Strategic Alliance Magazine Q4 2017 - 9

Front
Celebrating Success in the Quest for Value
By Michael Leonetti, CSAP

'Tis the new year, end of the holiday season when

we reflect upon all that transpired the past 12 months-
and consider what we can improve upon in the next 12
months. I find myself trying to get my head around two
things-celebrating success and finding value.
I think the two go together to a good degree-because
both of them require opening our eyes and minds to
possibilities and types of value we might not have considered previously. It means leaping out of our mental
boxes-as our cover story emphasizes-instead of saying,
"that doesn't apply to me" or "that's not how we do it" or
"we would never look at it that way." If we "do alliances
strategically," as Ben Gomes-Casseres emphasized in his
November ASAP Netcast webinar, then we must think of
ourselves as leaders, strategists, business developers, and
creative problem-solvers, not "just" partnership managers.
We must open ourselves up to find diverse forms of value
everywhere we turn-in our jobs, across our teams, with
our partners, and of course in our engagement with the
ASAP community. Ultimately, we can accomplish things
that are different, more substantial, and impactful for our
businesses. We also must be open to taking risks, to failure,
and to figuring out how we deal with that.
A new year, a new season, what better cause for celebration-so let's celebrate ASAP's success in the quest
for value. Here we are-almost two decades as a member-driven professional organization. We have a global
standard. We've grown the profession-some 750,000
people on LinkedIn identify themselves as managing
partnerships. They talk partnerships on the news every
day. I remember thinking recently, as the announcer reported Salesforce and Google are partnering in a huge
way, "What does Salesforce need Google for?" Or vice
versa? They are gargantuan market dominators. Still,
they need each other to create value-shareholder value,
product value, and most essentially, customer value. And
we, as partnering professionals, also need to think like
Salesforce and Google. As Norma Watenpaugh's research
starkly indicates (see Page 28, "The Next Generation

Ecosystem-Making the Big Channel Bets"), we can't (in
our own roles) be the old-school channel account managers reselling commodity tech products, just doing our
jobs as they go extinct, so tied into what we do every day
that we are unable to find new value our partners and our
own organizations require to survive.
How can ASAP help us not just survive, but thrive-in
the cloud, with traditional or nontraditional partners, in
the ecosystem, going wherever we must go to find value?
Working with our event program team, we've been in the
throes of planning the March 2018 ASAP Global Alliance
Summit-and our efforts have paid off. It's an astoundingly rich and diverse program offering professional
development, strategic insight, and intense peer-to-peer
interaction you get nowhere else. Moreover, in Fort
Lauderdale, Florida, our two biggest communities of
partnering professionals converge onstage-pharma and
tech-along with collaborators from other industries and
sectors. If you're in pharma, why not learn to create value
the way the tech companies have? If you're in tech, why
not develop cross-functional, cross-industry knowledge
and skills to create new value in partnering with, say, life
science companies? And whatever your industry, join us
at the Summit to celebrate some of our profession's greatest success stories in the quest for value-as exemplified
by the nominees and winners of the annual ASAP Alliance Excellence Awards.
It doesn't take much reflection on this past year to
conclude that it's been a truly wild, challenging, extraordinary time to be alive and working as an alliance
executive-and much more of this is to come. We work at
the center of how customer, partner, and virtually all other stakeholder value forms are created today. We create
that value by managing business collaboration. Because
of that, alliance professionals should always have a plethora of successes to celebrate-especially if we have the
reflection and wherewithal to open our minds to new potentialities. Wishing you and your teams much success,
health, and happiness in the New Year! n
Q4 * 2017 | STRATEGIC ALLIANCE MAGAZINE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Strategic Alliance Magazine Q4 2017