Strategic Alliance Magazine Q1 2018 - 38

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

"The biggest change I've seen in my years of doing alliance work is the incredible pace of change-technology,
business models, consumer buying patterns, all changing at incredible rates and all at the same time. This is an
unprecedented disruption," Peek explained.
"Just about every company in every industry is facing
disruption, and companies are both creating new partnerships to compete and working with vendors who are
themselves partnering to help clients transform their

"Fail fast is not

just a slogan,
it's an imperative."
--Donna Peek, CSAP
business and drive competitive differentiation as a matter of corporate survival," she continued. "Alliances have
never been more strategic and collaboration skills never
more vital to corporate success."
Fault lines in the marketplace serve as warning signs of industry upheaval, and a growth strategy for the future must
navigate past what Innosight calls the "shadow strategy"
where too many organizations "default to standard operating procedures that perpetuate flawed models at the
expense of new growth strategies." Instead, they need to cut
losses when testing reveals something isn't working.
"Fail fast is not just a slogan, it's an imperative," Peek
acknowledged. "Firms that become good at this will be
the best partners. As a result of all this disruption, the
need for speed is acute. Back in the day, you could develop annual business plans with partners-now it's all
about speed and agility," she said.

Though Peek served as ASAP vice-chairman, has been
on the advisory board of ASAP for several years, and
was a founding board member of the RTP (Research
Triangle Park) chapter of ASAP, her tenure with Genpact is fairly new, having joined the company in June
2017. And though alliances are a corporate imperative
from the board, CEO, and senior executive team, Genpact is new to the alliances world.
STRATEGIC ALLIANCE MAGAZINE | Q1 * 2018

"We're in a unique position where we are starting with a
blank slate. So, we have been building and rolling out
new processes and re-engineering existing processes to
be more partner-centric. It's a unique opportunity to get
it right at the outset and establish an infrastructure that
can scale. For example, we are in the process of implementing a new PRM (partner relationship management)
system and partner portal, sales engagement process,
teaming fee program, new partner contracts, and more."
Genpact's alliance team is small but growing. Scott Van
Valkenburgh was recruited from SAS over a year ago to
lead the alliances effort at Genpact. "Scott knew he needed
skilled and experienced alliance professionals who could
roll up their sleeves, build, and lead. He recruited me and a
colleague, and we both started on the same day about seven months ago. It's been an exciting ride at a company with
tremendous upside," she explained.
Genpact's leadership embraces partnering as essential
to the company's growth strategy-and the partnering
organization is expanding to meet the need.
"We worked with our chief marketing officer to incorporate the launch of our new partner program in our
brand relaunch in Q4 of last year, and we've been working with our chief strategy officer to align our partner
priorities to the corporate strategy. That alignment has
been key to establishing the strategic importance of alliances," Peek stated. "We are actively recruiting skilled
professionals," Peek added. "We have added internal resources to the team, some for operations support, some
that we'll groom into alliance management."
Although the company is at the beginning of its partnering journey, with only nine inaugural partners,
having a strategic alliance background has given Peek
a competitive edge with prospective partners.
"A few of the partners I'm working with have commented
on this. They recognize the need to carpe diem in this market and they know that working with a skilled alliance
professional is going to save them time and increase the
odds of a successful outcome. They feel like they are in
'good hands' and that they're working with a professional
who knows how to get things done and that we have a professional process for doing so," she commented.
"And it works both ways. Part of our prioritization criteria includes evaluating whether the prospective partner
has an alliances team, since we know that organizations

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Strategic Alliance Magazine Q1 2018