While doing some research for a client last week I ran into this piece by Dyer, Kale and Singh from 2001. A report about the position of the alliance office in a corporate organization and the effects of having a dedicated alliance office. In the report the authors describe how they conducted a study of 200 corporations who together had 1,572 alliances and looked at organizational perspectives and the effect the alliances had on the overall stock market performance of the corporations.

Dyer, Kale and Singh come to the conclusion that having a dedicated alliance office centrally organized is benefitting most of the corporations well.

Enterprises with a dedicated function achieved a 25% higher long-term success rate with their alliances than those without such a function — and generated almost four times the market wealth whenever they announced the formation of a new alliance.

Reflecting the findings in the report on to how some of my clients are organized I see recognizable organization of the alliance office for some and totally different setup for others. One of them does have a dedicated alliance office, however as it works predominantly for one part of the business it is organizationally also part of that business unit. One has split the alliance function in three segments that do opportunity identification, opportunity development and alliance management. Three separate central functions. In one situation the alliances that span all elements of the business are centrally organized the remainder of the alliances are purely in the business with almost no interaction between the alliance groups.

In this high level reflection it goes too far to connect the alliance success of my clients to the way they are organized. However what I do see is that in general the more central they are organized, the more dedication and the better alliance capabilities are developed. It does make me curious how other organizations have their alliance functions organized and what they see as their success rate. How about your organization? Please share you thoughts in the comment below or, if you prefer, sent me an email to share it privately.

Many organizations are struggling to maintain or grow their business in current economic times. Traditional organic growth asks for investments that may overstretch Today’s budgets, acquiring other companies requires substantial investments that may not be available and when you are depending on government subsidies you may be facing sincere budget cuts too. Despite the headwinds you want to maintain growth of your organization and if possible even grow faster and healthier than the competition does. Growth in a changing environment will ask for a different approach. 

Such a different approach may be to create a strategic alliance rather than pursuing the path of growing organically or by acquisition. In a strategic alliance two or more organizations will work together to create a solution or an offering they can not easily create on their own. With the current economic tide we will see that more and more organizations will need to focus on their core business and hence need partners to create the solutions to grow that core business. By creating strategic alliances organizations may be able to share investments, share knowledge, or create new unique solutions by combining products. 

Creating successful strategic alliances asks for a good amount of attention and a thorough approach. The word “strategic” is in there and is pointing to the fact that these alliances are of strategic importance to your organization or department. Anything you do with your organization that is of strategic importance will most likely receive your undivided attention. 

It all starts with the strategy. The alliance you create should fit with the organization and product strategy otherwise it will make no sense. One of my customers was approached by a potential partner with, what looked at first sight, an interesting proposition where both parties would be able to contribute knowledge and share from the revenues in the future. A closer look into my customer’s strategy learned that the product for which the prospective partner was proposing the partnership was in plan to be phased out during the year. Maybe not yet a reason to fully say No to the partner, after all the products on the verge to be phased out had served the company well in the past. These products may still have potential to create a new revenue stream through the new partnership that my customer could not easily create on his own. As the proposition did not fit the current strategy it was a red flag that indicated that further research was required before fully embarking on this new alliance. 

Every aspect in the lifecycle of an alliance has it’s own peculiarities, whether it be in partner qualification, negotiation, alliance design or alliance management. As a business owner/manager you know all about your business but may not be experienced in creating alliances. This is where a strategic alliance professional comes in. The external strategic alliance professional will in general not be the expert in your business in particular, but he is the expert in alliance creation between businesses in general. Based on his experience and alliance best practices the strategic alliance professional will guide the management of organizations through the formation of an alliance and be the sounding board and sparring partner for tough business decisions around the alliance. As such it is the professionals task to help protect his customer from common pitfalls in alliance creation and provide advise where needed. It remains an advisory role, the business owner/manager is the one that will make the decisions about the future of an alliance.

