We provide training to individuals and teams of strategic alliance managers to help clarify their role and make visible unconscious value-limiting behaviors, motives, and mindsets. We provide consulting to management on the unique aspects of this work and how those aspects need to affect staffing and career development activities. We help alliance managers bring transformational change into themselves and into their alliance team. We help individuals and organizations deal with role ambiguity.
“Joe helped us fundamentally change how we think and talk about being a strategic alliance manager! He also showed us how to objectively layout value impediments in order to remove barriers to value creation. This alone made the time spent tremendously worthwhile.”
– Jonny Klasson – Intel, Novell & Adobe Strategic Relationship Manager; Munich, Germany
In spiritual matters identity is a core issue. From identity derives our perspective: how we choose to see ourselves, others, and situations. Identity (role) is also a fundamental factor affecting attitude & mindset.
Strategic alliances are about value-creation. Given the creative nature of our work, it is worth considering how we identify with the attributes of deity. Do we see ourselves as the creator over our alliance (not The Creator, but a creator), or does that idea seem grandiose or blasphemous? This line of thinking calls for us to be truly humble.
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Problem
The role of strategic alliance manager is singularly unique; in all of business there is nothing like it. Its uniqueness stems from our need to focus on long-term value-creation and an alliance’s holistic impact on an entire company. We face unique challenges attributed to role confusion, overwhelming complexity, dysfunctional drama, and excessive time pressures, all of which distract us from the core issues – relationship and people.
Management, consultants, and professional organizations are helpful, especially in the areas of skill development and knowledge acquisition. However, they often fall short in helping us deal with core issues in order to make fundamental change. They fall short in helping us change our own attitude & mindset, and they fall short in helping us improve the climate in our alliance.
Read about our top 5 challenges.
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Solution
We help you clearly and boldly answer the fundamental question:
Who do you think you are?
We clarify the role by comparing and contrasting it with similar but subtly different jobs in business and point out the shortcomings associated with some staffing decisions. We make visible the unhealthy and value-limiting behaviors and mindsets which can easily be unconscious (invisible) to an alliance manager.
We examine the application of various types of change agents: fact-based, authority-based, relationship-based, and finally transformational agents of change. We discuss the applicability of each in different industries, types of alliances, and phases in the development of an alliance.
We explore the divine nature of our job, considering our relationship with the various attributes of deity: omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. From this higher perspective we take a fresh look at the negotiating process, taking it beyond mere win/win results. We also introduce nontraditional, counter-intuitive and transformational processes, like self-obsolescence and being an illuminating mirror.
Through a powerful process of collective listening, simplification, prioritization, and focus, we help strategic alliance managers develop both themselves and their alliance, in parallel. Each alliance manager and each alliance has unique needs and developmental opportunities. The process for developing the individual and their team is therefore uniquely-tailored. This process empowers the alliance manager and drives clear alignment with management and their team.
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Results
As a result, you will be empowered to:
- Develop both yourself and your alliance via a uniquely-tailored process.
- Increase alignment with your management team and throughout your alliance.
- Overcome external challenges, especially tied to role confusion and the misdirected expectations of others.
- Overcome internal challenges – unconscious, misdirected, and self-inflicted value-limiting behaviors tied to identity confusion.
- Transform your alliance and enable greater uncovering, discovery, and creation of incremental value – in both tangible and more importantly intangible forms.
- Empower others via the counterintuitive act of self-obsolescence.
- Be the creator for your alliance and change the climate by being the change.
- Have more fun than one person deserves – fulfillment, joy, and a passionate sense of purpose.
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Next Steps
Read Ideal Engagement Model.
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Many of these ideas are drawn from the whitepaper Strategic Alliance Manager Role: a unique, holistic and empowering perspective and the book Spiritual Principles in Strategic Alliances: transform status quo mediocrity into greatness.