Linda McComie – författare

In today’s competitive, globalized marketplace, the provision of services and products is a result of teamwork between several organizations. Relationships between organizations of any size are strategically important. If your supplier falls down at a crucial moment, it can have survival implications for your company or for other members of your supply chain. The management of these strategic assets cannot be left to chance and the same attention that you devote to finance, operations, HR, etc. must be applied to business relationships. Despite this, very few organizations focus on this or are even aware that they need to do it. Those that do are unsure how to do it. This is not helped by business schools that focus on either customer relationship management (CRM) or supplier relationship management (SRM) rather than collaboration between partners (Enterprise Relationship Management). This book is a unique "go-to" guide for all managers who should be looking at collaboration with other organizations as a new way to attain outstanding results that would not be achieved on their own. Currently, there is nothing else of this nature on the market. The book identifies relationship management as a pivotal management function. It presents a comprehensive, flexible, end-to-end management process that can be easily incorporated into the existing management structures. Further, they describe the crucial role of the relationship manager who is at the heart of the system and provides the drive to achieve high performance. Any company can tailor this discipline to the needs of its organization – whether an SME or a multi-national company selecting a new partner or managing existing relationships. This book covers the decision of whether or not to partner and with whom, the creation of an appropriate system of governance, the transition to operations, managing performance for continuous improvement, and, finally, controlled wind-up of the partnership. Throughout, diagrams to signpost the sequence of activities, checklists of important actions, and job-related worksheets are provided. In addition, there are numerous case studies in a variety of industries and public sectors that will be used as illustrations. Altogether these make this book ideally suitable for experienced managers as well as for training and induction purposes. Essentially, Implementing and Managing Collaborative Relationships: A Practical Guide for Managers shows managers how they can create and operate a simple and effective system of Enterprise Relationship Management that will enable them to maximize efficiency, resilience, innovation, and profitability.

In today’s competitive, globalized marketplace, the provision of services and products is a result of teamwork between several organizations. Relationships between organizations of any size are strategically important. If your supplier falls down at a crucial moment, it can have survival implications for your company or for other members of your supply chain. The management of these strategic assets cannot be left to chance and the same attention that you devote to finance, operations, HR, etc. must be applied to business relationships. Despite this, very few organizations focus on this or are even aware that they need to do it. Those that do are unsure how to do it. This is not helped by business schools that focus on either customer relationship management (CRM) or supplier relationship management (SRM) rather than collaboration between partners (Enterprise Relationship Management). This book is a unique "go-to" guide for all managers who should be looking at collaboration with other organizations as a new way to attain outstanding results that would not be achieved on their own. Currently, there is nothing else of this nature on the market. The book identifies relationship management as a pivotal management function. It presents a comprehensive, flexible, end-to-end management process that can be easily incorporated into the existing management structures. Further, they describe the crucial role of the relationship manager who is at the heart of the system and provides the drive to achieve high performance. Any company can tailor this discipline to the needs of its organization – whether an SME or a multi-national company selecting a new partner or managing existing relationships. This book covers the decision of whether or not to partner and with whom, the creation of an appropriate system of governance, the transition to operations, managing performance for continuous improvement, and, finally, controlled wind-up of the partnership. Throughout, diagrams to signpost the sequence of activities, checklists of important actions, and job-related worksheets are provided. In addition, there are numerous case studies in a variety of industries and public sectors that will be used as illustrations. Altogether these make this book ideally suitable for experienced managers as well as for training and induction purposes. Essentially, Implementing and Managing Collaborative Relationships: A Practical Guide for Managers shows managers how they can create and operate a simple and effective system of Enterprise Relationship Management that will enable them to maximize efficiency, resilience, innovation, and profitability.

This book is an innovative and controversial approach to dispel the baseless myths that are preventing managers of organizations from moving forward and reaping the benefits of collaboration. Compared to most publications on the market, this book is packed with the rich results of 20 years of research. It is based on over 200 studies in a wide variety of public, private, and international settings and over 4000 quotations gathered from interviews with managers. Many have been selected to illustrate the case studies and key points in the book. Collaboration has been presented as a serious business strategy for at least 50 years. Scads of books, papers, and conferences by consultants, academics, institutes, associations, and governments have trumpeted its benefits, and many online discussion channels are extolling the same messages. This book faces off against all this gung-ho hype that has patently failed in most alliance cases to achieve the full extent of the potential return,s such as improved revenues, reduced costs, greater market share, access to specialized know-how, and increased resilience in difficult economic conditions.The authors have looked at over 200 organizations in many industries and public sectors across the world, and in most cases, they have claimed they are collaborating, but it is not happening. This is the first Big Myth. The second Big Myth is that managers ignore it because they don’t have the foresight to realize how collaboration will benefit their operations, and so they find excuses why they don’t need to do anything. Many believe that closer working with partners is more trouble than it’s worth; it’s a black art ‘where we don’t know what to do, we don’t know that we don’t know what to do, it’s someone else’s job, or we don’t have the time, money or inclination to do it’. These attitudes are prevalent despite the high value (both bottom-line and strategic) that is usually tied up in the often long-standing formal and informal agreements between organizations. They also ignore the adverse impact on staff workloads, motivation, development, and morale, and seriously undermine their enormous potential contribution to alliance success.The purpose of this book is to dispel these myths because the research has clearly shown that they are baseless and are stopping managers and organizations from moving forward and gaining the benefits of collaboration that are there for the taking. This is groundbreaking and contentious because, for the first time, the universal misuse and obfuscation of the collaboration concept is being confronted. After many years, collaboration has become a cozy buzzword that is thrown around randomly and not taken seriously.