In the example mentioned above, where the product was being phased out, a couple of more red flags arose along the way, which led me to advise my customer not to pursue with the alliance.

This is the text of the January newsletter. When interested to receive this newsletter directly into your inbox you can subscribe in the top right corner of this page.


It is the second week into 2012 already and for sure one thing is still the same in the new year: time continues to fly! Allow me still to wish you a fabulous year in good health and prosperity. And with the element of time in mind: ensure to take your time to enjoy the things you are doing!

This year I will continue on the journey successfully embarked upon in the past years by providing advise, workshops and tools helping organizations to accelerate through alliances. A journey in which I hope we will be able to (continue to) work together too!

The new schedule for the “Skills Mastery – The preparation workshop for the ASAP CA-AM professional certification exam” is live on the website now. There are 5 dates scheduled in the Amsterdam area to help you prepare for the ASAP CA-AM Professional certification exam. The workshop is the same as provided last year. The feedback overall was good and it was great to hear back from participants that they passed the CA-AM exam after attending the workshop. Interested in attending the open workshop? Read here for more details. When interested to organize a tailored internal workshop for your organization please contact me to discuss.

Research indicates that many alliances and strategic relationships fail for reasons that can be prevented. Reasons often on the soft side of the relationship, like lack of trust, differences in operating rules and lack of coordination between management teams. These elements can be managed and turned around for the success of the partnership, when needed. However to turn these elements around one needs to be aware of them. The Joint Engagement Strategy survey is a health check for strategic relationships. It generates a report that highlights the state of the relationship and the areas where improvement is needed. Read more or contact me to discuss what the Joint Engagement Strategy survey can do for your strategic relationships.

Have a great day!

Earlier this year I became a member of the International Business Club of the World Trade Center Almere Area (WTCAA). This business club offers a platform for business networking with quite an extensive program that includes company visits, informative sessions and international trade missions. A couple of months ago I was approached for an interview in Crossborder, the dual language magazine of WTCAA. 

Three questions was the interview, which seems not much. However appearances are deceptive:  today the quite hefty Crossborder arrived and the three questions showed up as a very nice full page article about Simoons & Company.

Read the full interview here, a here the online version of the Crossborder.

Read more about the World Trade Center Almere Area and the International Business Club

Every professional should value the satisfaction of professional relationships. Relationships like alliances and strategic customer – supplier relationships. Often however we forget the importance of perception, the way of communicating and the management of expectations. Trust, openness, appreciation will be valued in a more positive way when the relationship is in a satisfactory state.

This is the basis for the Joint Engagement Strategy (JES), for which the foundation lies in the perception survey.

This survey consists of 17 statements that will be responded to in a timeframe of 7 – 9 minutes. The power of the survey is in the fact that the involved employees and those of your business partner will respond to exactly the same statements. Everyone will be asked to respond impulsively. Every survey will be reported back in a report that summarizes the state of the relationship in text and in a graphical way. This summary will be discussed in a joint evaluation.

In reality every evaluation will lead to points of improvement. These will be captured in an improvement plan that contains elements like approach, deliverables, responsibilities and the desired outcome. The improvement plan and the progress made will be discussed in the next evaluation. The survey and evaluation process in general runs 3 times a year.

Your satisfaction is under constant pressure. It is therefore important that the people responsible for the relationship will work with your partner in a joint team towards joint satisfaction. View satisfaction as a challenging team sport where it will be the goal to improve the measured values every time again.

In summary:

• 9 minutes, 17 statements in a joint survey
• Clear, short improvement plans as result of the joint evaluation
• A simple and repeating process with excellent results

Read more about the Joint Engagement Strategy and the perception survey.

Does your company have an alliance brand and how important is it for your organization to be recognized as an alliance brand?

