Culture is an essential topic when it comes to creating and managing successful alliances and partnerships. Culture determines to a large extent how people behave and communicate. With two or more organizations working together you will face at least two and likely more different cultures. In this fireside chat we discuss some of the cultural aspects in alliances.
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Culture and Alliances – Video transcript:
Peter: All right. There we are again on our next fireside chat. Hello Anoop.
Anoop: Hey, good afternoon, Peter. How are you doing?
Peter: I’m doing fine today. How are you today?
Anoop: Good. I’m just doing good
Peter: We had some interesting questions in our webinar last week. Most of them, we could actually answer live in the webinar. But it was one that we said, well, maybe we need to dive a little bit deeper. But just in our pre chat, we really realize that if we really go deep into this topic, we can spend a whole afternoon and that’s when we lose people that have been and that’s not the purpose of the fireside chat. All right, and we’re talking about culture. A very broad topic. Absolutely. So what would be your first take on culture and alliances?
Anoop: I think it’s really important. I did the thing that I’ve seen is the importance of culture. You need culture. You need the right culture within an organization in order to align people internally first of all, as we’ve spoken, if you don’t get internal alignment, you, you’re gonna find it difficult to align externally etc. So there are, I’ve seen two types of cultures in an organization. One is a command and control based culture where it is very authoritative. And an organization will say, we’ll take the not invented here syndrome and say, This is my culture, I want to do it my way. And then you have a trust based culture where an organization will trust the open mindedness around collaborating and partnering internally, as well as externally. There are many examples of that, Peter. So as you said, we’re not going to cover this in, in this particular chat, etc. So from that perspective, Peter, what are things that you’ve seen? What are the things that you’ve talked about in terms of culture?
Peter: Well, when it comes to culture and a couple of elements, there are internal elements and our external elements and there is a famous, well famous among the alliance people, report by I believe it was from Ard-Pieter de Man. It’s in the DNA, where it’s about research about what companies work well and what companies perform not so well and how it relates to culture when it comes to alliances. And there you see a couple of elements and what I always remember and I see that also with clients or companies that are doing very well in collaborative efforts externally, is there was one element about signs and language used internally. So when you talk collaboratively internally, and you use the signs of your partners also internally and you show internally that you are those external companies are basically an extended part of your company, then it’s all into one element into one piece. And it’s really bringing the culture towards a collaborative external culture. So that’s one on the inside. On the outside, I see when working together with two companies, you still have two different cultures there that you try to work together. And now we safely assume that we only have a company culture and we have a company culture. Of course, there are multiple layers and there are also country cultures there, there are all other cultures that are influencing the two cultures working together. But we need to come to a third culture basically, creating a collaborative culture for the two companies created together. And that’s where we talk also in our master classes about the operating principles. So we basically create a set of rules that we agree to adhere to, in our way of working together. So that’s in a nutshell what I see when you ask me quickly, so what do you see about culture?
Anoop: Correct, Peter? And I think there’s some there’s one thing that we’ve talked about a lot I and I talked about as well, and I and I, it’s something that we can address at some of the points It’s it’s the ABCD, right? You spoke about the language, etc. And how do we get to the right culture and having the right language and all that kind of stuff. But the ABCD model is a good model. And it’s something that we could probably pick up but at some other point in time, but we talked about that within our master class as well.
Peter: Yeah. And to open up a tip of the surprise that’s coming and a couple of months, it would be an excellent topic to dive deep into in our alliance accelerator community.
Anoop: Absolutely. Good idea, Peter. Okay, all right.
Peter: I think that’s it for today. Anoop
Anoop: I think so. I think super next time. Absolutely. Thanks, Peter.