1. Partnering Guide / November 28th, 2022
One of the few silver linings of the Covid pandemic is that the advancement of web conferencing platforms has made it so much easier to connect with people around the globe. We at The Rhythm of Business have taken advantage of the technology, allowing us to work with alliance managers in Asia. It is unlikely this ever would have happened if we had to travel to deliver our services. These experiences opened our eyes to the fact that concurrent with a surge in life sciences in the region, there has also been an increase in the demand for alliance management and alliance managers. We decided to find out what’s keeping these alliance professionals up at night.
...
1. Partnering Guide / October 12th, 2022
We are back! The first in-person-since-2019 ASAP Biopharma Conference held in September was also its largest. It was so great to see everyone and meet many new people. We presented our new Master Class –
Using the Power of Positive Influence to Bridge Differences and Drive Alliance Value – that focuses on an essential component of the job of the alliance manager. It is perhaps the hardest part of the job and also the source of the value alliance professionals bring to the alliance. Purposefully using influence is how to overcome differences to align on actions, make decisions, and solve problems that drive alliance value. Quite simply, it is the alliance professional’s superpower.
The ability to successfully use influence comes from having an understanding of what is important and useful to both you and your partner to help them accomplish what they are trying to do so that they can help you do what you are trying to do. This give and get over time for mutual benefit is the essence of collaboration, which of course, is how alliances produce results. The better you understand your partner, including motivations, beliefs, and values, the more creative you can be in finding ways to apply influence to achieve your mutual objectives.
...
1. Partnering Guide / August 31st, 2022
One of our favorite truisms is that alliances are conceptually simple but operationally very challenging. Frequently, these challenges include aligning different organization structures, bridging differences in resourcing prioritization, risk tolerances, or navigating internal governance and decision-making processes. Proactively addressing these common differences helps reduce team frustration and churn. It reduces the chance for delays in decision making
that erode values and potentially postpone the realization of milestones. It helps prevent decisions from being sub-optimized just to get to an agreement. The alliance professional who leads on developing understanding of their partner’s structure, operations, and culture, guiding the governance committees and teams to find an “alliance way,” delivers great value to their stakeholders.
Our new master class,
Using the Power of Positive Influence to Bridge Differences and Drive Alliance Value debuts at the
2022 ASAP Biopharma Conference in Boston, MA, September 28 – 30. Following a very successful Global Alliance Summit in April, the industry standard Biopharma Conference is back in person and promises to be a great e...
1. Partnering Guide / April 12th, 2022
Back in person for the first time since 2019, the
ASAP Global Alliance Summit kicks off next week in Tampa and we couldn’t be more excited! We are leading a new Master Class
Helping Your Partners Help You: Using the Power of Positive Influence. This cross-industry session provides an opportunity to apply techniques to lead without authority, practicing the reciprocity that is one of an alliance professionals’ superpowers.
Alliances, partnerships, indeed any type of collaborative relationship work on influence. It is the force that is used to help partners prioritize for you, to get executives to allocate budget to your effort, and to create champions. Alliance professionals use positive influence to create alignment internally and with partners and to find creative solutions to problems. Positive influence is what we use to earn the right to lead when we have no authority to do so. It is key to shifting mindsets from that of control and adopting the behaviors required in the business ecosystems companies operate in today.
Positive influence is the currency of business now that customers, partners, and team members all have practically infinite choices. This cross-industry master class explores how to develop your ability to use positive influence to create value for all concerned. It involves redefining your boundaries and purposefully building mutually-beneficial relationships throughout the ecosystems essential for success. We’ll explore the norm of reciprocity and how to use the tool of relationship currencies to help your partners help you.
Helping Your Partners Help You: Using the Power of Positive Influence is available as an in-person or digitally delivered workshop. There has never been a better time to hone your skills, helping your organization reap the benefits of collaboration and partnering.
1. Partnering Guide / January 30th, 2022
With 2022 well underway, it is a perfect time to think about good practices to adopt with your business partners. Collaborating is a source of innovation, business growth, and new relationships. It gives you a chance to see how other people and companies work which can be a great learning experience. It seems easy—no need for tips—but the truth is business collaborations are conceptually simple, but it can be quite challenging operationally to unite two or more companies with their individual structures, strategies, cultures, and processes in pursuit of a common objective.
First, what does it mean to be a “good” partner? It is all about working to accomplish more than either party could do on their own in the course of a long-term trusting, purposeful mutually beneficial relationship. It doesn’t mean you always have to do what the partner wants and it doesn’t mean everything has to be equal. It means that on balance, over time, each partner comes out ahead.
Herewith are our top ten tips to be a good partn...
1. Partnering Guide / December 5th, 2021
Earlier this year we published a white paper and gave a number of presentations on
Seven Habits of Highly Effective Alliance Professionals Who Deliver Value. We described what these people
consistently get right regardless of the purpose or business model of an alliance. One of the habits is a focus on being excellent in the execution of alliance management fundamentals. These core practices include, among others, strategic visioning and alignment, establishing efficient operating models, managing an agile governance process, creating alignment, and of course, good communication. Our experiences over the past few years tell us that too often these fundamentals get short shrift amidst the urgencies of the day, having too many alliances to manage—and in the constraints on working together caused by the pandemic.
