Alliance Management Consulting and Training, Partnering Frameworks and Tools, Collaborative Leadership

Grow your alliance management capability with The Rhythm of Business as your guide. Whether you are just getting alliance management started in your company or evolving an existing program, our consulting, training, digitization, and assessment services empower you to reach higher levels of partnering success.

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ON THE BLOG...
What’s Keeping Alliance Managers Up at Night?
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The Partnering Guide
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LATEST PUBLICATION...
As Seen in Strategic Alliance Quarterly: Positive Influence: The Alliance Professional's Superpower
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Thought Leadership
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WHAT'S HAPPENING...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements Offer Opportunities to Hone Alliance Management Skills
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Empowering Collaboration and Partnering Success

Collaboration

Conceptually Simple, Operationally Challenging.

For 20 years, we've helped clients cut through complexity, manage risk, and drive business outcomes through partnering. Let The Rhythm of Business show you how, too.

Thought-Provoking Presentations

Operational Excellence for Consensus Decision Making in a Hybrid Environment
Partnering Readiness:
The Through Line from Collaborative Leadership to Collaborative Execution
Reimagining Alliance Management as an Agile Capability When Business as Usual is “Just Too Hard”
Seven Habits of Highly Effective Alliance Professionals

Your Partnering Results. Accelerated.

Everybody partners now. The winners know how to drive real results—faster. Speed your path to measurable partnering outcomes.
We'll be your guide.

Featured Case Studies

Can a 'Dinosaur' Dance in Its Fourth Industrial Age Ecosystem?
The technologies of the Fourth Industrial Age have greatly magnified the speed, scale, and scope of partnering required to develop the complex solutions companies need to win with today’s powerful customers.

It requires new partnering models and the ability to quickly orchestrate the right mix of partners—many of whom could be very different from a company’s typical partners.

With our partner Alliancesphere, we saw the opportunity for our client, a well-known technology company thought to be a bit of a dinosaur, to assume a role as thought leader and orchestrator in the evolving ecosystem. Working with the channels acceleration team, we guided strategy development and helped management to think about partnering in a whole new way. Working with leadership, we developed a campaign of white papers and presentations so executives could share what it takes to partner in this new world. The channels acceleration team hardened a number of use-case-specific solutions, solving billion-dollar problems. The company is recognized by analysts as one of the leading players in helping its customers use new technologies for advantage.
Ironing Out the Differences in a Billion-Dollar Initiative

Two tech giants saw an opportunity to launch a significant new initiative within an already existing alliance.

But no one from either partner was comfortable taking on the entrepreneurial and collaborative challenge of designing the offering and preparing to get and go to market.

It also required developing a new contract and carefully segmenting the shared customer base between each partner’s sometimes competing professional services organizations and sales teams.

To multiply the challenges, neither party was able to get together face-to-face to work out differences. Amidst these difficult circumstances, together with our strategic partner, Alliancesphere, we facilitated joint sessions and smaller breakouts in two locations, plus engaged several remote participants, alternating between video conference, web conference, and teleconference, to ultimately arrive at an agreed plan to shape this billion dollar initiative.
A Turnkey Partnering Center of Excellence
A global biopharma company with a large number of alliances and other collaborations-- academia, service providers, consortia, emerging biotechs, and other big pharma-- engaged us to create both in-person and online alliance management training and tools, customized for their portfolio and way of working.

The participants were to include both alliance managers and alliance team members who regularly interacted with partners.

We delivered a turnkey comprehensive curriculum covering alliance management principles and practices, such as launching an alliance, designing and running governance, understanding alliance finances, and measurement and reporting. We also created specific modules on collaborative problem solving, the impact of culture on alliances, and understanding motivations. All of the courses and modules included case studies, as well as a toolkit. The curriculum forms the basis of the company’s alliance management center of excellence.
Assess and Reset for Success
An alliance that spent several years conducting research and doing early stage development achieved proof of concept and was ready to move to late stage clinical trials.

The alliance manager newly assigned to the partnership quickly realized the relationship was dysfunctional and the collaboration agreement woefully inadequate for a co-development, co-commercialization relationship that required consensus decision making and equal sharing of all revenues and expenses.

Using our Vital Signs™ Alliance Operations Effectiveness Assessment, we quickly uncovered the root causes of the dysfunction, designed and implemented appropriate governance and collaboration models, and conducted a reset of the alliance. With an effective structure in place and leadership aligned, the alliance has been able to advance into a pivotal trial with a promising molecule.
More case studies...

Beyond the Pill

Can Your Biopharma Company Go There?

Biopharmaceutical leaders harness partnering to execute beyond the pill strategies. Let us help you uncover new revenue and value streams, too.