The Partnering Imperative : Making Business Partnerships Work

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Summary: The Partnering Imperative makes sense of Business Developmen
Review: As a line manager responsible for a small software company's business development activities, what I like the most about The Partnering Imperative is that it helps me decide with what potential partners I should be persistent, and where it is best to be responsive to offers but guarded with resources. Like any small company, we need to focus to be successful. The Partnering Imperative is helping me decide what large companies our small company should partner with and also helping us predict the success that our partnering efforts will have. For our small software company, our partnerships will make the difference between our being a success that people will read about or another software company that had a great product but just could not break the $50 million in sales mark.

For the large equipment vendors who have to partner to "avoid the negative" of not working with small nibble companies who can fill in gaps in functionality, there is tremendous value in this book as a guide for avoiding the pitfalls of partnership between large and small entities. These are the situations where the larger partner often tries to manage away the risks presented by the differences between it, the larger partner, and its chaotic but essential smaller partner. In these partnerships, the larger organization is busy managing formal communications processes and preparing to walk away at the slightest hint of failure. If big and small companies can be aware of these tendencies from the start, they are more likely to stick it out and reach partnering pay-off.

For smaller companies who need to partner to gain access to distribution channels and installed bases of customers, The Partnering Imperative provides a pragmatic guide to dancing with the "elephants" that small companies must work with. Smaller companies who expect their larger partners to revisit agendas to address emerging needs, will be be more successful if they are address "big partner" concerns like avoiding surprises and differences through formal communications process with lots of checks and balances.