The result: alliance professionals who are missing opportunities to deliver value to stakeholders and alliances that aren’t as successful as they should be. Operational excellence is a mindset of getting a little better every day in the fundamentals of your craft—in making the basics just part of the culture and “how work gets done around here”—so that you can focus on higher value activities. It is about moving from good to great.
Herewith are our Top 5 opportunities to help alliance teams be more agile, to make better decisions, and have more valuable and productive partnerships right now. These insights have been gleaned though 1) VitalSigns Alliance Operations Effectiveness Assessments of complex codevelopment, cocommercialization biopharma alliances; 2) baseline assessments of practices against both the Seven Habits and our Alliance Management Foundation model, and 3) numerous roundtables and master classes we’ve conducted over the past two years.
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1. Partnering Guide / September 19th, 2021
As summer turns to fall, many people were hoping to return to their offices and meet with their alliance teams and partners, holding governance meetings in-person. Some are and some aren’t. Some companies aren’t allowing travel until at least 2022. A recent McKinsey survey found that “90% of organizations will adopt a combination of remote and on-site work as they emerge from Covid restrictions.”
[1] The upshot is that alliance professionals will find themselves having to design, organize, and facilitate important meetings that may be in-person (likely with face masks), completely remote, or somewhere in between—a hybrid. Each requires something a little different to be successful, with the hybrid meeting the most challenging to get right. Fortunately, there have been a lot of learnings over the past 18 months on how to have effective remote meetings. We need to apply those learnings to what we know about having productive alliance meetings and create a new template to drive success in a hybrid environment.
...
1. Partnering Guide / August 6th, 2021
On July 29, Jan facilitated a conversation with
Katherine Kendrick, CSAP, head of alliance management at
Jazz Pharmaceuticals and
Nancy Griffin, vice president of alliance management at
Dicerna Pharmaceuticals about defining and communicating the value professional alliance management delivers to its key internal stakeholders and partners. Part of
ASAP’s webinar series, everyone defined the preparation and delivery of the session as “certainly not work.” Highlights of our spirited and spontaneous conversation follows.
Our discussion built upon the cover story article in the Q1 2021
Strategic Alliance Quarterly, to which each of us contributed, widening the aperture to explore how to expand beyond the daily management of contracts, governance, and solving problems to discuss the higher level, more strategic services and activities stakeholders value the most....
1. Partnering Guide / July 5th, 2021
Download the pdf
Over the past few years, the number of partnerships between biopharmaceutical companies and digital information technology companies to develop innovative digital health products has grown exponentially. Partnership is about bridging differences to leverage the unique assets and capabilities of the partners, creating an outcome neither could achieve alone, or at least not economically. The strategic, operational, and cultural differences between biopharma companies and their “high-tech” partners are significant and must be overcome to realize the potential of digital health. This is fertile ground for alliance management professionals to ply their craft, ensuring that the risks of partnering don’t outweigh the benefits.
This article, published in the journal of the UK’s Pharmaceutical Licensing Group:
- Digs into some of the differences between biopharma and digital technology companies
- Explores the business model that is a mash-up between what is typical for each of the partners in digital health partnerships
- Suggests how alliance professionals can apply our alliance management foundation to bridge differences between the partners and create new value
Download the pdf to read the full article.
1. Partnering Guide / May 17th, 2021
How do you know if your alliance or business partnership is operating effectively? Sure, revenue is a gauge, as well as hitting key development milestones. It still doesn’t tell you if the partners are productively leveraging the resources available to the alliance, or if it is operating in an environment built on mutual trust and respect, focused on innovating and producing results.
Alliances are inherently inefficient and it is the job of the alliance professionals managing the alliance to preserve and enhance the value intended when entering into the collaboration, while identifying and mitigatin
g the risks that can cause it to fall short of its potential.
To measure if an alliance is operating effectively, many years ago we created the VitalSigns Alliance Operations Effectiveness Assessment (See Figure 1). In a demonstration that measuring effectiveness can contribute to alliance success, the XTANDI alliance of Astellas and Pfizer recently won the
2021 ASAP Alliance Excellence Award for a Longstanding Alliance. In accepting the award, the alliance directors credited the role regularly measuring effectiveness as part of a program of continuous improvement plays in the alliance’s success. Our congratulations to the winners! They have worked very hard over many years to ensure the alliance is producing maximum value for patients and the partners.
Measurin...
1. Partnering Guide / March 25th, 2021
Discussion Summary from Exclusive Executive Roundtable
There is a truism among alliance professionals—start an alliance right, or you will start it again in the midst of an erosion of trust and even conflict. As part of an exclusive executive roundtable discussion sponsored by The Rhythm of Business during the
ASAP Global Alliance Summit in March, nearly a dozen heads of alliance management within life science companies gathered to discuss the challenges of startup and the value alliance professionals can and should deliver to their stakeholders during this critical phase. Their conclusion: Prepare your stakeholders for what could go wrong and set them up for making it go right.
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1. Partnering Guide / December 28th, 2020
“We’re moving so fast we don’t have the luxury of formal onboarding. We just kind of throw them in there. They’re smart, they’ll figure it out.” This is what we’ve been hearing from too many alliance professionals about their approach to onboarding new project team and governance committee members. In taking this position, alliance professionals are overlooking a key value adding opportunity: Helping the new member know what they need to know to establish the right priorities and engage in the right activities to accomplish what they as a member of the team must, and to quickly get connected and engaged with the rest of the team.
