Shameless Self-Promotion for Alliance Managers is a hit! At the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) Global Summit, I took a gamble that alliance managers are eager to define a leading role in networked organizations that depend on alliances for a goodly chunk of their revenue. And it worked! We had an overflow crowd of very active and engaged participants who crafted an elevator speech defining their job and the value they create.

Alliances and collaborations are increasingly central to business models. Alliance professionals are the keepers of the expertise for making them work and deliver the value intended. The Summit theme of “Where Tomorrow Meets Today” (it was held at Disneyland, after all) provided a great platform to have conversations about what the profession of alliance management and its association, ASAP, must do to advance the use of alliances to achieve growth and innovation and to embrace alliance management as a distinct management discipline, such as marketing and product development.

 Some of the highlights of the Summit for me include:

•  Tom Koulopoulos’ keynote Alliances in the Innovation Zone urged us to take head-on the challenges of transforming organizations to succeed in today’s competitive environment
• The Collaborative Innovation Council tackled the role of alliance professionals in leading innovation of products, processes, business models – and the resulting innovation in management required to succeed
• The Biopharm Council debated the necessity of an alliance management function when the need to collaborate effectively has become part of nearly every one’s job within the industry
• Four very generous executive coaches offered insights intended to help Summit participants breakthrough to the next level of their careers
• Recognition of Novartis’ Malaria Initiative, a cross-sector collaborative network that has saved 750,000 lives with an Alliance Excellence Award

The energy and passion for collaboration as a way of working is always over the top when alliance professionals get together. With at least 15 countries and a who’s who list of major corporations represented, the Summit was at once both a celebration and a call to action. A celebration that alliances and networked business models are essential to strategy. A call to action to ensure the alliance professional’s expertise is valued and called upon to lead today’s organizations into tomorrow.