192 Part Three ❘ Choreographing Your Success ' FIGURE 10.1 ❘ Purposeful Collaboration Process 1. Set Goals (Figure 6.4)—Start by identifying your goals for the current period. Once you’ve written out your goals and identified the milestone, you’ll use to assess performance, determine the relative importance of each goal and assign a weighting factor. 2. Currencies Needed (Figure 6.5)—Having determined your goals, identify the specific currencies you believe are necessary to help you achieve each of your goals. 3. Four Questions (Figure 6.6)—Now that you’ve identi- fied your goals and the currencies you need, go through all of your relationships, answering the four questions about every individual. 4. Select Scenarios (Figure 6.2)—By answering the four questions, you can place every relationship into one of nine different relationship scenario categories. Then identify the specific Relationship Scenarios you want to dig deeper into. Remember, Scenarios A–D represent the greatest opportunity. 5. Rate Value (Figure 7.1)—In preparation for completing a Relationship Scorecard for each person in the identified scenarios, assess the level and utility of the currencies you believe you’ll receive from each person. 6. Relationship Scorecard (Figure 7.2)—Using the cur- rency value 5-point rating system, complete a current and future Relationship Scorecard for each person you evaluate. 7. Prioritize Relationships (Figure 7.8)—Now it’s time to establish priorities. Calculating the Relationship Value Delta (Future Relationship Value − Current Relationship Value) determines the relative priority of all your rela- tionships. The scorecard provides a wealth of informa- tion, so analyze that too. 10 ❘ How Yo u Do Business in the Era of Collaborative Business 193 8. Collaborate (Figure 8.1)—Now that you’ve determined with whom you want to collaborate and the specific cur- rencies each could provide, you must build the required level of trust through the activities associated with each level of collaboration. You do this by constructing a se- ries of value propositions that get each party succes- sively closer to obtaining the currencies it needs to achieve its goals. 9. Evaluate Performance (Figure 9.5)—After every interac- tion, assess whether you’ve gained access to the desired currencies. Then, based on your analysis and your abil- ity to see the pattern in the data, refine the value propo- sition, if necessary. Stand back and evaluate whether the currencies you received did, in fact, allow you to achieve your goals. During this process of evaluation, learn as much as you can about what worked and, even more im- portant, what didn’t work, so you can make better as- sumptions going forward. This requirement is really important because assessing the real-time progress and making changes just as soon as your intuition (fed by the data provided by the Relationship Scorecard) tells you will save you valuable resources. With this knowledge, refine your goals for the future and start the Purposeful Collaboration Process over again and again and again. HOW YOU THINK MATTERS MOST ❚ The Relationship Matrix and the Relationship Scorecard evaluate the strategic benefit of collaborating with a specific business entity. We’ve seen that the Relationship Matrix and the Relation- ship Scorecard are employed to evaluate the strategic benefit of 194 Part Three ❘ Choreographing Your Success collaborating with a specific business entity (individual or com- pany) given the goals you are trying to achieve. But as we hope this book has demonstrated, the real key to collaboration is on the individual relationship (personal) level. No matter how im- portant a collaboration may be between companies or how clev- erly an agreement is structured, the collaboration will not succeed if the necessary activities on the individual level don’t occur. And for activities to occur on the individual relationship level, it is important to know how you should think about rela- tionships in the era of collaborative business. ❚ Collaboration will not succeed if the necessary activities on the individual level don’t occur. Clearly, how you think matters most because it directly in- fluences how you allocate your resources in two main ways: (1) focusing your limited resources to provide the greatest benefit and fastest return, and (2) reducing the risk of exhausting your valuable resources on wasteful resource sinks. With the development of the Relationship Matrix and the Relationship Scorecard, we have objectified this analytical pro- cess. Indeed, we can now see the individual cells of the Rela- tionship Scorecard as data points in the puzzle of understanding on a real-time basis whether you are making progress toward your goals and thus can take immediate action if you are not sat- isfied with that progress. However, we recognize that while our challenge has been to insert systematic data collection and analysis into every facet of business relationships, it is your challenge to know when to transcend the numbers and go with your gut. After all the mea- surements and analyses are done, you still have to make a deci- sion, which sometimes means going beyond the data to rely on your intuition. We don’t mean we’re throwing everything we’ve said out the window, but this book would not be completely ac- curate if we implied that all decisions can be turned into a purely 10 ❘ How Yo u Do Business in the Era of Collaborative Business 195 mechanical process. They can’t. But it is an old saw that the per- son who seems to have better intuition is usually someone who has better information. So it is vital to have access to the infor- mation that the Relationship Matrix and Relationship Scorecard provide. ❚ The person who seems to have better intuition usually has better information. Thus, the implications of our new methodologies and tech- nologies are profound. First, you can exponentially increase the level of information at your fingertips for making significant business decisions by now valuing, measuring, and managing strategic relationships at their fundamental human level. Sec- ond, you can use a broader approach that includes cash and cur- rencies