I PARTNER, THEREFORE I AM ... MORE

I PARTNER, THEREFORE I AM … MORE

Organizations are struggling to react quickly to ever-changing customer needs, alliances among competitors, brand-new technologies, and top-talent wants and whims. Companies are straining to shift with market winds and financial swings, striving to outmaneuver and outlast competitors. Finding balance between the tasks and the relationships within and between organizations is key. Businesses are becoming organic networks, neural webs. A partnering culture appreciates the power of organic networks and embraces connectivity as the way we need to do our business every day. As our nomadic forebears did millennia ago, we will survive and grow only by making connections among one another, to the world around us, and to forces beyond our comprehension.

If you truly belive that things cannot be different, then they will stay the same. Too oftern we sink orselves in the quicksand of fatalistic clichés such as "There's nothing new under the sun." Let's see, did physicians a thousand years ago know how the atrioventricular node routes bioelectric impulses along the pathways of a beating heart? Did astronomers one hundred years ago scan the sky with a radio telscope and see the Black Hole at the center of our galaxy? Did mathematicians ten years ago crank equations with a 2-GHz microprocessor? Creativity is at once both an act of faith and an act of hope. Ponder the insight of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, writing in Christianity and Evolution (1964): "Nothing can any longer find place in our constructions which does not first satisfy the conditions of a universe in process of transformation" (78, emphasis added). I create, therefore I am.

In the world of commerce and industry, connectivity happens when enterprises form strategic alliances and partnerships within and among themselves. Creating a partnering culture requires hard work because most of us are, unknowingly, suspicious captives of a world-view that espouses disconnections and self-reliance as the quickest ways to success. I did it my way My way or the highway. Successful leaders must understand and appreciate the profound marketplace implications of the human journey from connections to disconnections to reconnections. Zero sum must give way to infinite sum. New partnering cultures will thus need bracing but pliant transitional structures to enable connectivity values to take hold in the current hostile environment of disconnections. Alliances produce extraordinary results only when information flows freely and people trust each other and are loyal to one another. I partner, therefore I am … more.

To help leaders of an enterprise better understand how the existing organization culture is aligned or misaligned with the behavioral characteristics of a partnering organization, the authors employ a proprietary assessment instrument known as the Partnering Culture Survey. The survey data are presented to the company's leaders in the form of a six-dimesional Partnering Culture Profile, along with a specific set of staged, actionable recomendations for creating a Powerhouse Partner. In Chapter 3, we will begin sharing generic strategies and tactics for building a partnering organization, steps we have summarized in what we call the Powerhouse Partner Model.