Finding Opportunity in Disruption: Pivot your Ecosystem Strategy

Have you rethought your partner ecosystem strategy in terms of what new opportunities lie ahead?  Are you prepared to find the opportunity in disruption?  We can assume that business as usual is not going to work in today's volatile business climate because business has become unusual. Yet, disruptive times are times of great opportunity for [...]

By |2020-08-26T14:25:43+00:00August 25, 2020|

Ecosystem Partnerships Extend and Evolve Alliances

Published by  TIDWIT Inc. at  June 2, 2020 An interview with Norma Watenpaugh, CEO & Founding Principal, Phoenix Consulting Group Q:  You have been involved with the channel and emerging ecosystems for some time.  How has the concept of partnership evolved over the past several years? NW:  I would not say the concept of partnership has evolved so [...]

By |2020-06-09T18:27:36+00:00June 9, 2020|

Partner Relief in Uncertain Times

Small businesses have been unusually hard-hit in these uncertain times. The dynamics of the partner ecosystem is that most of the partners are small business and they serve small businesses. Being a small business myself, I know how precarious cash flow can be. Many of these businesses are seeing their revenues shut down as their [...]

By |2020-05-12T18:58:05+00:00April 20, 2020|

Building a Culture for a Collaborative Ecosystem

Building a partner ecosystem is hard. But what's harder than building an ecosystem? Building a culture that supports an ecosystem strategy. I spoke with one executive who was responsible for building the partner ecosystem at a well-known payroll processor, and our discussion perfectly illustrated this challenge. The executive's decades-old company was expanding beyond payroll processing [...]

By |2020-03-27T20:14:14+00:00March 27, 2020|

Why Principles-Based Collaboration Is Essential For Agile Ecosystems

as published in Forbes.com. As we enter an "Era of Ecosystems," we need a different approach and thinking to manage these multi-dimensional and multi-lateral business relationships. I believe the partner management processes that have been developed as a profession are still relevant, but we do need to rethink how we apply them. Nine-way governance models [...]

By |2019-12-17T22:28:16+00:00December 17, 2019|

We Need All of our Alliances to be Agile!

In early 2018, my colleague Laura Powers, an Agilest Icon, and I held a workshop on Agile Partnering. One of our attendees was Kristina Scott, Sr. Director Partner Enablement, Marketing, Operations at Seclore. Seclore is an emerging security software startup with a broad ecosystem of channels, technology alliances and OEMs. A year after the workshop, [...]

By |2019-09-16T16:36:05+00:00September 16, 2019|

Sleeping with the Frenemy

or How to Build Successful Partnerships with the Competition as published in Forbes.com. In the complex landscape of today’s business ecosystems, it is almost inevitable that companies with a large network of partners are, in fact, competing with some of those same partners. This has given us "co-opetition," a term that is derived from "cooperative [...]

By |2019-09-16T16:34:10+00:00August 19, 2019|

It Takes an Ecosystem

or How to Build to Build Partner Ecosystems for Agility, Innovation and Growth in Your Business as published in Forbes.com. As someone who has been architecting and managing business partner ecosystems for more than 30 years in the tech industry, I am quite interested in the attention ecosystems have been receiving from management pundits of [...]

By |2019-07-24T19:58:40+00:00July 17, 2019|

Agile Collaboration – A Better Way to Partner

Or "Seven Steps to a Successful Agile Collaboration" as published in Forbes.com As organizations transform to more digitally savvy business models, I am seeing that it is more than business processes that need rethinking. I believe transformative digital business models require ecosystems of partners and a faster, more responsive way of working within these networks [...]

By |2019-05-04T23:17:24+00:00May 4, 2019|