Description

Successful Alliance Partner selection: Why likability might not be the best criterium.

 

A personal lesson

Twenty years ago I answered the phone to hear my alliance partner in a joint venture tell me that from now on I had to fund our alliance. In the setup of the joint venture we had agreed that he was the financial guy. He was funding it, and I would run the business. Now he suddenly had decided to pull his financing back. And oh, if I didn’t do it, he would blame me for mismanagement and sue me in court. This was the beginning of a nasty six weeks that led to a painful business divorce. I liked my partner, but it appeared that likability wasn’t enough when it came to a successful alliance partner selection.

If I had done my due diligence right I would have found out that the culture of his company was different than what I had in mind. I would have learned from public available information that his financial situation was not as good as he said it was. So, I could have known. But I did not, simply because I liked my counterpart and naively thought that it would work out well together. 

It ended up in a six figure costly lesson on a personal level.

The same Alliance Partner selection mistakes in large organizations

Since then I have learned a lot. Among those learnings is the fact that such an opportunistic approach based on likability does not only happen with small companies. My clients are in general larger organizations and I have seen my own experience happen at a larger scale over and over again. For instance, about nine years ago at a client one business CEO mentioned to his innovation director that he met the CEO of another company at a neighborhood barbecue. At the barbecue they agreed that the two companies would start to work together. Their decision was purely based on personal likability.

The innovation director received the message that it was up to him to make this new partnership work. The innovation director struggled for a long time to find the right value proposition for a partnership. It did not work out. There was no value proposition to be found. Worse, the two organizations had no partner fit between them. Several months later, after a lot of exploratory conversations, the company finally threw in the towel. Likability was not enough as a foundation for an alliance.

This alliance effort did not fail, because it never came off the ground. It only cost them time and money involved with the meetings. And a lot of frustration for the people involved. If both companies would have continued their efforts and started an alliance and invested in it, a failure could have cost them a magnitude of what my failure had cost me.

So how should you manage successful alliance partner selection?

Partner selection, or partner assessment, should be part of the first steps you take in creating alliances and partnerships. It is one of the foundational steps for future success in alliance creation. The two examples illustrate that partner selection is essential on every level. So, how do you do partner selection? Clearly don’t build it purely on likability and don’t start with an executive barbecue conversation! 

A successful Alliance Partner selection is generally done by assessing partner fit in several areas. You should also focus on partner assessment if you have only one candidate that you can work with. The purpose will be to assess where the two organizations are different. It is those differences that will lead to synergies and alliance success. However, make sure to manage some differences carefully during the lifetime of an alliance, to ensure that they will not hamper alliance success.

The most common areas to assess partner fit are strategic fit, operational fit, and cultural fit. Some organizations will add human fit and network fit to the assessment as well. Obviously you will also need to look at skills and capabilities. Will you be able to generate new value together?

The 4-step guide to successful Alliance Partner selection 

The 4-step guide to successful Alliance Partner selection describes a solid methodology for partner selection. The approach described in this book and its belonging tool is based on best practices from highly successful partnerships and is applicable to every organization, regardless of size.

This guide will lead you step by step in your partner selections in a structured, yet pragmatic, way that is based on four foundational steps:

1: The strategic rationale
2: Needs and contributions
3: The ideal partner profile
4: Approach the partner

Follow this methodology and you will increase your chances of building a solid foundation under your partnership. You will need to do the work first and then, when done right, it can bring you an endless return on investment!

 

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Note: the book comes in a package with two formats: ePub for your ereader and PDF for any other platform. The package also contains the partner selection toolkit.