The Art of Agile Alliances

Six years ago I published a book called The Strategic Alliance Handbook - A Practitioners Guide. The book was meant to represent all I had leaned in the previous 16 years about best practices in business to business alliances. Six years later and I revisited those best practices with two fellow authors @Jim Whitehurst (not the Red Hat one the IBM and SAP one!) and @Gavin Booth (he of ex Accenture, KPMG and now AWS fame!). The new book is called the Strategic Alliance Fieldbook - The Art of Agile Alliances. A lot has changed in the last six years, and paradoxically a lot has remained the same. But one conundrum became increasingly clear as we developed our research for the book which is: six years ago best practice was 'build the relationship first and it will lead to results' the mantra now is 'deliver results and that will build the trust to develop the relationship'.

We are seeing this obsession with speed, responsiveness and flexibility in multiple business areas, usually combined with a desire for innovation. But nowhere more so than in the field of alliances and more particularly strategic alliances. For many years companies had the luxury of spending up to six months developing a robust and comprehensive business model secure in the knowledge that they had 5-7 years worth of value that could be reaped from putting down these strong relationship foundations.

This is not the case today. Market opportunities are becoming ever more fleeting and if organisations cannot ally quickly and effectively then they run the risk of missing out on valuable business development opportunities. But it's not just missing out on new opportunities. Alliances now need to be flexible vehicles which can react quickly to changes in market conditions. Remember all those alliances that you formed 5-10 years ago using information that was current then? Well they need to pivot to the new digital reality of today and they need to do so quickly and effectively.

Hence the important tagline for the book 'The Art of Agile Alliances'; and here again we come across another paradox. Which is How do you accelerate alliances? How do you make them move faster? How do you make them more responsive? The counter intuitive answer the we discovered during our research was that you need to use an alliance process that is designed to deliver results early. Rather than 'wing it' by inventing the governance structure and identification of key stakeholders as you go; you need to have a ready made Agile Alliances playbook that both sides can adopt to build speed into the alliance design, development and deployment from the outset. Its somewhat like the distinction between being 'cloud ready' and 'cloud native' in technology terms.

The good thing is that the book contains multiple examples of Agile Alliances in action and also has a plethora of templates and tools to help you build agility into your alliances. Not to mention a ready made Agile Alliances Assessment Tool which will allow you to discover 'How Agile are my Alliances?'.

The authors will be explaining the new model and exploring the research that went into its development in an online webinar on 7th July. You can hear first hand the advantages of agility in alliances and better yet, how to develop that agility through structured processes. You can register for the Agile Alliances Webinar here: Agile Alliances Registration Page all attendees will be offered a 40% discount on the price of the paperback or ebook version of the new book.

I look forward to seeing you there!

PS - If you can't wait you can order an early copy of the book here: The Strategic Alliance Fieldbook - The Art of Agile Alliances

PPS - And if you would like to join other alliance executives looking to discuss this new model and develop deployment strategies for its use, then feel free to join the Agile Alliances User Group.