Bite-size pieces: withering on the vine...

'...a large Canadian mining corporation, kept all its geological data to itself. This was consistent with the accepted assumptions and practices of the sector, which instinctively tended towards confidentiality and secrecy. Over time, the company became 'data rich', but efficiency and profitability poor. This was because Goldcorp failed to realise the value others external to the organisation could add to the data by analysing, manipulating, developing and presenting it in new, innovative and useful ways. Goldcorp's data was allowed to wither on the virtual vine, its juicy bits of information never harvested and fermented into vintage wisdom and sparkling insights.'




From Sleeping with the Enemy - Achieving Collaborative Success:

          4th Edition                                      

 

For more details click here.

 

 

 

Bite-size pieces: create an attractive identity and reputation

'Where criminals seeking to attract potential partners in crime create identities and reputations that discourage the law abiding but attract a wide selection of the criminally useful, those seeking to collaborate within the legal overworld can create identities and reputations that discourage the non – collaborative but attract a wide selection of the collaborative.

For example, a high profile construction project focused upon building a new rail link to London's Heathrow Airport invested great time and effort into making a collaborative, partnership approach part of their culture and identity. This collaborative culture then ingrained itself into the day – to – day activities of the project, gradually providing it with a reputation that attracted a wide range of suitably skilled and collaboratively inclined businesses and organisations with the potential to work effectively in partnership within the project.'

 

From Sleeping with the Enemy - Achieving Collaborative Success:

          4th Edition                                      

 

For more details click here.

Bite-size pieces: the where and the when

'Criminals go to where their potential partners in crime are likely to be and they go to these places at times when they are likely to meet them, however inconvenient, anti – social or even dangerous doing so may be. 

Legitimate collaborations can certainly learn from this. They often suffer from the ‘Carousel Syndrome’ where the same old faces, the same old partners, turn up again and again and again, whenever a new collaborative initiative is formed. This does not enhance a collaboration's ability to be innovative or to benefit from new perspectives and insights. It also limits the pool of potentially valuable knowledge, experience and expertise a collaboration can call upon.

Being prepared to go to where more 'hard – to – reach' potential partners are, at times and in ways that are convenient to them, however anti – social or even dangerous these may seem, can make all the difference to a partnership's ability to engage effectively with its target audience and gain the knowledge, expertise and resources it needs to achieve its aims.'

 

From Sleeping with the Enemy - Achieving Collaborative Success:

          4th Edition                                      

 

For more details click here.

 

 

Bite-size pieces: magnetise your brokers

'Criminals know that they have to 'magnetise' the brokers or linking people within their collaborative networks and the breeding pools for developing potential partners contained within them. They know it is not enough to introduce and resource brokers, and that it is not even enough to ensure that brokers have good collaborative skills. Criminals know that for brokers to be effective in their roles they need to act as magnets within the network, attracting people to them not just because they have good contacts but also because they possess invaluable knowledge, skills, expertise and experience that aspiring criminals need.

 Those seeking to create legal overworld collaborations need to realise a very similar thing: that to attract potential partners the brokers they introduce to their collaborative networks need to be magnetised with the power of valued and sought after (mostly legal overworld) knowledge, skills, expertise and experience.'

 

From Sleeping with the Enemy - Achieving Collaborative Success:

          4th Edition                                      

 

For more details click here.

Launch of the Fourth Edition of 'Sleeping with the Enemy - Achieving Collaborative Success'

 

Following on from the success of the previous editions, the Fourth Edition of 'Sleeping with the Enemy - Achieving Collaborative Success' will be
published later this month.

The Fourth Edition includes a new extended chapter 'Why should The Devil Have All The Best Collaborations?', which explores what we can learn from the way criminals collaborate.

On the run up to the launch the Third Edition will still be available, and its e-version will still be available to download for free.   

Here is an overview of the Fourth Edition's  Content:

 'An excellent book that outlines the value and benefit of collaborative working...' 

  

This book is about collaborative and partnership working best practice. It describes how to:

• achieve the potential of partnerships and collaborations; 
• engage effectively with hard-to-reach stakeholders; 
• lead partnerships and collaborations effectively;
• work well with competitors; 
• identify differing organisational cultures and manage the interactions between them; 
• manage partnership discussions effectively; 
• encourage partnerships and collaborations to develop and move forward; 
• deal effectively with the conflicting demands that lie at the heart of collaborative efforts; 
• evaluate partnership processes and outcomes; 
• appreciate and use the four principles that underpin effective collaborative working. 

