Sleeping with the Enemy - Achieving Collaborative Success: Fifth Edition

'An excellent book that outlines the value and benefit of collaborative working...' This book is about collaborative and partnership working best practice. It will help you achieve the following: realise the potential of partnerships and collaborations; engage effectively with hard-to-reach stakeholders; lead partnerships and collaborations effectively; work well with competitors; identify differing organisational cultures and manage the interactions between them; manage partnership discussions effectively; encourage partnerships and collaborations to develop and move forward; deal effectively with the conflicting demands that lie at the heart of collaborative efforts; evaluate partnership processes and outcomes; appreciate and use the four principles that underpin effective collaborative working. As well as including a chapter entitled 'Why Should the Devil Have All the Best Collaborations?', which explores what we can learn from the way criminals collaborate, the 5th edition offers two new chapters and a new appendix. The first new chapter explores the concept of trading styles and how they evolve during the life of a collaboration. The second new chapter offers six principles for encouraging and gaining willing and able involvement from key partners and other stakeholders. The new appendix offers some of the most popular posts from the author's 'Cutting Edge Partnerships' blog. 'Sleeping with the Enemy' is full of tools, techniques and approaches that you can apply to your day-to-day collaborative activities, and many of the book's ideas are explained through the use of practical examples and short case studies. If you need to set up, maintain and develop a partnership or any other collaborative effort, this book is an indispensable and insightful companion.

Charles M Lines is an independent management consultant and a past Senior Lecturer at the UK Civil Service College, where he was Course Director of its partnership and collaborative working programmes. Since leaving the Civil Service over a decade ago, Charles has continued to search out and share best practice in collaborative working.