other than cash to sustain these relationships. Third, you can build collaborative business relationships that are based on trusting, purposeful, mutually beneficial value propositions. As we’ve stressed throughout the book, collaborative rela- tionships don’t just happen. In addition to requiring a lot of hard work, this new repertoire of relationship skills is fundamentally different from the skill set that was required in the product-centric business environment and therefore takes time to absorb and de- velop. But the task must be accomplished. Why? Because as we all know, business begins in the mind. In the age of collaborative business you must think from the perspec- tive of everyone as a customer, that there is quantifiable and sig- nificant value in non-cash currencies, and that the intricacies of all forms of business relationships can be objectively measured and managed. By thinking about business from these new per- spectives, you can understand where your business is and where it is going. This is the beginning of Purposeful Collaboration. 196 Part Three ❘ Choreographing Your Success To be successful in the era of collaborative business where everyone is a customer . . . you must have the mindset of an entrepreneur and the skillset of a choreographer. So the time has come to put down this book, lace up your dancing shoes, and . . . Let the dance begin! 10 ❘ How Yo u Do Business in the Era of Collaborative Business 197 [...]... The Rhythm of Business, Inc., a Newton, Massachusetts, firm that helps businesspeople and organizations measure and manage the value in their business relationships in order to realize strategic benefit Experts in the emerging field of collaborative business, Jeff and Jan pay particular attention to understanding the impact of advances in information and communications technologies on the relationship. .. for Boston Magazine as well as articles for several national computer publications The Rhythm of Business, Inc., provides education and training offerings, publications, consulting, and software products that offer the understanding and tools required for the development and implementation of collaborative business models, processes, and relationships that can iterate as customers and the business environment... change For more information, visit us at EVERYONE IS A CUSTOMER Now your entire organization can learn how to grow customer relationships! For quantities of Everyone Is a Customer, please contact Mindi Rowland in Special Sales, 800-621-9621, ext 4 410, rowland@dearborn.com Your company also can order this book with a customized cover featuring your name, logo, and message... entrepreneurs and free agents in the earliest stages of their businesses, consulted with established companies, and served as president of a company that produced and marketed educational business conferences and publications for manufacturers adopting collaborative product development practices She is a Certified Public Accountant and was formerly a partner and human resources director with a regional CPA firm... serves on the boards of directors of RelationsWeb and Responsible World, Inc Jan has also served on the boards of not -for- profit organizations that promote entrepreneurship as a means out of poverty for women, and she was a delegate to the 1997 Microcredit Summit David Rottenberg is the editor for The Rhythm of Business, Inc He has also worked as a freelance author and has written business profiles for Boston... program is among the top 25 entrepreneurship programs, according to the 2002 U.S News & World Report rankings Jeff has been part of the founding team of six companies in diverse industries, 209 210 About the Authors ranging from manufacturing and distribution to software development He has served as advisor, consultant, and educator to thousands of businesspeople throughout his career Jan has worked... between a business and its customers Jeff is also professor and director of Bentley College’s Entrepreneurial Studies Program in Waltham, Massachusetts Bentley’s award-winning program is based on the iterative and intuitive business-building process first described in Jeff’s book The Rhythm of Business: The Key to Building and Running Successful Companies (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1998) Bentley’s program is. .. Choreographer constituencies of, 23–24, 35 customers and, 8 See also Customer( s) defined, 16 defining needs and wants of, 21–22 incentives for, 55–56, 70, 81 management of relationships in, 49 see also Collaboration Collaborative opportunity, 101 Collaborative relationship, 101 Communication technologies, 9 Compensation systems, 57–58 Competencies, as currency, 61–62 Copyrights, 158 Cost reduction/savings,... 183–84, 193 goal-weighting table, 106 identifying, 105 percentage-weighting for, 105 –6 process, 118–20 Purposeful Collaboration and, 193 real time indication of progress, 178–79, 185 relationship assessment, 97–98 relationship linkage, 169–73 shared, 141, 153–57, 166 S-M -A- R-T, 78, 90, 105 , 110 value realized, 176–80 Global Logistics & Supply Chain Strategies, 42 Griffin, Ron, 157 Hensarling, Lenley, 161... 28–30 Incentives, for collaboration, 55–56, 70, 81 Industry consortia, 13 Information, 25, 34, 36, 166 infrastructure, 150–51, 161–64 patterns of, 164 real-time, 162, 163 security of, 158–59 sharing, 142, 144, 151–53, 165 systems, 57 technologies, 9 Information risk, 158–59, 166 InformationWeek, 6, 53 Innovation, 78, 170 Intellectual property, 62, 160 Intensive interaction, 79–80 Interaction-by-interaction . exponentially increase the level of information at your fingertips for making significant business decisions by now valuing, measuring, and managing strategic relationships at their fundamental human. knowledge, refine your goals for the future and start the Purposeful Collaboration Process over again and again and again. HOW YOU THINK MATTERS MOST ❚ The Relationship Matrix and the Relationship Scorecard evaluate. that there is quantifiable and sig- nificant value in non-cash currencies, and that the intricacies of all forms of business relationships can be objectively measured and managed. By thinking about