Join us on February 17, 2021 for an interactive presentation Techniques for Successfully Collaborating with Strategic Suppliers and Partners presented to the Project Management Institute’s Mass Bay Chapter. The session, which will be held over Zoom, introduces participants to:

• Pros and cons of typical collaborative operating models and how to decide what is right for your collaboration
• How to establish appropriate oversight and feedback models that provide freedom to operate
• Understanding how to use value and influence, the secret sauce of collaboration
• How to build trust across organizational boundaries—and why there is no collaboration without trust

We also share a practical framework for joint solution development projects that gets you on the path to successful partnering, producing the solutions customers want. Register today!

Top Five Opportunities for Getting a Little Better Every Day

On February 24, we present the trends we see in our work over the past two years with biopharma alliance professionals about the small changes in everyday practice of alliance fundamentals that can make a big difference in outcomes.

This ASAP Netcast webinar presents five opportunities to improve operational excellence in alliance management that not only deliver value on their own, they also create time and space for pursuing higher value services.

Practical tools and learnings presented include:

• A step-by-step inquiry process to create alignment to guide an alliance’s decision making
• A chartering process and Collaborative Leadership Agenda to establish an alliance’s operating model, distribution of responsibilities, and desired behaviors
• A framework for comprehensive and holistic information management and communications within the alliance and between the alliance and its member partners

Getting a little better every day in alliance management fundamentals is a critical strategy both for managing resource constraints and engaging stakeholders in a collaborative approach to alliance success.

Register today! Even if you can’t attend, you’ll have access to the recording and slides.

Download our whitepaper describing the five opportunities and learn about an ASAP Alliance Excellence Award Winner that demonstrates what embracing these opportunities can do for you!
 

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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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

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...

Download an overview of our Digital Alliance Management Training

Pump up the value to demonstrate why alliance management is essential to company success.

Over the past several months we’ve worked with a variety of life science companies to take our traditional, in-person alliance management trainings and convert them to online offerings. In the process, we’ve discovered that online training can be even more successful than in-person workshops. We’ve redesigned many of our popular courses to be delivered over Zoom, incorporating rich interaction in small breakout groups with pre-reads and individual assignments.

We’ve also added a workshop delivered together with our partner allianceboard to guide alliance professionals in automating routine services to expand their reach and influence and to make their...

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...

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...

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....

A diverse group of alliance professionals is convening in Amsterdam on November 14 and 15, 2019 for the ASAP European Alliance Summit. The Rhythm of Business is pleased to sponsor the event for the second year and to be offering Partnering Readiness: The Through Line from Collaborative Leadership to Collaborative Execution. Jan Twombly, CSAP, president will deliver the presentation

Partnering readiness means that throughout the organization, 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.

The goal of partnering readiness is to introduce agility, reduce the inefficiencies in partnering, and ensure that the rhythms of partnering are not met with unnecessary friction and hurdles. This level of partnering everywhere capability is essential today. According to Cap Gemini, Institute for Corporate Productivity, MIT Sloan Management Review and others, 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. These companies are ready to partner; purposefully and opportunistically, in one-to-one relationships, multi-partner engagements, and in ecosystems. They are breaking down barriers, incorporating the activities and rhythms of partnering with agility and ease into their solo activities.

Drawing upon research among the ASAP community and direct engagement with companies building their partnering readiness for today and beyond, the session:

• Presents an actionable framework to describe partnering readiness
• Identifies common organizational barriers to collaboration
• Describes initiatives ASAP members have underway to remove the barriers 

Can’t be at the conference? Download the presentation now and contact us today to learn how you can help your company develop its partnering readiness.

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.

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...

Build speed and agility into partnership development and management by acting like a startup business. Drive customer-obsessed partnering outcomes by demonstrating collaborative leadership. Our two new Learning in Action™ programs help you and your team “get smart quickly” and drive business transformation.  

The Rhythm of Business announces two new Learning in Action™ opportunities to help businesses create and grow the partnerships and alliances they need in order to provide the transformative outcomes customers seek. These programs are delivered in person for maximum learning and include: principles, guidance and tools, application through either a case study or working an actual situation—potentially with a partner—activation support, as well as tracking and reporting of success metrics. Program descriptions and links to session overviews and sample co...

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....

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.