Your strategic alliances, partnerships, and other devices for collaboration are also important and necessary resources. As your organizational structure flattens, there must be some way to let go of control without losing control. Instead of the favored vertical integration, where all the work is done in-house (a model common in some big corporations), there may be another way. Why not give up some of the control and profits through shared work? Why not form relationships with vested interest in mutual success? In a rigid structure this may be hard to do, but given the need to add and subtract work units, this model fits very nicely with the relationship organization.
Nortel Networks practices the model of downloading responsibilities by outsourcing. Nortel has extensive relationships to perform urgent but not important activities, leaving the core team to do those things that matter more to the company’s well-being. Here is a list of some of Nortel’s strategic partners and the functions each handles:
A good resource is your competition. In the old model of seeing the world, the competition was the enemy to be met and defeated on the business battlefield. Today we have many examples of how organizations thought to be enemies are now working together to achieve even greater returns. Twenty years ago who would have thought IBM and Apple Computers would be working off the same platform, or that BMW would be building cars in Alabama (known in slang language as “bubba beamers”), or that Honda would be making cars in the United States.