Collaboration is the key to survival
“In the modern business world chaos is now the norm. To survive and become superlative there is an urgent imperative beyond excellence: the flexibility that can and must use chaos as the source of market advantage.” Tom Peters, Thriving in Chaos
Although Tom Peters wrote this over 40 years ago it has recently become even more frenetic which can spell potential disaster or golden opportunity. Now the world is in considerable turmoil, in particular the US tariff policy is resulting in a seismic shift in global trading relationships. This must lead to new strategic supply chains based upon collaboration and underpinned by the staff who will establish and work within them. In our last post we talked about the collaboration myths that prevent alliances from prospering:
- Organisations declare that they are collaborating but continue to treat their ‘partners’ as they always have done.
- Collaboration attempts fail to happen because managers don’t understand what is required. In particular the failure to bring their own team on board leads to bad person-to-person behaviours across the supply chain that results in a self-reinforcing negative cycle.
Unfortunately, complacency has allowed these to take root and provide managers with stock excuses for under performance. But the world has changed radically and they need to consider that managing relationships between businesses and organisations is going to be more challenging. Firms have been used to making their own decisions and strategies and relishing their freedom but, deciding to team-up with similarly minded companies is a step into the unknown. The clash of cultures is only the start. Governance, communications, processes, structure, people and change all add up to an exponential increase in management complexity. Included in this is the need to weld all staff involved into a joint alliance team.
Furthermore, few organisations enter into alliances with appropriate success strategies and most seriously underestimate the increased level of management effort needed. On top of this, the environment has the ability to continuously throw ‘spanners into the works’ without warning.
These myths cannot be allowed to obstruct the development of the new relationships because the key to survival in a chaotic world is working closely within your supply chains and networks to reduce risks, increase resilience and seek out high value opportunities.