When choosing your alliances, it is more important to have the right people involved than it is to have the right idea established.
A popular example of this theory uses people in a boat, and that boat having no direction. With the wrong people in the boat, it will be difficult to get the boat moving in any direction because of internal power struggles. In this case, an alliance will not be able to implement an idea, there will be no forward motion. However, when the right people are in the boat, it matters very little what the idea is because the alliance will eagerly move in any direction needed.
Structure Your Alliances Well
Leaders of organizations pay too much attention to what potential partners can offer financially, and don’t assess characteristics. They confuse structure with purpose and in fact, conscious design is rarely seen. It’s an afterthought, with a tendency to blindside leaders who move quickly into partnerships without viewing the larger network within which it will belong. By making a point to contemplate the design of an alliance network, it will be clear where some partnerships won’t fit, and work to dissolve these early on.
Strategic Goal Setting
Next, the emphasis must be on collaboration. Only with collaboration can a partnership blossom for all parties. When designing an alliance network remember that like all relationships, a partnership will grow and change. For this reason,make selectionsbased not just on the benefits they can offer today, but for future opportunities as well.
Theory of Trustworthiness
Likewise, there are three levels of trust; weak form trust, semi-strong form trust, and strong form trust and the characteristics of each partnership will dictate the level involved and how trust, or lack of it, determines the reputational and economic aspects of conducting exchange transactions with each other.
Each has potential benefits and liabilities. For example, weak form trust partnerships usually happen when the value of the product or service being exchanged is low and there is little chance for either organization to act in opportunistic ways.
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