I believe strongly in partnerships and their ability to provide everyone with meaning and success in their lives. I believe that partnerships make better products, better relationships, and better results for customers, suppliers, companies, and all their stakeholders. I haven’t always felt this way. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in partnerships but that I simply never thought about them. Then I took an executive position in a middle-market company and everything changed.
Before I held that position, I was a consultant in a Big 8 (at the time) consulting firm and, later, a partner at a local firm. We specialized in IT system selection, World Class Manufacturing, business process improvement, and productivity improvement. I never thought much about the human aspects of what I did; my job was to improve the business and deliver excellent methodology.
When I started working as VP, Operations, for the first time I really focused on people. I had never directed employees, and suddenly I was in charge of over 70 of them: people with families and aspirations who wanted to do a good job and make a living. I was also in charge of our relationships with our suppliers. They too had aspirations and families to support and wanted their businesses to be successful. In many cases, they were used to being beat up by their customers and developed a typical “us versus them” attitude. As a member of the executive team that led the entire organization, I saw that working together to improve our business was more effective and more fun than the constant turf battles that were common in the companies that I used to consult with.
Partnerships seemed like an obvious way for everyone to achieve new levels of performance. In a partnership, the whole is greater than its parts; 1 + 1 is much more than 2. If partnerships are developed and strongly supported, 1 + 1 can be 100 or more. Now I use the concepts of partnerships in all of my consulting work because it provides my clients with breakthrough results. Partnerships are much more than collaboration. This book provides many examples of partnerships that achieved extraordinary results with customers, suppliers, internal organizations, and the community.