The 4th edition includes a chapter entitled 'Why Should The Devil Have All The Best Collaborations?', which explores what we can learn from the way criminals collaborate. 

  

'Sleeping with the Enemy' is full of tools, techniques and approaches that you can apply to your day-to-day collaborative activities, and many of the book's ideas are explained through the use of practical examples and short case studies. 

  

If you need to set up, maintain and develop a partnership or any other collaborative effort, this book is an indispensable and insightful companion.

Managing the paradoxes that lie at the heart of partnership working

Here is a very interesting article about how Unilever is transforming its relationships with suppliers to create a web of partners who can work together to create, enhance (and share the benefits of) sustainable business practices.

Unilever transforming its supply base into a web of partners working together to share the benefits of sustainability

For me, what are particularly interesting are the paradoxes Pier Luigi Sigismondi (Unilever's Chief Supply Chain Officer) identifies as particularly challenging and, if a partnership is to achieve its potential, crucial to manage well. These are:

• The ability to retain local integrity and solve local issues whilst operating at a global scale.
• The need to be both structured and open to achieve real change.  

The latter paradox is similar to another paradox: the need to be both predictable and unpredictable. The effective management of this paradox is often crucial to partnerships tasked with identifying and implementing creative and innovative solutions to difficult and complex problems. I explore this paradox and give an example of its effective management here:

Partnerships must be both predictable and unpredictable

In fact, there are a good number of other paradoxes that partnerships must manage well if they are to realise their potential and achieve, or even better exceed, their goals. Some of the most crucial ones are:

• A partnership must focus on short and long-term issues at the same time.
• A partnership must be both open and closed.
• Partners must act both separately and together.
• Partnerships and partners are both powerful and powerless.
• Partnerships and partners need to be both directive and reflexive.    

  
I explore these paradoxes and give real life examples of their effective management in Chapter 7 of my book 'Sleeping with the Enemy - Achieving Collaborative Success', which is available from Amazon. Just click on the cover to your right to get it.

Have you come across any other paradoxes that partnerships need to manage well?

The combining trade

(The 'combining trade' is one of four styles of trade those seeking to work with others need to know about and use. To find out about the remaining three trading styles click here.)


The combining trading style is most effective when: an enhanced focus upon a new area is required; the size and scope of the collaborative activity increases significantly; the collaboration begins to attract and involve additional partners and collaborators from outside the original membership.

Given this, a combinatory trading style may prove to be the next logical step from a collaborative trading position. Having explored each other's perceptions and joint areas of interest, and having created a jointly understood language and way of working together, trading partners may naturally move towards a fusion of ideas and outlooks that is mutually beneficial in that it utilises the best of all the partners' worlds and encourages and enables the exploration of new areas and opportunities. 

The trading partners eventually fuse into one trading group that looks outwards, finding new people, organisations and areas with which to connect and trade.        
     
This outward focus is the combinatory trading style's most significant. This is because it makes the style's activities more strategic, wide ranging and ambitious than that of the first two trading styles, which are arguably more tactical, localised and perhaps inward looking in their focus.

Scientific collaborations often evolve a combinatory trading style, the ever-growing complexity and entanglement of the areas researched leading to new fused focuses and new branches of science that eventually become discrete new disciplines. Biochemistry and biotechnology are well known and well established examples of this. More recent fusions of disciplines have led to synthetic biology, quantum biology and organic electronics. As these and other new disciplines continue to combine and fuse they attract and create new knowledge and skills that lead to new insights (and ever more scientific disciplines!).

Within the business world, the UK high street combination of Curry's and PC World is an obvious and relatively straightforward example of a combining trade, where both companies have complementary knowledge, skills and resources that are to the benefit of both and which enable the combined entity (in the form of combined retail outlets) to look outward toward new customers and opportunities. (However, the fact that both companies share a parent company may point to a measure of coercion having being applied to the relevant decision making.)     

Closer working between health and social services has led to the creation of combined teams which can offer a seamless service to patients, benefit from cross-sector expertise and experience and, because of their increased spread of activities and connections, discover new partners to work with and new areas to work within.

This has especially been the case where health, social and other services have become associated with GP multi or 'super' practices where the increased and diverse expertise and resources available, together with the enhanced reach of GP activities, have added significantly to opportunities for discovering new partners and new areas of contribution.