The Partnering Guide™
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Alliance Management Capability
We’re launching a video series: Partnering on the Edge: The Hard Work of Partnering Well. As part of our deep and long-standing engagement with ASAP, it will be made available to the ASAP community as sponsored content as well as on our YouTube channel and...
Biopharma leaders already understand the industry’s business model has fundamentally shifted. Partnering isn’t an adjunct to internal R&D or a strategic lever pulled selectively. It is the operating model. The work of discovering, developing, and delivering...
Biopharma alliances succeed or fail for reasons that are often misunderstood. Many leaders still assume that partner selection, strategic fit, or agreement quality determine performance. These factors matter, but they do not explain why alliances with similar science,...
In today’s biopharma landscape, complexity is the constant. Portfolios are expanding—not just in size, but in diversity. Collaborations span research to commercialization, startups to multinationals, and molecules to digital platforms. Meanwhile, tightening budgets,...
The biopharmaceutical environment is defined by uncertainty and turbulence. Indiscriminate and sudden cancellation of research grants, workforce contractions, shifting regulatory and policy landscapes, and supply chain instability have become the new reality. Add...
We certainly aren’t clairvoyant, although we have a crystal ball that sits on a shelf in our library. If you try to look through it, what you see is pretty murky. To the contrary, we believe the future for alliance management is coming into focus. Collaboration is the...
Many companies rely on partnering today for significant portions of pipeline and revenue. Here’s how they can get better at it. Across the biopharma industry, we see that an increasingly diverse ecosystem of organizations are involved in identifying new drug...
We’ve made the point that companies today need an organizational partnering capability just as they need a financial or talent development capability. To know the contours of what that capability needs to be, look to the company’s partnering strategy. Every company...
The March 28, 2024 ASAP Webinar shared the journey savvy alliance leaders are taking to evolve their practices from a standalone function to an organizational capability. This evolution in impact and influence is essential, given that partnering is central today to...
Partnering and alliances are easy! Two or more companies decide they want to do something together and they just do it. Right? Not really. Because alliances combine the different strategies, structures, cultures, and processes of the partners, it takes skill and...
Alliance Management Practices
We’re launching a video series: Partnering on the Edge: The Hard Work of Partnering Well. As part of our deep and long-standing engagement with ASAP, it will be made available to the ASAP community as sponsored content as well as on our YouTube channel and...
Strategic misalignment is not a rare disruption in biopharmaceutical alliances—it is an expected outcome of operating in a dynamic, interdependent industry. It is an inevitability, driven by shifting portfolios, leadership turnover, scientific advances, and external...
Alliances have long been a core strategy of biopharmaceutical companies. From early-stage biotech discovery partnerships to global codevelopment and cocommercialization pacts, these collaborations create value for the partners by accelerating drug development,...
Far from Mundane, Alliance Operations Is How Alliance Work Gets Done—and Can Make the Difference Between a Successful Alliance and One Plagued by Delays, Cost Overruns, and Other Inefficiencies As sources of innovation and growth, strategic alliances and other...
When collaboration is central to strategy, alliance management must be an organizational capability. Part of that evolution is expanding focus from individual alliances to alliance portfolios. A portfolio is simply a grouping of items that share a similar...
You know your alliance management team does a good job, but how does it compare against other teams with similar portfolios? Where does it stand relative to the “gold standard” of alliance management? You’d like to benchmark your practice to smartly focus individuals’...
Leading alliances do better at realizing their intended value, aligning around a strategy, and making decisions in a timely manner. One reason? Their Joint Steering Committees (JSC) are more effective. Our Q4 2023 article for Strategic Alliance Quarterly presents data...
Next to Hyde Park and a stone’s throw from Kensington Palace, alliance practitioners, advisors, and academics gathered at the Royal Garden Hotel on Kensington High Street, London September 20-22 for the ASAP European Alliance Summit. The conference was the perfect mix...
If biopharma alliance governance isn’t effective, the alliance won’t succeed – or at the least it won’t be as successful as it could be. That’s why leading the governance process is one of the most valuable and visible activities of alliance managers. There is a lot...
It is a perennial question: What is the impact of effective alliance management? After all, alliance professionals don’t develop products or ensure they get into the hands of customers. Their equally important contribution to success is to ensure that alliance...
Alliance Management Skills
September features both an online presentation and the ASAP Summit London. Our focus is on the alliance leader’s evolving mandate to maximize value capture from their alliances. On September 9, we will be leading an online program incorporating roundtable discussions...
Historically, alliance professionals have faced challenges engaging senior executives effectively. Too often, interactions center on routine updates rather than forward-looking, strategic discussions. At the 2025 ASAP Summit in Denver, Jan Twombly shared techniques to...
