Why Goliath
Needs David
The Goliaths of business have
always looked to the Davids of business for new
innovations. Today, these relationships are even more
critical given the complexity and risks of introducing
new technologies into the marketplace. David Luff offers
sage advice to Davids on initiating and growing these
relationships.
Goliaths are big for a reason; they need scale and
processes to ensure order within. This often slows them
from reacting quickly to customer needs or a changing
marketplace. On top of that, the economy has taken a
toll on their top line and many of these large
Enterprises have been forced to cut back on R&D,
staff, and marketing. Some of these big companies are
struggling, there's mounting pressure from their
shareholders and the competition, and they need new
ideas to find the next "big thing".
Then along comes this nimble, responsive Newco,
"David" who is outmaneuvering Goliath in their
traditional markets often with the latest solution or
technology. Many Goliaths try to ignore this dissonance
but many have gotten the point. They have formed
internal teams to scan the horizon and make sure they
pay full attention to protecting their home turf and
maintaining as much market share as possible.
Assuming Goliath is somewhat "enlightened", let's
explore why Goliath needs David's alliance:
*
David can supply that last missing "link" in Goliath's
offering.
* David allows Goliath to execute their
larger [stealth, yet-to-be disclosed] strategy.
*
David's alliance will give Goliath a speed-to- market
advantage.
* David gives Goliath access to a team
that has a different set of skills.
* David's
alliance will cost Goliath less then if they tried to
make it themselves.
* Finally, David is viewed as a
viable competitive threat and it's always better to keep
a close eye on your competition.
Complete
Article
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Dear Sonja,
Speaking yesterday at the annual meeting of the
Council on Competitiveness in Washington, IBM CEO
Samuel Palmisano noted, "There are new realities
to innovation." The financial markets' short-term
focus makes it difficult for many companies to
justify investment in new technologies.
Information and communication technologies have
produced huge productivity gains that have
dramatically reduced transaction and information
costs - and the number of employees a company
needs to produce profits. A global workforce is
quickly becoming reality, as countries such as
India and China become increasingly competitive
with more developed economies in education, job
skills, and technical infrastructure, as well as
wages.
>From our vantage point, this is
additional evidence of the structural changes
occurring in business. Yet, it is somewhat
comforting that the process of innovation is
facing "new realities," as innovation itself is
required to adapt to and profit from structural
changes. In this issue of Pursing
Value we'll introduce two innovative
approaches to tackling tough business
challenges:
* Utah's award winning Smart
Site Initiative is taking a page out of the Asian
technology outsourcing playbook to support
entrepreneurial ventures and create jobs in rural
communities.
* Dow Chemical's SiLKnet
Alliance is building a Collaborative Community to
facilitate the industry-wide learning necessary to
adopt a radically new technology.
Our featured guest column, by David Luff,
Strategic Alliance Business Development Advisor
for Juniper Bank, discusses how smaller,
entrepreneurial firms can align with big
businesses to speed innovation for both partners.
And Jeff offers some thoughts from the just
completed Annual Summit of the Association of
Strategic Alliance Professionals, where he
introduced the concept of the alliance manager as
an entrepreneur.
As always,
Keep on
dancing,
Jeff & Jan
and The Rhythm
of Business Community
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| Utah's Smart Sites
Initiative Bringing About Fundamental Change in
Rural Business Communities |
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"It says a lot when one of
our programs excels in competition with population
centers such as Albuquerque, Atlanta, Boston,
Newark, New Orleans, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and
San Diego." So said Jeff Gochnour, director of the
Utah Division of Business and Economic
Development, as he accepted the 2003 Excellence in
Economic Development Award from the US Department
of Commerce.
According to a press release announcing the
award, "The Utah Smart Site Initiative develops
family- sustaining employment opportunities in
rural communities through the attraction, creation
and expansion of businesses that use the Internet
to provide information technology outsourcing
services for clients anywhere in the world.
Services include: software development and
testing, technical call centers, database
management, data entry and web site
development."
The Utah Smart Sites
Initiative recognizes that rural communities have
many advantages over urban areas. They offer lower
cost of living for employees, lower rents and cost
of doing business, as well as a way of life and
sense of community that is increasingly important
to many people. At the same time, the Initiative
provides opportunities for agricultural workers to
transition to the knowledge-based economy. So far,
companies participating in the Smart Sites
Initiative have created over 700 new
jobs.
What we find so innovative about the
Initiative is that not only is it positioning the
rural character of its communities as a
competitive advantage, Smart Site companies
actively pursue opportunities to collaborate with
one another. These efforts allow them to leverage
their strengths and pursue otherwise unattainable
opportunities to strengthen their communities'
economies.
The next time you call the help
desk or take an online course to bolster your
technical skills you could be interacting with a
Utah Smart Site company! To learn more, visit www.smartsites.
utah.gov.
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| SiLKnet* Alliance Disrupts
Tradition in Semiconductor
Industry |
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The semiconductor industry
has had a rough time over the past few years.
There is fierce competition and an ever-pressing
mandate to produce increasingly more powerful and
faster chips. This requires the development of new
technologies to extend the capacity semiconductor
chips.
There are few manufacturing
processes more complicated than that which
produces a semiconductor chip. Building a facility
to produce them costs billions and requires a
number of different chemistries, processes, tools
and equipment, all produced by different vendors,
to work together seamlessly. A single misstep can
be very costly.
In that environment how can
the learning necessary to make new, much needed
technologies work with all the different
components of the manufacturing process?
Traditionally, a very siloed approach was used.
Suppliers would work directly with the chip
manufacturers, often with very limited information
and without understanding how their equipment,
tool, or process interacted with another of the
manufacturing process modules.