When this engagem...
1. Partnering Guide / December 4th, 2020
There is no question 2020 has been the most challenging year in recent memory. As it comes to a welcome close, old challenges are appearing anew. For biopharmaceutical alliance professionals, it is once again the season of having to explain to the CFO wielding the budget axe, “So tell me again what you do?”
It is not surprising, given the uncertainty of the business climate and the wholesale changes that have occurred. Companies have learned to live without physicality in offices, sales calls, team meetings, conferences, new staff interviews…the list goes on and on. Suffice it to say that any executive worth their salt is examining what their business needs and doesn’t need to be successful as we hopefully emerge from the pandemic in 2021 and into the next normal.
Savvy alliance leaders should welcome the challenge—and be prepared with an answer that not only explains how you’ve helped the business achieve great things during 2020 by keeping its alliances on track. You must also be ready to share what you and your team are doing to reimagine the future course of the company’s alliance capability and help lead it in a time of scientific and technical advancement, changing economic incentives, and empowered patients that necessitates partnering happening everywhere in the organization—all while incorporating the surprisingly productive ways of doing business we’ve adopted...
1. Partnering Guide / November 11th, 2020
The following post was initially published by The Drucker Forum as part of its "Shape the Debate" discussion concurrent with the 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, Leadership Everywhere, A Fresh Perspective on Management.
There are some things we’ve learned in the past seven months that make sense to carry forward into the next normal. Chief among them is that the amount of partnering among firms occurring to combat the pandemic, the neighborhood tie-ups to support small businesses, and bubble quarantines in learning groups as well as professional sports teams, requires a collaborative leadership style.
Collaboration is a buzzword that everyone thinks they know what it means, but few truly do. It is typically thought of as a simple skill we all learned in the sandbox, a value to be trumpeted, or technology that allows people to work together electronically. These are all elements of collaboration, but they fail to adequately define...
1. Partnering Guide / September 24th, 2020
Download a pdf of our conference presentation
Our hats are off to everyone who participated in the
ASAP Biopharma Conference earlier this month! Because of all the creativity and engagement by speakers, participants, the program committee, and staff, it certainly felt like a
real conference, just one delivered in a digital environment instead of in Boston’s Seaport District! It is further evidence the status quo is no more and so many of the old rules no longer apply. This is really the silver lining: a license to fix what’s broken, become more resourceful and agile, dispense with unnecessary process, and focus on what matters most.
COVID-19 and Work from Home (WFH) has created a new burden on alliance professionals. You must be more intentional, work harder to be in the right meetings, pay more attention to the mental and physical state of your team, your governance members. Add to this all the new types of service, data, and digital partnerships both before- and with-COVID and it is clear the time has come to reimagine how alliance management practices are implemented and the capability is organized and resourced to meet growing, changing demand.
Our presentation at the conference introduces practical actions for reimagining the collaboration between alliance managers and their internal stakeholders, especially governance team members, and the resulting partner experience. We toss aside the status quo to:
- Redefine how alliance managers are assigned to alliances
- Collaborate with stakeholders to align on the services that create value for them and that mitigate the panoply of value-eroding risks that are now present
- Create the transparency of information flows and communication required in our together-but-apart world
Contact us today to discuss how our consulting and training services can help your alliance management team be more agile, more digital, and more successful in delivering the value to stakeholders that matters most today.
1. Partnering Guide / September 2nd, 2020
This is the third in a series of posts from allianceboard, a next generation alliance management platform and The Rhythm of Business on why the time has come to digitize your practice to drive value for stakeholders, your partners, and you.
Seeing the Big Picture
Not long ago, an executive newly appointed to lead the alliance management function for his company—but who had no alliance management experience—asked us, “How do I see what is going on across all of our alliances? I am used to starting my day looking at a dashboard that lets me know what needs my attention.” We had to explain to him that currently, within his company, he would have to manually aggregate individual alliance managers’ monthly reports to get an overall picture. But that need not be the case.
As we’ve been describing in this series of posts, external events coupled with the growth in the number and types of alliances and other collaborations are shining a spotlight on the need to digitize certain aspects of alliance management workflow and administration. If our newly appointed alliance executive had in place a digital alliance management platform, he would have had the ability to aggregate all the alliances in his portfolio—or any relevant subset thereof—into a single dashboard and understand them in relation to one another. It would also help him better appreciate the work of his allian...
1. Partnering Guide / July 31st, 2020
This is Part Three of a three-part series about an exemplary research collaboration between global biopharmaceutical giant AbbVie and BioArctic, a research-intensive Swedish biopharmaceutical company. The purpose of the alliance was to develop antibodies (immunotherapy) based on promising science discovered by BioArctic that could stop progression of the debilitating Parkinson’s disease (PD). The partners wish to share their experiences so that both their companies and others may benefit. The Rhythm of Business was engaged after their collaboration had achieved its primary objective to help the partners examine their alliance, identify repeatable practices, and tell their story.
