American Management Association Offers New Curriculum on Strategic Alliances and Partnerships

Business Wire, Sept 13, 2007

Three new seminars are endorsed by the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals and will prepare alliance managers for ASAP certification

NEW YORK -- American Management Association (AMA), a world leader in professional development and performance-based learning solutions, is launching a new series of programs specifically designed to empower individuals who are managing strategic alliances and partnerships for their organizations. The new Strategic Alliance Management curriculum will include seminars, Web-based programs, as well as other development materials and training resources.

"Essentially, there are three ways to grow your business: build, buy, or ally," said Pat Leonard, Executive Vice President for U.S. Management Education at American Management Association. "Each has its own challenges, but the alliance path affords the opportunity to gain new or expanded capabilities that your core business lacks without permanent commitment of organic investment or external acquisition and integration. Surveys of senior management indicate that alliances are increasingly a more preferred growth strategy for a host of reasons: cost effective means of product development, speed to market, enhancement of brand, alternative sourcing of talent and talent management, and the ability to share the risk of growth and innovation."

The seminars in AMA's new portfolio include the Essentials of Strategic Alliances and Partnerships, Launching and Managing Strategic Alliances and Partnerships, and Measuring the ROI of Strategic Alliances and Partnerships. They are endorsed by the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals and will prepare alliance managers for ASAP certification.

"As companies depend more on strategic alliances to drive growth and innovation, the art of collaboration and managing those complex relationships becomes a corporate core competency," said Mike Leonetti, Chairman of ASAP and head of Healthcare Partnerships at Boehringer Ingelheim. "AMA's Strategic Alliance Management portfolio is a great resource for developing the critical skills needed by professionals to effectively manage alliances and to aid them in achieving certification in alliance management."

According to the McKinsey Quarterly, strategic partnerships are an important example of emerging forms of corporate strategy. Six out of ten executives report that their companies have more partnerships today than they had five years ago, and 75 percent say the need to strengthen their competitive position has prompted changes to those partnerships.

There are many reasons why organizations choose to partner and the benefits can be dramatic for all parties involved. Some of the top reasons include creating greater value for customers, leveraging new sources of innovation, entering new markets or lines of business, establishing new revenue streams, reducing costs or harnessing economies of scale, developing new products or services, and expanding geographically.

According to a recent study of 765 CEOs conducted by IBM Global Services, CEOs around the globe believe alliance collaboration is absolutely critical. Although collaborative aspirations were high, effective implementation was dramatically lower. Citing a lack of the skills and competence in what is actually needed for an alliance to succeed, many of the CEOs referred to partnering as "theoretically easy" but "practically hard to do."

AMA's seminars will provide participants with the best practices, knowledge, skills, and tools needed to successfully manage multiple aspects of successful alliances partnerships. These two-day programs are specifically designed for a broad range of executives, managers, and team leaders at every level across all functional areas who are either responsible for or support their organization's strategic alliances and partnerships.

Essentials of Strategic Alliances and Partnerships will help participants understand and articulate the characteristics of successful alliances, prioritize the key components for each phase of the alliance life cycle, recognize today's best practices in alliance management, assess their organization's competency in forming partnerships, and evaluate their organization's attractiveness as a "preferred partner."

Launching and Managing Strategic Alliances and Partnerships will help participants to identify the five essential areas crucial to the success of alliance relationships as they relate to creating high-performing alliance teams, anticipating and preventing potential pitfalls in alliances, monitoring alliance relationships using a "health check" survey, diagnosing and treating the hidden causes of underperforming alliances, and adapting the alliance team charter--a proven framework for managing alliances.

Measuring the ROI of Strategic Alliances and Partnerships is specifically designed for those executives who need to determine the bottom-line value of their alliances. The program will enable them to develop alliance performance scorecards that they can use at every level of their organization, learn how to lay the foundation for structuring and managing results-oriented alliances, assess the effectiveness and return on investment of current strategic relationships to get buy-in for future alliances, identify where they are in an alliance life cycle, use the appropriate metrics for each stage, and identify processes for driving, measuring, and rewarding peak alliance performance.