I’ve just finished reading an excellent book on creating value from businrsses outside of your own. It’s called Remix Strategy by an academic named Benjamin Gomes-Casseres who is somewhat of an alliance guru.
He has distilled years of looking at what makes business to business relationships successfully deliver joint value into a pragmatic how-to guide. Procurement practitioners are increasingly being asked to being the outside in and thereby deliver more value – this book gives some excellent (and implementable) advice that can help achieve those goals.
Essentially, there are three types of relationships businesses can have: trade, alliances, acquisition. There are obviously shades and colours of each but it boils down to a continuum of how much control you have over each others affairs as to how you move across the spectrum. Having decided you need to go outside of your business to achieve your business strategy, you need to determine where you need/want to fall on that continuum for success and, having done that, he counsels then looping around three fundamental questions:
- How will joint value be created
- How will the relationship be governed
- How will the value be shared
There’s obviously a lot more to how you specifically go about these things but I loved the simplicity he applies to his distillation. My own experience is that the word “partner” is all too casually used by both selling and buying organisations without either side ever really getting to anything but a trading relationship. Applying a rigour to the assessment of what external support you need to achieve your business goals would be a helpful start to framing the kind of relationships and “what’s in it for me” answers necessary to improve the odds of a different type of collaboration.
I highly recommend a canter through this one if you’re in any kind of a role seeking to bring value from the outside into your company.