Supply Chain and Partnership Management for Entrepreneurs

An Instant Guide

Guy Rigby

• Verlag: Harriman House
• Jahr: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857191908
• Thema: Business
• Thema: Entrepreneurship

This eBook is about supply chain and partnership management for entrepreneurs.The author of this instant guide from Harriman House, Guy Rigby, has also written From Vision to Exit, which is a complete entrepreneurs' guide to setting up, running and passing on or selling a business.

Supply Chain and Partnership Management for Entrepreneurs

“Success in the modern world depends on the real connections you have.”

— Reid Hoffman, founder and CEO, LinkedIn

Collaborate to accumulate

The road to growth is paved with partnerships – successful businesses rarely operate alone. They collaborate with other businesses and people within and outside their supply chains to establish mutually beneficial alliances. They do this because they know that partnering can leverage their own competencies and those of others to help propel their growth.

Strategic alliances are nothing new. Accenture, the management consultancy, says that Fortune 500 companies have an average of 50–70 alliances each. In this chapter, we’ll examine how to work with alliance partners and build robust relationships with suppliers in order to improve your efficiency, productivity and results.

Collaboration is a watchword for the 21st century. We have discovered that working together and engaging with complementary, non-competing businesses is always more powerful than working alone – we collaborate to accumulate.

As Neal Gandhi points out in his book, Born Global: “It’s no longer a case of working with someone from a different department to create something innovative or high quality. It’s about opening our doors to working with people and organisations outside the four walls of our traditional HQs, from different corners of the globe. That’s how value is created in today’s economy – through collaborative networks that provide more access to talent, skills, knowledge, information and ideas. Sharing opens up a wider resource pool.”

Network thinking

Thomas and Penny Power are the founders of Ecademy, an online business network for entrepreneurs and small business owners. They talk about the difference between ‘institutional thinking’ and ‘network thinking’. The former, which is ‘closed, selective and controlling’ is bumping up against the latter, which is ‘open, random and supportive’.

They accept that both styles are required, depending on the situation and scenario, but say that network thinking is gaining ground against institutional thinking, with its evolution presenting real challenges to executives in both large and small organisations.

For me, network thinking is all about collaboration. If you are open to sharing and collaboration, you can create a community that is more engaged and inclusive, more active and participatory. In the online age, it won’t pay to hide yourself away.

There are many businesses that are fearful of adopting a network approach. They are worried about giving away their trade secrets or losing their competitive advantage. In most cases, they are wrong. If they won’t collaborate with their customers, suppliers, distributors and others, their competitors surely will.

“Growing up, the world was defined by the conflict between a democratic, free-market West, and a totalitarian, command-economy East,” says Jasper Westaway, CEO of software collaboration platform oneDrum. “Most companies persist with an industrial age model that resembles the latter and not an information age model that favours the former. We are by default closed [and that means] we are closed to success,” he continues. “In practice, organisations never fail because they are too open; they fail because they are too closed.”

Take the Body Shop, for example. A great deal of its success comes down to the strength of its partnerships at every level and its ability to build strong relationships with all of its stakeholders. These include suppliers (fair trade cooperatives), others in its supply chain (NGOs and charities) as well as its distributors (retail partners and ‘at home’ consultants), all of whom champion the Body Shop’s causes.

Other companies, ...