Strategic Alliance Magazine Q2 2016 - 8

Committing to Collaborate I wish I'd had Martin Echavarria's Enabling Collaboration on my bookshelf years ago. It might have saved me from a lot of effort-and the discomfort of repeatedly being thrown over the fence. UP Front By Michael Leonetti, CSAP When I was working as an alliance executive at a large global pharma company, many of the alliances we constructed ended up being reevaluated in a drawn-out, half-year or longer sparring match we called "renegotiations." We typically closed the deal quickly. Why wouldn't we? All of our business development colleagues needed to get the deal done and move on to their next conquest. There were a lot of details we failed to understand or better yet think through in terms of how we might collaborate. We had a contract, a solid legal document that could stand up in a court of law, but not a collaboration agreement. I have to ask myself now, "Was there a better way to handle the negotiations? What good is a partnership with a contract that fails to prepare parties for true collaboration?" If only I'd had a copy of Martin Echavarria's book on my shelf at the time, it might have saved a lot of effort and the discomfort of repeatedly being thrown over the fence. In its clear and simple format, Enabling Collaboration: Achieving Success through Strategic Alliances and Partnerships advocates for a very different way of thinking about leadership and business. A key argument in the book is that partners should frame opportunity based on mutual understanding and core competencies, build basic relationships and implications over time, and lock in the commitment to development with alliance collaboration the goal. When structuring alliances, is there a better process to consider? Echavarria asks. Partners often don't have strong enough relationships up front to negotiate the harder stuff. Too often, they have just met and are at infantile stages in an alliance, yet they perform tactical negotiations without the critical alignment in place. The most successful alliances take place when enough time is invested in developing core competencies and marketplace creation defined as value, rather than just deciding what each partner can get from the other. So often alliance managers proclaim they understand collaboration, but we may not be achieving real collaboration and are just cooperating. In my previous experience, when pressed to collaborate, we typically would take the Noah's Ark approach: "I put one in the ark, now you put one in." The book provides valuable tools on how to change the process and collaborate effectively while negotiating five territories of alliance development. The model involves strategic identification of patterns to build ecosystems, define value, and the best practices necessary for selecting and combining partners. "Taking the time to prepare, establishing an alliance strategy, and perhaps an internal alliance function and alliance team, helps organizations to distinguish between the kinds of alliances that will help them grow and discard potential business partnerships that do not make sense," he writes. "Aligning internally on 8 STRATEGIC ALLIANCE MAGAZINE | SUMMER * 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Strategic Alliance Magazine Q2 2016