Alliances

Alliances, from simple collaborations to global joint ventures, harness the capabilities and assets of multiple firms to create growth options. They also pose new, often-misunderstood risks. Most alliances fail to reach their planned objectives. Few reach their full potential.

Our Senior Advisers understand the fundamental cause of alliance failure to be the lack of an integrated alliance architecture — from strategy formulation to partner choice to portfolio and day-to-day alliance management. True North brings decades of experience planning, forming, and managing alliances to our clients. We collaborate with them systematically to design and build their alliance-management capabilities. Working with senior executives we build understanding and commitment. Clients reinforce that commitment through enhanced decision-making processes and broad-based training. Over time, these actions drive alliance-supporting behaviors across the organization.

Clients prefer our integrated approach, as we work with them to blueprint alliance management needs, identify architectural elements with the greatest effect on success and focus improvement efforts. True North does not offer quick fixes, nor do we tout studies purporting root causes that match our service offering. We agree with top alliance practitioners that spot fixes are ineffective.

Ecosystem Design and Management

Leaders must simultaneously build strong core capabilities internally, while leveraging external sources suppliers, alliance partners, academic and industry organizations to thrive in an increasing complex competitive and regulatory arena. Business ecosystems are difficult to create, and even more difficult to manage. Successful corporations often face the great challenges to effective collaboration, as their people and systems are adapted to solitary control. True North helps with developing, implementing and managing:

Recognizing that each client’s alliance needs are unique, we help them: