A few years ago I sat in a room of alliance managers from about 10 different companies and a very unscientific survey was carried out. Each of these companies represented what industry observers would call alliance best practice. They were 'the great and the good'. Those present were asked what percentage of their planned, sponsored and funded alliances had not been successful. Success was defined as having been openly recognized as delivering the anticipated and desired outcome.
The feeling of the room was that the alliance failure rate in the IT industry was about 75%.*
The purpose of this blog is to explore why the failure rate is so high, test some ideas that will improve this result significantly and generate some new ones. Many, if not all, of the issues discussed will be relevant to channel strategy, policy and everyday management as well as what many call 'alliances'.
One path to business success is to find something of enormous value that is hard to do. Then become the expert.
Put another way, this is a discipline that few companies do really well. It is a source of competitive advantage that many companies fail to exploit.
I have no axe to grind except to say this is my discipline, it can be wonderfully complex, it is often surprising, the notions of trust and relationships sit at its heart, it can be hugely powerful and it can be the key that unlocks exponential success.
Nuff said
* This may not be a problem if a company takes a 'portfolio' approach to collaboration. That is they will invest in 10 relationships, expect 7 to fail, but the rewards from the 3 that succeed will more than cover the investment. Even in this case the rewards that getting that 'hit rate' to 5 would be magnificent. I am yet to encounter an organization where this is an explicit policy.
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