Read Part One:
The Making of a True Collaboration
Read Part Two:
How the AbbVie-BioArctic Partnership Executes Collaboratively
For two years the partners had been following the workplan, advancing the science that they hoped would produce a game-changing treatment for Parkinson’s Disease. For that to happen, AbbVie had to “opt-in” to license the antibodies for clinical development. If it decided not to, for any number of valid business or scientific reasons, BioArctic would need to go find another partner. If that rejection were to occur, it would cost them valuable time in both the exclusivity to the underlying intellectual property and in the competitive arena. It would result in devaluing the asset in the eyes of a new development partner. In October 2018 BioArctic delivered the “Golden Package” containing the fruits—all the data and deliverables—of the two years of work to AbbVie, which had 90 days to make a decision. Thanks to a proactive approach with much of the ground already laid, the review was quick and internal alignment secured. Within two weeks it informed BioArctic that it would exercise its license option bringing the alliance to a succ...
1. Partnering Guide / July 15th, 2020
This is the second in a series of posts from allianceboard, a next generation alliance management platform and The Rhythm of Business on why the time has come to digitize your practice to drive value for stakeholders, your partners, and you. Louis Rinfret, PhD, founder and CEO of allianceboard contributed this post. Access the first post in this series Digitize Your Alliance Management Practice to Provide Visibility, Promote Agility, and Create Value
How do you ensure your alliance team is agile and efficient while managing a growing portfolio? As companies race to innovate and grow, heads of alliance management functions must plan how to support the increasing demands on their teams.
Working harder with current systems and processes is not sustainable in most situations. Leaders must then think strategically and envision how they...
1. Partnering Guide / July 7th, 2020
This is Part Two of a three-part series about an exemplary research collaboration between global biopharmaceutical giant AbbVie and BioArctic, a research-intensive Swedish biopharmaceutical company to develop antibodies (immunotherapy) based on promising science discovered by BioArctic that could stop progression of the debilitating Parkinson’s disease (PD). The partners wish to share their experiences so that both their companies and others may benefit. The Rhythm of Business was engaged after their collaboration had achieved its primary objective to help the partners examine their alliance, identify repeatable practices, and tell their story. Read Part One The Making of a True Collaboration.
Getting to “Happy-Happy”
The synergy equation of 1+1=3 is an axiom of partnering, implying that the goal is to create value that cannot be achieved alone. Sweden’s BioArctic takes it a step further, looking to achieve the state of “happy-happy” with their partners. This next generation of the classic win-win focuses on “satisfaction, relationship, the cooperation, and the future.”
[1] It is a way of getting to an agreement that is open, transparent, non-competitive, and assumes that each party gets what it wants by helping the other parties to the relationship get what they want. This “give and get logic” is the essence of collaboration; core to how to create, deliver, and capture true value in an alliance. As BioArctic’s project leader explains, “It is important to listen to the partner and unde...
1. Partnering Guide / June 30th, 2020
This is the first in a series of posts from allianceboard, a next generation alliance management platform and The Rhythm of Business on why the time has come to digitize your practice to drive value for stakeholders, your partners, and you.
The Time to Digitize is Now
We’re Zooming and Hanging Out every day. Going-to-Meeting, Teaming, and Webexing from morning until night. These conferencing apps are familiar tools to alliance managers; it is just that our reliance on them has grown as we manage alliances from a distance. As helpful as they are when meeting virtually, approximating face-to-face meetings except for the essential relationship-building step of breaking bread and raising a glass, they facilitate only a portion of alliance management activity that provides the services stakeholders value. The demands of remote work lay bare the need to accelerate an essential component of applying agile principles to alliance management—digitizing certain aspects of alliance management workflow and admin...
1. Partnering Guide / June 6th, 2020
This is Part One of a three-part series about an exemplary research collaboration between global biopharmaceutical giant AbbVie and BioArctic, a research-intensive Swedish biopharmaceutical company to develop antibodies (immunotherapy) based on promising science discovered by BioArctic that could stop progression of the debilitating Parkinson’s disease (PD). The partners wish to share their experiences so that both their companies and others may benefit. The Rhythm of Business was engaged after their collaboration had achieved its primary objective to help the partners examine their alliance, identify repeatable practices, and tell their story.
At the September 2014 Parkinson’s Congress in Stockholm, Sweden, Gunilla Osswald, CEO of BioArctic approached the AbbVie booth and asked whom she should talk with about her company’s Parkinson’s Disease program. She was directed to AbbVie’s Europe-based search and evaluation team member who told her that BioArctic’s program was too early for AbbVie to consider. “Come back when you’ve humanized the antibody,” he said.
Fifteen months later, having successfully humanized the antibody, Osswald was meeting with AbbVie’s search and evaluation lead for neuroscience at a partnering conference. Their meeting was supposed to be a brief 20 minutes. Layer-by-layer it became 90 minutes of scientific discovery. It was the first step in establishing a critical trust building foundation for what would become a successful collaboration on promising science to treat a disease with no known cure.
This partn...
1. Partnering Guide / May 9th, 2020
As we try to find our way to the next normal for the economy and our lives, a tremendous leadership challenge presents itself to alliance professionals: How to reimagine the people-centric business of partnering when team members’ personal lives are disrupted or worse, remote work is the norm, there is great economic uncertainty, and intense pressure on resources? Add to this the fact that cross-industry, multi-partner as well as public-private collaboration is required to innovate our way out of this crisis. The number of partnerships for tests, vaccines, treatments, and medical equipment is exploding, as this
graphic from CB Insights (Figure1) depicts. How can alliance management expertise be applied to this speed, scale, and scope of partnering so that time and money is not squandered by the inherent inefficiencies in partnering?