The Rhythm of Business is proud to once again sponsor ASAP’s European Summit in London 17-19 September and the ASAP Biopharma Conference in Boston November 4 – 6. The European Summit is a cross-industry even that has quickly become the leading European conference on...
What happens when companies in an alliance find they have significant philosophical differences they just can’t align? It can be a recipe for stalemate and escalation. Decisions are delayed and value is lost. These differences can often be hard to uncover, hidden by...
One of the great things about managing alliances is that no two days are ever the same. You never know what challenge will unexpectedly land in your inbox or the new opportunity you’ll discover. Add to the variety of situations alliance professionals must manage the...
As Seen in Strategic Alliance Quarterly – Positive Influence: The Alliance Professional’s Superpower
As seen in Strategic Alliance Quarterly, this article describes what positive influence is and how to use it to align actions, make good decisions, and solve problems within your alliance. Using influence involves exchanging what those with the power to advance or...
Using the power of positive influence is an essential skill alliance professionals must master. 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...
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...
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...
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...
Collaboration
The biopharma industry’s business model now depends structurally and irreversibly on multi-party execution. Scientific, regulatory, political, and commercial conditions have converged to create unprecedented interdependence. Modalities are more diverse. Clinical...
Alliances have long been a core strategy of biopharmaceutical companies. From early-stage biotech discovery partnerships to global codevelopment and cocommercialization pacts, these collaborations create value for the partners by accelerating drug development,...
Historically, alliance professionals have faced challenges engaging senior executives effectively. Too often, interactions center on routine updates rather than forward-looking, strategic discussions. At the 2025 ASAP Summit in Denver, Jan Twombly shared techniques to...
Collaboration Is Not a Discrete Skill but a Way of Working—and the Data Shows That Improving Your Teams’ Collaboration Leads to Improved Alliance Results. ...
What happens when companies in an alliance find they have significant philosophical differences they just can’t align? It can be a recipe for stalemate and escalation. Decisions are delayed and value is lost. These differences can often be hard to uncover, hidden by...
Alliances frequently operate with consensus decision making. Explore the benefits and challenges of achieving consensus. Learn techniques that will help your alliance make the best decisions it can.
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...
The statistics are daunting. Drug development has an overall failure rate of over 96%. It is especially acute for some of the most debilitating diseases where the biological mechanism that causes the disease state is not well understood. Spreading that risk...
Collaboration is one of the most misunderstood and overused concepts in business today. There are many perspectives on what it is, ranging from the simplistic—working with other people to produce an outcome—to the complexity of the latest technical platform that...
News and Events
We’re launching a video series: Partnering on the Edge: The Hard Work of Partnering Well. As part of our deep and long-standing engagement with ASAP, it will be made available to the ASAP community as sponsored content as well as on our YouTube channel and...
September features both an online presentation and the ASAP Summit London. Our focus is on the alliance leader’s evolving mandate to maximize value capture from their alliances. On September 9, we will be leading an online program incorporating roundtable discussions...
Spring conference season is here and The Rhythm of Business is once again pleased to be sponsoring and speaking at two events focused on advancing the profession of alliance management. Jan Twombly will be sharing some of our recent work at two upcoming conferences,...
Despite the uncertainty and turbulence defining our economic environment, it has never been more important to partner effectively and realize the intended value of alliances. Based on recent experiences with forward-thinking alliance leaders, a number of core...
We are pleased to once again sponsor the 2025 Strategic Alliance Management Congress – and this year it is in Boston on March 25 and 26! Jan will be leading an interactive workshop examining real-world scenarios and sharing frameworks and tools for helping alliance...
The Rhythm of Business is proud to once again sponsor ASAP’s European Summit in London 17-19 September and the ASAP Biopharma Conference in Boston November 4 – 6. The European Summit is a cross-industry even that has quickly become the leading European conference on...
We are proud to once again sponsor the ASAP Global Alliance Summit being held April 29 - May 1, 2024 in Cape Coral, Florida. This not be missed cross-industry event features many opportunities to hone your alliance management skills, connect with fellow professionals,...
The March 28, 2024 ASAP Webinar shared the journey savvy alliance leaders are taking to evolve their practices from a standalone function to an organizational capability. This evolution in impact and influence is essential, given that partnering is central today to...
Next to Hyde Park and a stone’s throw from Kensington Palace, alliance practitioners, advisors, and academics gathered at the Royal Garden Hotel on Kensington High Street, London September 20-22 for the ASAP European Alliance Summit. The conference was the perfect mix...
The Rhythm of Business is proud to once again sponsor and speak at the ASAP European Alliance Summit in London, September 20-22 and the ASAP Biopharma Conference in Boston, November 6 – 8. These two ASAP signature alliance management events offer alliance...
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