperative is helping me decide what large companies our small company should partner with and also helping us predict the success that our partnering efforts will have. For our small software company, our partnerships will make the difference between our being a success that people will read about or another software company that had a great product but just could not break the $50 million in sales mark.
For the large equipment vendors who have to partner to “avoid the negative” of not working with small nibble companies who can fill in gaps in functionality, there is tremendous value in this book as a guide for avoiding the pitfalls of partnership between large and small entities. These are the situations where the larger partner often tries to manage away the risks presented by the differences between it, the larger partner, and its chaotic but essential smaller partner. In these partnerships, the larger organization is busy managing formal communications processes and preparing to walk away at the slightest hint of failure. If big and small companies can be aware of these tendencies from the start, they are more likely to stick it out and reach partnering pay-off.
For smaller companies who need to partner to gain access to distribution channels and installed bases of customers, The Partnering Imperative provides a pragmatic guide to dancing with the “elephants” that small companies must work with. Smaller companies who expect their larger partners to revisit agendas to address emerging needs, will be be more successful if they are address “big partner” concerns like avoiding surprises and differences through formal communications process with lots of checks and balances.