Even bef...
1. Partnering Guide / March 15th, 2020
This is Part One of a Four Part post on adapting and applying certain principles of agile management as a means of meeting the increased demand for alliance management services as the scale, scope, and complexity of biopharmaceutical asset, service, digital, and data alliances and partnerships grows.
Download a pdf of all four parts of “Reimagining Alliance Management as an Agile Capability” plus “What to Do When it Gets ‘Just Too Hard.’”
In our post
What to Do When It Gets “Just Too Hard” we describe a challenge biopharmaceutical alliance professionals are facing: How to provide proactive, value creating alliance management services to company stakeholders and partners when the number, variety, and technical complexity of partnerships exceeds the ability of alliance managers to implement a traditional management model across the scale and scope of the overall corporate portfolio. A promising approach to the problem lies in adapting and applying certain principles of agile management. In this post we explore what is meant by agile and how it can be implemented in an alliance managemen...
1. Partnering Guide / March 14th, 2020
This is Part Two of a Four Part post on adapting and applying certain principles of agile management as a means of meeting the increased demand for alliance management services as the scale, scope, and complexity of biopharmaceutical asset, service, digital, and data alliances and partnerships grows.
Download a pdf of all four parts of “Reimagining Alliance Management as an Agile Capability” plus “What to Do When it Gets ‘Just Too Hard.’”
Read Part One of Reimagining Alliance Management as an Agile Capability
Practice Component 1: Resourcing the Portfolio
One of the key reasons for reimagining alliance management as an agile capability is because there is currently a mismatch between the scale of enterprise partnering and professional alliance management resources.
Current practice addresses this through traditional tiering and scoping that result in unmanaged alliances and diminished value to stakeholders of alliance managers who are spread too thin to deeply en...
1. Partnering Guide / March 13th, 2020
This is Part Three of a Four Part post on adapting and applying certain principles of agile management as a means of meeting the increased demand for alliance management services as the scale, scope, and complexity of biopharmaceutical asset, service, digital, and data alliances and partnerships grows.
Download a pdf of all four parts of “Reimagining Alliance Management as an Agile Capability” plus “What to Do When it Gets ‘Just Too Hard.’”
Read Part One or Part Two of Reimagining Alliance Management as an Agile Capability
Practice Component 2: Increasing the Agility of Alliance Management Practices
There are many ways to build agility into alliance management practices. The Service Level Agreements between alliance managers and stakeholders shape expectations and focus resources on the work that delivers the greatest value to stakeholders and enhances the partner experience. Successful implementation of services requires standardization, meaning that everyone understands the language and how t...
1. Partnering Guide / March 12th, 2020
This is Part Four of a Four Part post on adapting and applying certain principles of agile management as a means of meeting the increased demand for alliance management services as the scale, scope, and complexity of biopharmaceutical asset, service, digital, and data alliances and partnerships grows.
Download a pdf of all four parts of “Reimagining Alliance Management as an Agile Capability” plus “What to Do When it Gets ‘Just Too Hard.’”
Read Part One, Part Two, or Part Three of "Reimagining Alliance Management as an Agile Capability"
Practice Component 3: Adapting the Alliance Management Organization
Typically, the resourcing model has been that each alliance has one alliance manager and that each individual has responsibility for multiple alliances. Certainly, there are exceptions for very large and complex alliances, and in advanced companies that have recognized the need for new ways of working, but by and large the traditional model remains entrenched. This means that alliance management functions, groups, or teams do not operate as teams; they operate as collections of individual contributors. Agility depends on purpose driv...
1. Partnering Guide / January 21st, 2020
Thus far in this series of posts on collaboration, we’ve defined it as a
purposeful, strategic behavior that is easier said than done. This is because of both a failure to build the
capability—the mindset, skillset, and toolset—to collaborate across boundaries and the
collaboration paradox—the systems, processes, and policies that helped companies be successful in the past that today impede their ability to collaborate. In this post we look at both
collaborative leadership and the
leadership system required to support and implement the capability as the antidote to the people and organizational challenges of achieving success in cross-boundary collaborations....
1. Partnering Guide / January 2nd, 2020
A very successful entrepreneur once told us she knew it was time to iterate her assumptions and change her business when the current way she was doing something was “just too hard.” Ever since that conversation, we watch for this signal. Alliance management within biopharmaceutical firms is showing many signs of hitting the tipping point where it is just too hard to continue implementing alliance management practices as is typically done. One of the key issues raised during our 2018 research project with more than 30 biopharmaceutical companies both large and small was the challenge of an ever-increasing workload—both a growing portfolio to manage and the increasing technical complexity of the alliances making up the portfolio.
[1]
Lat...
1. Partnering Guide / December 26th, 2019
In our post
Collaboration: Easier Said Than Done we said that leadership systems had to evolve to break the collaboration paradox—the barriers that impede collaboration, but enabled success in a prior business environment. That’s one part of the puzzle of making collaboration—a strategic and purposeful way of behaving and working— an organizational capability. There are also operational and execution skills to collaboration between entities in addition to the psychological skills and values such as openness, empathy, and delegation that are typically present when individuals behave collaboratively.
