I came across an awesome article about innovative partnerships and strategic alliances in Business 2.0 the other day. Melanie Haiken talks about the need for medium-growth companies stuck between buzzing startups and huge corporations to build strong relationships not only with their employees (although very important), but also with their competitors and with the community. This is becoming a necessity!
One of my favorite parts:
One mistake many businesses make is refusing to partner with the competition for fear that it’ll steal secrets or gain an advantage. It’s far better to follow the oft-quoted advice of Michael Corleone: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. After all, your competition is your competition because you share the same goals. So why not use that common ambition to your mutual benefit? You might even find that partnering can double your success. “Nowadays,” Rigsbee says, “somebody might be my competitor in the morning, and by the afternoon we might be working together on something.”
She also mentions a few examples of great companies that offer some interesting extras to attract top talent, like subsidized vacations (S.C. Johnson & Son), incentives for buying hybrids (Timberland), sleep breaks, and tuition reimbursement.
I’d love to see more of this trend. In the areas I focus on, I’m seeing companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, and so on teaming up with each other over and over again. And it’s obviously working very well for them. They are able to bring cooler products to market building on each other’s abilities. It’s also why I like the open-source model for business — where the tools are there for anyone to add value to the product, and no one is afraid of losing their secret upper hand. (There are plenty of other ways to have a competitive advantage.)
-Innovative Partnering [Business 2.0]
That’s so funny. I just wrote about this in my latest post about Gen-Y leadership. I think this idea about partnering with competition will be essential for company success.
Cody,
The new look is great. I’m impressed.
Regarding your post, it seems like a new term is called for – neither competitor nor partner but, perhaps, compartner? partitor? In truth, these big companies are ecosystems and parts of the two companies may be fierce competitors and other parts may be dependent upon one another. Your mind is younger and more nimble than mine, so I imagine you could come up with something better, but it does seem as though the old distinctions miss a wide swath of the current reality.