Strategic Alliance Magazine Q3 2017 - 9

New Bottle-Old or New Wine?
Seasoned executives sniff out repackaged thinking, discern what's really new in the latest
business trends, and use that knowledge and experience to innovate and create value.

Front

By Michael Leonetti, CSAP

Our business conversations are saturated with

specialized terminology of all types, from myriad sources.
Just think of the "E" words-e.g., enablement, enterprise,
execution, empowerment, engagement, edge, end-to-end,
ecosystem. Alliance managers used to, and still, refer to
ecosystems as networks. But of course today's ecosystem
introduces new twists on the old model, network is also
a technical term, ecosystems have a different meaning for
field biologists and environmentalists, and so on. While
today's ecosystems are defined by greater complexity and
governance, they continue to make use of the partnered
networks learnings we studied 15 years ago. Not a bad
thing, just worth noting.
I've been thinking a lot about language-what's old,
what's new, what's relevant-as the ASAP organization
has stepped out of our comfort zone to collaborate with
other business organizations. When I became president
and CEO nearly four years ago, one of my priorities was
for ASAP to "practice what we preach" by seeking more
collaborative relationships. Bit by bit, starting with a partnership to build our certification program and educational
materials, we've made progress:

n For many years, our biopharma members have sought

to engage the business development and legal communities to close the gap between deal making and alliance
success. Our first attempt with the Licensing Executives
Society International was short-lived, but recently we've lit
that candle again. Current LES President Brian O'Shaughnessy headlines at this year's ASAP BioPharma conference.
Together with former ASAP Chairman Christine Carberry, CSAP and COO at Keryx Biopharmaceutcals, they are
discussing opportunities ahead that bizdev, legal, and partnership managers can explore together.
n Reciprocal speaking engagements with SAMA, the

Strategic Account Management Association, included
the delivery of workshops jointly conducted with LaVon
Koerner of RevenueStorm on building collaborative relationships with strategic accounts. Now, strategic account
managers are approaching ASAP to learn the process of
defining and delivering collaborative business relations.

n This August, I conducted a

joint webinar on (you guessed it)
"Ecosystems: Is Yours Working
for You?" with my counterpart Jim
Stockmal, president at the Association for Strategic Planning (ASP). Jim and I spent a good bit of time defining
business ecosystems and making sure the audience (a
mix of alliance execs and strategic planners) all would be
on the same page with us.
Finally, one of our most important and longstanding partnering initiatives has culminated in the publication of
ISO 44001, the International Organization for Standardization's standard for business collaboration. More than
a decade in the making, the standard aligns with ASAP
best practices and maps to the ASAP Handbook of Alliance
Management: A Practitioners Guide. Put differently, the
specialized language we've developed over many years to
precisely describe what we do to manage partnerships now
will be broadly propagated as part of the lexicon of a global
standard for collaboration.
Participation in ISO standard development exemplifies the
challenges of stepping out of our comfort zone. Not every
ASAP member has been enthusiastic or even agrees that
a collaboration standard is useful; others envision it being a powerful vehicle to expand ASAP's global footprint
and widely propagate enterprises' capability to collaborate.
The standard still is very much in early adopter stages-
so this is an ideal time for input of ASAP members. The
ISO standard is a combination of fresh and well-established thinking-and don't we need both? You can find
more information on the standard and its connectivity to
ASAP in the August 2017 edition of eSAM Plus. Is it time
for your company to define its leadership in the partnering
community by having your company or alliance certified
versus just your people?
As ISO and our other collaborations grow, there will be
new ideas along the way as well as the reuse of proven partnering processes and models under new names. The key
is to engage, figure it out together, innovate-and always
choose to add value. n
Q3 * 2017 | STRATEGIC ALLIANCE MAGAZINE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Strategic Alliance Magazine Q3 2017