Dow Chemical's SiLKnet Alliance www.silknetalliance.com
has disrupted the traditional approach and formed
a collaborative community that crosses the
industry. The Alliance is producing the learnings
necessary to integrate SiLK, a material Dow
created specifically to address certain
limitations of chips. Certainly there are many
alliances in the semiconductor industry. What's
different about the SiLKnet Alliance is that never
before has a materials supplier - someone very
early in the supply chain - brought together the
members of the industry to foster collaborative
learning for the benefit of the entire industry.
As you can well imagine, the challenges of
managing these relationships and protecting
intellectual property are significant.
Over
the coming months, we'll delve into these issues
in more detail, as The Rhythm of Business, in
collaboration with Bentley College, is actively
engaged in learning what has made this Alliance
the talk of the industry.
*SiLKnet is a
Service Mark of Dow Chemical Company.
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| The A.S.A.P. Alliance
Summit 2003: Crossing Boundaries, Forging
Relationships, Unleashing Value |
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In today's, collaborative,
customer driven networked economy, forming and
sustaining strategic business relationships with
customers, suppliers, and partners has become a
mission-critical imperative for most businesses.
So, it was no surprise that over 250 alliance
practitioners and thought leaders from a wide
range of industries, including - IT,
communications, energy, pharmaceuticals,
healthcare, automotive - met in Seattle for four
days of discussion and workshops focused on how to
effectively develop and manage strategic
alliances.
While the Summit explored multiple challenges,
plausible solutions and case studies, several
overarching themes are clearly
apparent:
The transformations taking place
in how businesses are structured and organized is
now widely recognized and is driving the
heightened interest in learning how to operate
successful alliances. Indeed, there were twice as
many people in attendance as were at last year's
Summit.
Although there was much discussion
around alliance best practices, it is widely
recognized that the major challenge alliance
professionals face is being able to clearly
articulate the specific value accruing to their
companies from its alliances.
As the
boundaries between companies blur as value
networks replace stove piped supply chains, the
critical role trust plays in fostering the culture
needed to share proprietary information becomes
critical to alliance success.
What was
particularly striking was the willingness of
companies to share the nitty gritty details of
their alliance programs with competitors in the
room. This speaks to the recognition that we can
all benefit by open, candid discussion of what
works and what doesn't when it comes to running
effective alliances.
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| New Workshop
Series |
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The Rhythm of Business,
Greer Black Company and Pioneer Entrepreneurs Join
Forces to Bring World-Class Business Resources to
Bozeman, Montana
A new workshop series
that will help entrepreneurs address their most
pressing business issues will be introduced on
November 19th. The premier workshop, "Leveraging
Relationships to Grow Your Company" is offered in
collaboration with Greer Black Company and is
produced by Pioneer Entrepreneurs. The workshop
focuses on concrete action steps to address
participants' organizational goals, improve
performance and increase profits.
Entrepreneurs know how to do a lot with a
little. In a world of scarce resources, purposeful
collaborations offer entrepreneurial thinkers
levers, allowing them to move market dynamics in
ways that benefit their businesses. Whenever you
collaborate-in any business interaction-you make
assumptions about your business, the nature of the
relationship, and the value of what you offer. The
risk is that you may undervalue resources not
easily quantifiable, shortchanging yourself in
each business opportunity.
This workshop
provides a mindset and skillset to help you manage
your assumptions, so they don't manage you. It
offers tools to value, measure, and manage your
relationships strategically. It demonstrates how
you can make explicit your thinking about the
nature of your business and how your market works
and explore the short- and long-term consequences
of your actions. The tools you take away will
enable you to make better decisions about the
strategic value of your relationships, and how you
allocate resources to them to grow your business,
increasing performance and
profits.
According to Don Greer, "Most
workshops give you the content and leave you to
figure out how to apply it to your business. This
one leads you through the process of application,
so you've made progress on key issues when you
return to work the next morning."
To learn
more about the workshop and additional details,
please visit:https://www.123signup.com/event?
id=brdt. If you represent an entrepreneurial
support organization and would like to learn about
partnering with us to deliver this workshop to
your constituency, please contact Dave Bayless of
Pioneer Entrepreneurs at dbayless@pioneerentrepreneurs.com.
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| November's
Events |
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Boston-Based Law Firm
Burns & Levinson to Host Relationship Business
Program on Value Propositions
We're
pleased to announce that Burns & Levinson,
LLP., is hosting a program for its friends and
clients presented by Jeff Shuman and Jan Twombly
of The Rhythm of Business. The November 12, 2003
breakfast forum in Boston will focus on how
companies in diverse industries are building their
businesses by growing relationships.
The
session draws upon The Rhythm of Business's recent
experiences with executives and managers
transforming their companies to reflect today's
business environment. Jeff and Jan will present
examples of developing the relationship business
mindset, skillset, and toolset to transform the
value network and understand the true value of
customer relationships.
To receive an
invitation, just reply to this email.
Other Events:
Monday, November
3rd: "Measuring and Managing the Value of Every
Relationship: The Missing Link for Business
Success," New England Human Resources Association
HR Invention Convention, Providence,
RI
Tuesday, November 11th, "Meeting the
Challenges of the Semiconductor Materials Supply
Chain Through Collaboration," International
Sematech, Austin, TX
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| Want to Contribute to
"Pursuing Value"? |
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 We welcome third-party
contributions to "Pursuing Value: The Newsletter
for Relationship Business." If you'd like your
article or a "Letter to Editor" to be included in
an upcoming issue, please submit it to us for
consideration with an email to info@rhythmofbusiness.com.
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