CAT HERDING 101: A Field Guide to Creating and Managing Alliances for the New Digital Solutions

Who is the target audience?

Senior management in technology oriented firms who are responsible for negotiating partnerships and alliances and those who maintain or sustain such alliances.

These executives may be in large or small firms and may be working on or need advice on domestic or international alliances.

What is the objective of the book?

The primary goal is to educate executives in the U.S. on why partnerships are crucial to the future of their company and what it takes to be successful in this relatively new fundamental business skill

Why should they read this particular book?

The timing is good. Technical firms are faced with three paradigm shifts. The first is the cost of developing new technologies, which has increased tenfold in the past decade, while product life has been reduced from ten years to eighteen months. This means these firms must seek new approaches that provide a faster return and faster product deployment than they can achieve within their own organizations.

The second shift is from the convergence of telephone, computer and entertainment. What this shift means in alliance terms is that most firms must partner with other firms in order to provide a complete customer solution or participate in these new markets. This is true of firms as large as IBM and HP and is even more crucial to small technology firms, who must at least have distribution partners. In short, most firms in the target industries must develop alliance skills or perish; it is that severe.

The third shift is the globalization of markets. This expanded demand for products is only available to those firms that can adapt to the market cultures and rules of the new markets. In most cases, this means partnering with both local companies and the government. It means participating in those new economies as a corporate citizen, and it means making local companies successful.

With that said, the track record of U.S. partnerships is abysmal! Partnering is the opposite of U.S. corporate cultures, which emphasize competition, turf protection and short-term rewards. HP, Siemens and Japanese firms, which are good at partnering, are in stark contrast to most American firms.

This book tries to create a road map for getting from today’s corporate culture to the partnering culture that will be needed to survive and grow in the years ahead.

Why is the book believable versus a professorial tome?

The basis for this book is work done by the authors for IBM and several of IBM’s partners. The goal was to improve IBM and partner skills. The new programs that we recommended and were initiated by IBM have generated several billion dollars in net new revenue and substantial cost savings. The result for IBM is a highly successful program. The program has been written up in publications like Business Week. Alliance management is also the subject of several internal IBM training programs.

What tone does the book set?

Partnering techniques can be a very dry subject, so we utilized humor, anecdotes and war stories to hold the reader's attention.

We realize that most corporate readers are "skim readers.” Therefore, the format is:

1. Highly graphical in its explanations
2. “Tell ‘em what you’re going to say, then tell ‘em what you said”
4. The book must have usable graphics

Very High Level Outline

1. Why are partnerships so important in the next five years and beyond?
2. What are examples of success stories (US and International)?
3. Examples of failures and why
4. How our method helped various firms like IBM
5. What are the key philosophies behind the TechSynergy Method?
6. The Partnering Formula and how to use it
7. Summary

Bill Gould defines his role as an alliance ombudsman and author. He has spent the past forty years in history’s most volatile industry, working with some of the great technology firms across three continents. He now focuses specifically on alliances in the technology related industries, drawing on his broad background experiences for perspective and insight. He is Co-founder of TechSynergy, Inc.

Bill Barley is President of Barley and Associates, Inc., a technology relationship development consulting firm and Co-founder of TechSynergy. His consulting practice is in the areas of corporate rela-tionship development, cross-functional process improvements, technology licensing and partnerships, and customer satisfaction processes. In addition to this, Bill conducts executive partnership development and executive consensus building workshops. He also assists with ISO 9000 Certification processes and manufacturing “best in class” evaluations and implementation plans. His consulting practice involves both his former employers and two other Baldrige winners.