Steve Steinhilbers book on strategic alliances was face down on my desk when some words on the back caught my eye. Even though I read the book and know Cisco is very focused on establishing alliances for the right reason I did not realize the size of the impact of alliances to Cisco yet. On the back of the book it was mentioned that Alliances deliver Cisco “a cumulative value of more than $4.5 billion annually in business impact”. That sounds impressive and as this little sentence triggered my interest I looked a little further. In the year the book was published (2008) Cisco had an annual turnover of nearly $40 billion. This means that more than 10% of that revenue is impacted by the alliances Cisco established. It is a significant part of Cisco’s revenue. I would argue that Cisco is an alliance brand.

That triggers a question to define what an alliance brand is. An alliance brand is a brand that creates a significant amount of the revenue thanks to alliances and has a solid implemented set of alliance capabilities and best practices. In Cisco’s case the revenue element is there and as Steve’s book highlights they have seriously invested in establishing the alliance capabilities and best practices in the Cisco organization.

Other examples of alliance brands are among many of the pharmaceutical companies. The CEO of Ipsen for example presented at the Biopharma conference in Basel earlier this year about the impact of alliances on his business. Basically without alliances Ipsen would not be the company they are today. Marc de Garidel mentioned in his keynote that alliances are responsible for more than 40% of their business. To manage this essential part of the business alliance capabilities are solidly implemented and alliance management is reporting directly to the CEO.

Philips Electronics is well known for their alliance with Sara Lee and the resulting Senseo coffee maker. This alliance is in place for about 10 years now and has brought the Senseo to the market in many countries. The Senseo has helped to change the coffee market. Other Philips alliances include amongst others the PerfectDraft alliance with InBev and the Nivea for Men alliance with Beiersdorf. Philips is also know for having a thorough set of alliance capabilities and best practices implemented for which they in 2007 received the ASAP Alliance Program Excellence award. In the public statements however Philips generally makes no remarks on the contribution of alliances to the topline of the organization. For Senseo we can safely assume that after 10 years the Senseo brand is an alliance brand: without the alliance the Senseo would most likely not exist.*

This brings up another question: can we really focus on one (overall) brand to conclude if a company has an alliance brand? Cisco and Ipsen create apparently all alliances using their main brand. In the Senseo example we see the creation of a separate brand that becomes the alliance brand. Bringing that back to the opening statement: how important is it for an organization to be recognized as an alliance brand?

Being recognized as an alliance brand can help to accelerate growth of the organization. With proper alliances an organization will be able to create achievements they would otherwise not easily create alone. It will also act as a magnet, attracting more potential partners that will approach your organization to do things together. After all you are recognized as an organization that knows how to partner. This also adds another reason for having a solid alliance process and capabilities implemented. Partner selection has a different starting point when being approached rather than when approaching others. It is as such essential to properly select, filter if you want, to end up with successful alliances at the other end of the funnel.

How about your organization, do you have an alliance brand?

On the 12th of December ASAP Benelux will come together in the afternoon to hear Professors Ard-Pieter de Man and Geert Duijsters talk about the 4th ASAP State of Alliance Management study, about alliance capability and alliance performance. The study examines how alliances and alliance management influence the performance of firms.

The session will provide you a preview on the study, the methodology used and the results and offers ample room for discussion. It will start at 15:30h and will be held in cooperation with the Brabant Center of Entrepreneurship in Eindhoven. Registration can be done through the form below.

Information obtained for registration will only be used for sharing information about the session and for a one time invitation to a next session.

Earlier this week I watched this video starring Luis Suarez and his life in a corporate world without email. A powerful story that might feel a bit negated at the end when it turns out to be an IBM commercial. But then, having worked in IBM and knowing Luis, I know that Luis really works in this powerful way. With a minimum of email and highly interactive through the social channels.

After seeing the video and realizing the time consumption the inbox asks I was triggered to try to minimize my email behavior. In some cases it is pretty easy: just pick up the phone and in some cases uses instant messaging rather than email. I also found a quick win, that creates some kind of dilemma. I started unsubscribing from email newsletters again. The newsletters that I subscribed to in the past for a reason, but I don’t read anymore. They usually get deleted anyway.