[1]
Behaviors are ways of conducting oneself or how a group acts in response to its environment. On a psychological level, collaboration is a natural response to an environment of trust, transparency and respect. In that nurturing environment, one is more likely to be open to other’s ideas, empathetic to their concerns, and willing to give up some level of control and credit.
Organizations agree to collaborate to
leverage and align the resources of each party for customer benefit which should result in mutual benefit for the collaborators. This requires uniting two or more entities that each have their own strategies, structures, cultures, goals, and processes,
crossing organizational boundaries to access those resources. This adds complexity, risk, and challenge to the endeavor....
1. Partnering Guide / December 9th, 2019
Collaboration is a business buzzword that everyone thinks they know what it means and how to do it, but few truly do; yet it has never been more important than it is today. In addition to the lack of collaborative skills and mindset would-be collaborators also face a
Collaboration Paradox— the systems, processes, and policies that have enabled success in the past reinforce barriers impeding success in today’s ecosystem-based collaborative business models. Developing the necessary capability—the mindset, skillset, and toolset for intra- and inter-organizational collaboration—is a work in process for most organizations. This capability also needs a backbone to latch itself to—the culture, policies, and processes of a
leadership system that enable and encourage collaborative ways of working.
...
1. Partnering Guide / July 9th, 2019
The 11
th Global Peter Drucker Forum is all about the power of ecosystems and managing in a networked world, topics that are near and dear to us. They are hosting an excellent blog that has many contributors and posts. Check out
our contribution that argues that without an enterprise partnering capability, it could become the Achilles’ heel – the exposed and unprotected weak spot – of any business seeking to create, deliver, and capture value in through ecosystems.
1. Partnering Guide / May 31st, 2019
download a pdf of the slide deck
access the full webinar
The data keeps rolling in: The companies that are successful in becoming digitally-enabled and customer-obsessed—and therefore prepared to compete as we enter the 2020s—are those best able to collaborate internally and externally. This dynamic of Technology + Partnering together are redefining and rewiring organizations, necessitating a new collaborative leadership system to serve as the backbone that supports agile collaborative execution.
The objective of the leadership system? To ensure that companies are
ready to partner; purposefully and opportunistically, in one-to-one relationships, multi-partner engagements, and in ecosystems. Partner readiness for the 2020s is not as simple as having an alliance management team that supports a center of excellence offering tools and training. Partnering readiness is embodied in every leadership action, operational structure, and execution motion. It extends through strategy, product, marketing, sales, support and management. It is
the strategic imperative for alliance leaders today.
View our recent
ASAP Netcast webinar or download the
slide deck to evaluate how ready your company is to compete and succeed in the 2020s.
1. Partnering Guide / April 2nd, 2019
Author: Jan Twombly
At the recent ASAP Global Alliance Summit, we conducted an abbreviated version of our workshop, Own Your Transformation: A Five-Point Agenda for Empowering Collaborative Leadership, with alliance professionals from info tech, biopharma, and fintech, as well as other industries where partnering is as essential as the technology. The objective of the session was to design a collaborative leadership system to break through the barriers organizations typically put up to true collaborat...
1. Partnering Guide / December 20th, 2018
Earlier this month, we presented and recorded a
webinar to expand upon our mini e-book that we wrote together with our partner
Alliancesphere,
Own Your Transformation: A Five-Point Agenda for Creating Your Organization’s Collaborative Leadership System. The key message of the presentation is to urge alliance professionals to take charge of closing the gap between the happy talk about the importance of partnering and the actual ability of organizations to collaborate and partner well in a digital world....
1. Partnering Guide / November 6th, 2018
download the pdf
Technology + Partnering together are today’s business imperative. They are redefining and rewiring organizations and what it means to be a leader. Partnering is happening everywhere, requiring collaborating internally and externally—at all levels and across all functions—with unprecedented speed, scale, and scope. It is apparent to leaders now:
digital transformation doesn’t happen without robust partnering capability.
The challenge and opportunity for today’s collaborative leaders could not be more meaningful and impactful:
How will you create, deploy, and integrate a leadership system for collaboration from top-to-bottom and end-to-end, overcoming organizational boundaries, inertia, and old ways of leading?
The SMART Partnering Alliance of The Rhythm of Business and Alliancesphere offer a
five-point collaborative leader’s transformation agenda— a roadmap for creating your organization’s leadership system for a rapidly changing digital world.
1. Partnering Guide / October 15th, 2018
In 2016, former US President Jimmy Carter announced that he no longer required treatment for his metastatic melanoma that had spread to his brain and liver. After six months of being treated with the immunotherapy pembrolizumab (trade name KEYTRUDA), together with surgery and radiation therapy, doctors had seen no sign of his disease for three months. This was a remarkable development—before pembrolizumab was approved in 2011, President Carter’s cancer likely would have been fatal.
Known as a “checkpoint inhibitor” pembrolizumab and other drugs in its class work—in simplest terms—by turbocharging the body’s immune system so that it can fight cancer. Its success, and the success of other similar drugs, such as avelumab (trade name BAVENCIO), and nivolumab (trade name OPDIVO), have unleashed a tsunami of clinical collaborations to identify how using these drugs in combination might expand and extend their significant patient benefits—and maximize their value to the biopharma companies that are de...
