After seeing a full spectrum of partnerships in your independent professional career, what’s next? You partner in the RIGHT part of the spectrum!

Tuesday: Return Driven Strategy FROM THE DESK OF MILES EVERSON: For the past two weeks, we’ve been talking about deliberately building good partnerships as an integral part of your career as an independent professional. Today, we’ll continue our discussion around this topic, but expand it to focusing on choosing the best types of partnerships for your brand and what happens when the wrong partnerships are chosen. As someone who’s been in the business of supporting independent professionals for many years now, I believe knowing these things is very important if you want to move forward in your career. Keep reading to learn more about what it truly means to “partner deliberately.” CEO, MBO Partners Chairman of the Advisory Board, The I Institute

After seeing a full spectrum of partnerships in your independent professional career, what’s next? You partner in the RIGHT part of the spectrum! According to the book, “Driven,” which was co-authored by my friend and colleague, Professor Joel Litman, and Dr. Mark L. Frigo, deliberately choosing the best type of partnership is based on: A partner’s ability to enhance the activities designed for accomplishing the higher tenets in the Return Driven Strategy framework. The genuine assets of a partner. This means you have to consider the need for exclusivity in the partnerships you’ll build given their importance to the potential uniqueness of your offerings. But! What happens when the wrong level of partnership is chosen? Let’s take a look at two companies that had different approaches to partnering with other businesses. In the 1980s, The Coors Company, a popular beer maker in the US, felt that vertical integration was important. [Vertical Integration: This is when a business feels a need to actually own all inputs and distribution of a particular offering in order to survive and succeed in the industry.] So, the beer maker bought up canning companies as well as aluminum manufacturing businesses because why not? Cans are made up of aluminum. Here’s the thing. The Coors Company failed to answer these important questions before deciding to partner with canning and aluminum manufacturing companies: Can aluminum containers be manufactured so uniquely that they would cause a customer to purchase The Coors’ can of beer and disregard other competitors? Could the aluminum used to make the cans be made with such a singular precision that consumers would buy The Coors’ beer because of that aluminum quality? If your answers to both questions are “no,” then you would probably understand why The Coors Company experienced poor returns for decades. On the other hand, The Coca-Cola Company had a different partnering strategy during the same period. It did the opposite of vertical integration. Instead of recklessly partnering with different businesses, the company made great strides in divesting itself of bottling operations. Sure, Coca-Cola never became a glass or aluminum manufacturer. It only retained equity interests in businesses to maintain control over bottling. After that, the company focused on marketing and branding its offerings and monopolizing control over key distribution assets. As a result, Coca-Cola’s returns rose year after year for over a decade. See? There’s different and polarizing results for these companies… all because of their approaches to partnerships! When you fail to build the right relationships and partnerships with other firms or independent professionals, your competencies in the area of innovation, branding, and delivery will be affected. … but that doesn’t mean you should just opt to not partner with anyone or any business at all. You just have to know how to partner in the RIGHT part of the spectrum so you’ll optimize returns for your own firm or organization. According to poet John Donne, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.” In the same way, no business can survive on its own without carefully and deliberately leveraging the assets and activities of others. If there’s one driving motivation behind all your partnering activities, it should be this: The promise of better innovating, branding, and delivering offerings. The benefit of partnering deliberately? When done right, this could mean higher returns for your firm and eventually, higher benefit to the society because resources are not wasted on unnecessary activities! Hope you found this week’s insights interesting and helpful. Follow us on LinkedIn.     Stay tuned for next Tuesday’s Return Driven Strategy! To redesign any process is to understand its purpose and change or develop processes to achieve that focus. Learn more about map and redesign processes on next week’s Return Driven Strategy!