Claflin's Five Rules for Partnering

Vecta Consulting

Bruce Claflin has five rules for partering success

Bruce Claflin, former CEO of 3Com, insists that internal 3Com resources are only applied to areas that differentiate 3Com.

The horizontal markets that emerged with the PC in the 1970s allow companies to focus only on one or two layers and partner elsewhere.

Partnering allows you to leverage the capital, scale and expertise of others but requires unique management skills to know what to keep and what to drop.

He outlined five rules for successful partnering:

partners will not be monogamous - to be the best in the vertical markets you serve, you need to work with the best players in other horizontal slices of your market; accept that they will be working with your competitors too.
you will sometimes forget rule 1 - partnerships work best between a dominant and subservient player but the subservient partner sometimes grows faster than the dominant player causing friction and potential divorce
the CEO role is important to the partnership - if only as a safety valve when misunderstandings happen, allowing adjustments of expectations.
apply the same disciplines to the management of outsourced areas as you would if they were sourced internally.
know your own capabilities so well that you really do outsource anything at which you are not the best.

He emphasised that partnerships need a lot of hard work if they are to deliver their full value.

We can help you decide if, how, where, and when to collaborate; how and with whom.

Collaboration is becoming increasingly necessary to maximise financial return as product development costs and risks escalate. Choosing when and where to compete or collaborate with the right partners using the right forms of collaboration is the foundation. Knowing how to collaborate effectively with a partner in one area while competing intensely with the same partner in another is adding a new dimension to product development. Changing partners from one product generation to another is also necessary to minimise the threat from disruptive technology.

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Contact: Frank.Morris@vecta5.com

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