1. Partnering Guide / September 15th, 2018
It has been said by more than one executive that having too much work for her team to manage is a “high-class problem to have.” If you buy that thinking, biopharma alliance executives have a very high-class problem to cope with!
The Rhythm of Business has interviewed over 30 alliance executives from a wide-range of biopharma, biotech, and animal health companies to understand and report on the current state of practice. Our core finding is that alliance management is here to stay in biopharma. It is viewed as a strategic capability, essential to the organization, with increasing C-Suite visibility and support.
What we’ve also learned is that alliance management teams are dealing with growing portfolios of alliances to manage along with greater technical components to their alliances. Some 86 percent of interviewees report growin...
1. Partnering Guide / May 1st, 2018
Partnering at the speed of business requires the entrepreneurial agility to adapt and evolve, especially when pursuing a business transformation agenda. Agility and nimbleness can be quite challenging in complex partnerships that must navigate the strategies, structures, processes, and cultures of two or more companies to get anything done...
1. Partnering Guide / March 6th, 2018
Lorin Coles, our partner at Alliancesphere, often says, “There is a difference between vibration and forward motion.” The winners in business today recognize speed is the currency of business—and using it to move in the right direction is equally critical. With apologies to Lewis Carroll, too many companies take the approach of “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will do.”
When it comes to building the partnerships that allow you to co-create, co-develop, and monetize complex solutions, being ready to move forward with haste takes a robust framework that lets you identify and engage with the right partners at the right time...
1. Partnering Guide / February 4th, 2018
AUTHOR:
Jeff Shuman
As January drew to a close, I couldn’t help but to think back 20 years, to the end of January 1998, the month my book, The Rhythm of Business: The Key to Building and Running Successful Companies was first published.[1] It describes the natural development process successful entrepreneurs use to build and run their businesses.
In metaphor and in reality, successful entrepreneurs feel the rhythm of their business. When they do, they know what they need to learn about their customers, the partner ecosystem, and the business model that will create, deliver, and capture value for all concerned. That focus on “getting smart quickly” lets them operate with necessary speed and the agility to adjust with quick, easy grace as they learn what enables their success.
...
1. Partnering Guide / December 28th, 2017
AUTHORS: Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman
Speed is the new currency of business, says Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO at Salesforce. And he’s spot on!
Bain’s Firm of the Future practice makes the key point that “success depends on how firms deliver the benefits of scale and intimacy better and faster to customers.”
[1] What is unsaid is that it takes an ecosystem of partners too, because of the complexity of the technologies and the domain expertise required to apply them within specific use cases. And these partners probably are not the same ones that help you service enterprise customers with traditional solutions, or where the purpose of the partnership was for balance of trade.
For example, indu...
1. Partnering Guide / August 30th, 2017
AUTHOR: Jan Twombly
download pdf
The July/August issue of Pharmaceutical Outsourcing features our recent article on building the mindset, skillset, and toolset to collaborate with providers—and maximize the performance of your biopharma ecosystem.
The article highlights Forma Therapeutics, a quickly growing integrated drug discovery and development company, that has a very collaborative and innovative culture that clearly works to its benefit. The Company just announced an extension of its 2014 collaboration with Celgene to “evaluate additional therapeutic candidates across important emerging target families in the areas of protein homeostasis, inflammation & immunology, and neuro...
1. Partnering Guide / December 8th, 2016
AUTHOR: Jan Twombly
Everywhere – In every place or part; in all places. The power to partner everywhere means that throughout your business, wherever it engages with external partners, the mindset, skillset, and toolset to partner well are infused in the culture, ingrained in behavior, and integrated into how work gets done.
Building this capability is an urgent organizational imperative. You need it to benefit from the transformation heralded by the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution. The economic and human value these technologies are expected to produce is huge – as much as $11 trillion per year from the Internet of Things, just one such technology. The relationship with the customer is being upended and business processes and business models are being reshaped by these technologies. But no one company can do it alone. The speed, scale, and scope of partnering required today are unprecedented. Partnering is ubiquitous. To benefit, you need a next generation partnering everywhere capability.
The Power to Partner Everywhere: Why You Need It, What It Is, How to Build It, the latest publication from SMART Partnering,TM a venture of The Rhythm of Business and...
1. Partnering Guide / October 13th, 2016
AUTHORS: Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman
Maybe it is starting to sink in. Just maybe it is starting to be understood. The ways and the depth with which we connect with others, connect our organizations, and share data, knowledge, and experience are driving business, societal, and personal value. This means managing external collaborative relationships well – a.k.a. partnerships and alliances – makes a difference in the outcomes we get!
Here are two recent studies that see the light:
...
1. Partnering Guide / July 25th, 2016
AUTHOR: Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman
Our previous blog post stated that partnering could be either the connective tissue or the Achilles’ Heel of a company’s efforts to capitalize upon the tremendous opportunities offered by the Internet of Things (IoT)--and all the technologies enabling the digitization of business, the shift to everything as a service (XaaS), and outcomes-based business models. We said that smart companies are rethinking their partnering practices from the customer back – and finding that what they’ve been doing is no longer sufficient for the speed, scale, and scope of partnering today.
At the crux of the issue is that in order to deliver the turnkey solutions customers require, companies need the ability to assemble just the right mix of partners for that customer scenario – and hope that can become a replicable industry use case, relevant for many more customers without tremendous customization. The path for achieving this appears to be a targeted and precise vertical focus.