The dilemma it creates is my own email newsletter. I send it out almost every month in both Dutch and English to approximately 1300 people globally. Every newsletter delivers some good conversation with old time connections, but also every newsletter stays with a significant un-opened rate. It serves a purpose and fits the social communication for a number of people. Clearly also for a number it is an inbox-filler. So maybe my next newsletter should be about inbox optimization and unsubscribing from newsletters?

You can still subscribe to my newsletter on the right of this page

Alternatives: use the RSS feed, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+

This morning I researched a couple of resources about the alliance lifecycle and noticed that the cycles I found all differ and still are somewhat similar. Quite understandable as every organization will adjust common alliance best practices to their own needs. The lifecycles I found ranged from 5 to 8 main steps. All of them obviously covering the cycle from start to transition. The differences are in most cases in the middle, where some steps are divided over more steps than others. All of them share  that the alliance lifecylce is in fact an umbrella: it combines tools and substeps under the umbrella and can thus easily add up to tens of steps.

In our workshops we use the following six steps:

1. Opportunity identification
2. Partner qualification
3. Alliance formation and planning
4. Negotiation and agreement
5. Implementation and management
6. Transition

One of my customers uses a slightly different model where step 2 is split in two separate steps and step 3 and 4 are combined in one step. Also Cisco’s model as described in Steven Steinhilber’s book is a six step, but slightly different, lifecycle. In some cases step 3 and 4 are in a different order, putting the negotiation before the alliance formation. The 8 step process I noticed is splitting into seperate main steps some of the elements I would probably capture in substeps. This model was also different in the sense that it basically puts governance, executive sponsorship and alliance management as a continuous foundation layer below all of the steps.

In the end all lifecycles more or less follow the same structure, covering the alliance lifecycle from start till transition. How about your alliance lifecycle and processes, do they follow a similar structure or are they (radically) different?

Two years ago, in November, I decided to leave my trusted working environment and focus entirely on Simoons & Company. This was the start of two instructive years, learning about things that are obvious to employees and learning about my new position as small business. But most of all, learning about myself: where do I excel and will I be able to add most value for my clients? And for which elements should I work with a partner? It were also two years with a lot of recognition, fun and freedom.

I have learned how I can add most value for my clients: by facilitating successful partnerships between organizations. Alliance management is the foundation and the result is growth and development for all involved partners. With a combination of my experience and alliance best practices, I help clients make the appropriate steps and avoid pitfalls. That is the principle of my advice & coaching activities and workshops. In the end, one of the best parts of my reward is the satisfaction of seeing my clients becoming (more) successful; thanks to the work we did together.

Do you want to know how I can help you creating (more) successful alliances? Call or send me an email and I am happy to discuss it with you.

For 2011 I have planned one additional open workshop on alliance management: on November 25 in the WTC in Almere. This workshop will be held in English. Among the participants, who already signed up for it, are international participants from pharmaceutical, IT and university branches. Sign up quickly; there are a few places left.

Can I ask you to do two more things? First, consider who of your business relations would be interested in successful alliances between organizations. I would like to be in touch; can you forward this newsletter to him or her?

And second, something totally different: the amazing activities of “The Colour Kitchen” in Amsterdam. In this restaurant, people of different cultures get a second chance and the opportunity to learn a wonderful trade. The foundation “The Colour Kitchen” is participating in a contest of the Cooperation Fund of the Rabobank in Amsterdam. The contestant with most votes will receive an amount of money. The Colour Kitchen wants to use that money to give a second chance to even more students. But, first, they have to win for that. And this is possible with your vote. Have a look and vote here. They deserve it!
(In case your Dutch skills are not up to par, choose the “stem” button on right top corner of the movie, then fill in your email address to acknowledge the vote followed by a confirmation link you will receive in email that need to be clicked once more.)




This is the text of the November newsletter. Prefer to receive the newsletter directly in your inbox? Subscribe by using the form in the right most column of this website.