At the ASAP Biopharma Conference, we presented our new Master Class on The Power of Positive Influence: The Alliance Professional’s Superpower. Read the write up about it from the editorial team at ASAP. 

Contact us if you’d like information about bringing the workshop version of this Master Class to your alliance team.

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.   
...

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...

Download the pdf

How can we and our partners achieve operational excellence in a hybrid meeting environment? A mix of technology, planning, creativity, and flexibility is helping alliance professionals find the answers.

The title of this article came from the participant introductions in our sponsor’s executive roundtable following the 2021 ASAP BioPharma Conference, very nicely summing up the sentiments of the assembled. Regardless of the environment, process, or activity, excellence in alliance management is the North Star we strive for. And oh yes—we are likely doing this in a hybrid meeting setting, with some people in a room physically together and others remote. It creates a new dynamic in many ways, especially for making complex decisions, potentially necessitating a more prescriptive approach than was used when everyone was in a room and had built relationships over multiple opportunities to “hug and break bread,” as Jeff likes to say.

Download the pdf of this article that appears in the Q4 2021 issue of Strategic Alliance Quarterly for and exploration of operational excellence in alliance management and insights on pursuing aspects of it in a hybrid governance meeting environment.

The Rhythm of Business is proud to once again be a platinum sponsor of the ASAP Biopharma Conference. This is the premier event for life science alliance management professionals. Even in an all-digital format, there are plenty of opportunities to network, learn from industry leaders, and put your fingers on the pulse of partnerships today.

Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman will lead a Live Stream Master Class session on Monday, September 27^th: Operational Excellence for Consensus Decision Making in Hybrid Environments. Participants will analyze a comprehensive case study in small group discussions and address several questions to:

• Apply leading practices for facilitating hybrid meetings to structure the decision-making process
• Consider how to best prepare executives to properly consider a complex topic when not in a room together
• Overcome the trust barriers that exist because alliance teams haven’t had the venues to properly build relationships during the pandemic

 
Participants’ analysis will be informed by an upfront presentation by Twombly and Shuman that shares some of their most recent work on driving excellence in alliance management practices in a hybrid environment and at a time when alliance management services are in high demand.
 
Twombly is a long-time member of the Board of Directors of ASAP. To see the complete Conference agenda and to register, visit https://asapbiopharma.org.

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...

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.

A Summary of our ASAP 2020 Biopharma Conference Exclusive Executive Roundtable Discussion
 
It is really starting to settle in—there is no going back, there is only moving forward. Whenever we again experience a world where face-to-face meetings, quick drop-ins on a colleague or executive, and maybe even business travel are possible, there are some things we’ve learned in the past six months that make sense to carry forward into that next normal. In our current normal, we are not only figuring out how to deal with distanced work, we’re trying to learn how to innovate with new partners and new partnering models and ensure we deliver what matters most to our stakeholders and alliance partners to realize the outcomes and value intended by both newly formed alliances and those once operating under an entirely different set of assumptions.

These are some of the highlights of our exclusive executive roundtable discussion during the 2020 ASAP Biopharma Conference on September 15, complementing our presentation The Silver Lining: Reimagining Alliance Management to Focus on What Matters Most Now. Link to our conference presentat...

Summary from exclusive ASAP Global Alliance Summit executive virtual roundtable. Download the discussion slides

“We are all operating in a new norm and we need to evolve with it.” So stated one of the alliance executives The Rhythm of Business invited to a virtual roundtable discussion during the 2020 ASAP Global Alliance Summit on reimagining alliance management for the next normal. We approached the topic from two angles:
 

• The impact of COVID-19 on a people-intensive business that depends on good relationships
• The increased demand for alliance management services as companies’ alliance portfolios continued to grow in size, complexity, and new types of digital and service alliances, even before the pandemic

The silver lining of needing to find a next normal is that it gives license to fix what is broken, it forces us to become more resourceful and agile, and focuses us on what...

Download a pdf of presentation

The 2019 ASAP Biopharma Conference is in full swing, with record attendance. The opening day included a session moderated by Jan Twombly, President, The Rhythm of Business on why collaboration between medical affairs teams in complex alliances is crucial and how alliance managers can be certain they are positioned for success, thereby increasing the likelihood the alliance will achieve its intended va...

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...

Jan Twombly, president of The Rhythm of Business is joined by Judy Baselice, director, alliance management at Pfizer and Ellen Locker, executive director, alliance management Merck & Co. at the 2018 ASAP Biopharma Conference in an interactive discussion about the complex web of agreements, restrictions, and obligations resulting from the explosion of clinical collaborations to create combination therapies....

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: 

...

download pdf
Author: Jan Twombly

For its 2012 study of alliance management in the biopharmaceutical industry, The Rhythm of Business surveyed 47 companies from across the globe and found that, on the whole, resources and staffs devoted to alliance management in biopharma are increasing or hol...