Strategic alliances and alliance management professional development opportunities are aplenty this spring, including online and in-person options. You can find us speaking on the following venues:

March 29, 2022 - ASAP Webinar: Leaning into the Future: Priorities for Biopharma Alliance Professionals
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April 20 - 21, 2022 - ASAP Global Alliance Summit: Master Class Helping Your Partners Help You: Using the Power of Positive Influence and panel discussion How Alliance Professionals Deliver Value in BioPharma Commercial Alliances

May 9 - 11, 2022: Strategic Alliance Management Congress: Top Five Opportunities for Getting a Little Better Every Day

May 18 - 19, 2022 - Biopharma Project Managers' Conference: Everyone Needs Some Alliance Management Skills in the Biopharma Ecosystem

Click more for details about these presentations and links to the...

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.

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....

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...