Partnership vs. Competition
by naisan on Mar.29, 2007, under competition, enterprise software, partnership, strategic alliances, tech industry
In 1989 the Harvard Business Review published an article around Partnership and Competition being points along the same continuum. This is a fairly obvious point, but it is a subtle truth that reveals how some of the assumptions we make are so unconscious that they fade into the background.
Any competitor is a potential partner, and any partner a potential competitor. Which they become is your choice.
So partnership in tech, which is a fluid field allowing for rapid structural change, allows for more flux in relationships than other fields. But what defines how we see other companies in tech? It is really about deciding what you are, and then also knowing what you want to become, and how you plan to get there.
Barring a solid understanding of those three things, which are the core of corporate strategy and planning, partnerships are dangerous. They can easily take over your company. In some cases that’s a good thing: witness how many VAR organizations have grown up around some of the largest software vendors. In some cases there are entire companies that were built out of a partnership gone wild, with the express goal of letting that partnership subsume the company in the form of an acquisition.
In the end, larger companies that build successful partnerships are good at the same thing that makes good relationships on the personal level: boundaries.
In the end, deciding what you are not going to do becomes more powerful that what you are going to do.
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April 10th, 2007 on 21:14
I made a link to you – does that make us partners? I hope neither of us gets subsumed by the other…