...
1. Partnering Guide / May 3rd, 2016
AUTHORS: Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman
The Internet of Things (IoT) is upending partnering “best practices.” One practice is clear: no company succeeds alone. It takes an ecosystem.
This is partnering at a scale, scope, and speed unprecedented until now. It requires creativity and bold experimentation. Companies must learn quickly, iterate strategies, manage complexity, and try new models for value creation, delivery, and capture.
“We know how to partner. We’ve been doing it for 20 years.” These are deadly words when said about partnering for the Internet of Things....
1. Partnering Guide / April 6th, 2016
AUTHORS: Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman
In a recent appearance at the Boston College CEO Club, GE’s Jeff Immelt remarked that one of the reasons GE is moving its headquarters to Boston is that he wants to be in the “sea of ideas” driving the innovation and change that surrounds the industrial internet. In his words, he wants people “terrified and paranoid” because all the innovation and change around them could make them obsolete if they don’t evolve and grow, too.
While some may consider this an overstatement, there is enough change happening in business models, strategies, operations, and how leading companies execute for success to give us pause and ask:
Shouldn’t partnering models and practices evolve, to...
1. Partnering Guide / February 29th, 2016
AUTHORS: Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman
If it is March it must be time for the ASAP Global Summit! This year’s conference – the last one for which Jan is leading the programming, stepping down from the role after 7 years – is organized under the theme of Partnering Everywhere: Leadership for the Ecosystem. The programming committee chose this theme because of how pervasive partnering has become across the enterprise and the diversity of business and partnering models that are developing across all industries. Businesses are partnering with companies and institutions never thought about previously. Cross-sector and multipartner arrangements are proliferating. Value is not just financial; it is multifaceted and evolves uniquely as each partnership matures.
Success in ecosystem partnering is not happenstance—it takes careful design. Three components—strategy, governance, and execution—must work together seamlessly to give your organization the partnering capability it requires today.
At The Rhythm of Business and in the work of the transformation-focused SMART Partnering™ Alliance with Alliancesphere that we announced at the 2015 ASAP Global Summit, we are confronting this challenge head...
1. Partnering Guide / December 23rd, 2015
AUTHOR: Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman
As we reach the end of 2015, we can only look back at an amazing year and ahead with giddy anticipation of what 2016 will bring. This is the year we finally hit the tipping point in the transformation of business that first prompted us to begin our journey into...
1. Partnering Guide / June 8th, 2015
AUTHOR: Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman
Over the years partnering has gone through many cycles, falling in and out of favor but still somehow, never really being considered a strategy of choice, unless a company was born with it as part of its core business model. In most traditional companies, sen...
1. Partnering Guide / April 25th, 2015
AUTHOR: Jan Twombly
We are pleased to offer a complimentary SMART Partnering Assessment of your company’s partnering capability. Simply complete this brief 15 question, 5-minute survey and you will be provided with customized feedback from the SMART Partnering Alliance – The Rhythm of Busine...
1. Partnering Guide / February 27th, 2015
AUTHOR: Jan Twombly
It is ASAP Global Summit time again and as we head to snow free and warm Orlando, Florida from the grasp of one of the two worst winters in Boston’s recorded weather history, we are excited about more than the chance to leave the snow boots and shovels at home!
At the Su...
1. Partnering Guide / January 26th, 2015
AUTHOR: Jeff Shuman
I just finished reading Walter Isaacson’s new book, the Innovators. To my surprise, I couldn’t put it down. At 560 pages with over 1000 reference notes covering the period from 1834 to 2014, it is not a casual read. But for this life-long student of computers and collaborat...
1. Partnering Guide / December 31st, 2014
AUTHOR: Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman
As 2014 winds to a close, we pause to reflect on the past year and to think about what the New Year may bring. It has been a pretty good year for partnering professionals and anyone who believes in the power of collaboration.
Brilliant new partnerships inte...
1. Partnering Guide / November 16th, 2014
AUTHOR: Jan Twombly
I had the pleasure of moderating the ASAP New England Chapter’s event earlier this month, Alliance Management in an Age of Disruption. Our panel of cross-industry alliance professionals tackled a number of issues, including:
1. Partnering Guide / September 29th, 2014
AUTHOR: Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman
Over the past several months we have thought a lot about a question that is both challenging and imperative:
How can alliance managers more directly and more successfully improve partnering outcomes?
We’ve long worked to enhance and increase the impa...
1. Partnering Guide / June 30th, 2014
AUTHOR: Jeff Shuman
We have travelling quite a bit lately. One of the few benefits of long-range travel is that it gives me a chance to catch up on my reading! Here are a few more books to add to your summer reading list - -this time on strategic thinking and partnering.
The first is ELEVATE...
1. Partnering Guide / May 23rd, 2014
AUTHOR: Jeff Shuman and Jan Twombly
If you are like me, you are in the process of selecting the books you want to read over the summer. The good news is that with e-books it’s a lot easier to “pack” a number of books as you head off for vacation or just try to squeeze in some beach ti...
1. Partnering Guide / May 17th, 2013
Author: Jan Twombly
When it comes to business buzzwords that have lost all meaning, “partner” is likely at the top of the list. Everyone is a partner today. Whether decision making, investment, risk and profit are shared or the objective is to shake down a service provider to the point wher...
