Rhythm of business что это
Rhythm of business что это
Partnering fundamentals are essential —but insufficient for the complexity and dynamics of business today. If you seek business outcomes through partnering, you must holistically manage complexity, foster agility, and build innovation into everything you do. So called “best practices” are not best for your business—by definition they normalize differences and encourage mediocrity.
The Rhythm of Business employs the principles of design thinking and lean startup—the essence of the rhythm of business methodology:
Partnering requires entrepreneurial agility. The Rhythm of Business guides you to identify critical assumptions and the data needed to validate or invalidate them as quickly as possible. If not valid, we help you iterate your assumptions quickly, saving resources to allocate to a better approach.
How We Work With You
The Rhythm of Business works as an extension of your team, augmenting your resources and serving as your trusted advisor.
As an extension of your team we take on specific projects that benefit from our expertise, experience, and commitment to your success.
Often we develop or improve organizational structure—e.g. moving from a centralized alliance management group to a decentralized or next generation partnering everywhere design. We help organizations mature from vertical, functionally based structures into holistic, programmatic structures focused on the solution ecosystem and customers.
Almost always, we help our clients iterate practices, processes, roles, responsibilities, accountabilities, then integrate them into corporate governance. By creating a common platform for partnering throughout the organization and managing a dynamic, complex portfolio of partners, we ensure you can flex to work with different types of partners.
It Takes Partnering to Deliver the Goods.
Recent research confirms it: The companies that excel at digital transformation are the ones that collaborate well—internally and externally. We help companies build the mindset, skillset, and toolset required for next generation partnering in a world of accelerating change.
We augment your resources— stepping in to negotiate agreements, building and guiding the implementation of launch plans, intervening in challenging situations with data-driven assessments, and facilitating a path forward.
Alliances in formation count on us to help shape their operating, governance, and economic models. We help provide “guardrails” that can be documented in a contract, but don’t overly constrain the partners as the business develops.
We help drive the crucial and time-intensive startup stage, ensuring it gets to steady-state operations, be that in research, product development, or commercialization. We’ll get governance in place, work plans developed, teams collaborating, and management receiving regular reports. Think of us as an outsourced program and alliance management team.
Keep Your Capability on the Cutting Edge.
Alliance managers today must do more than mitigate risk—you must create, deliver, and capture value through partnering. Take your capability to the next level—with The Rhythm of Business at your side.
We are your trusted advisor, providing leadership a steady expert voice amidst storms of conflicting advice. We are your channel for the emerging, leading practices for partnering in our rapidly evolving world.
We also show up with our toolbox. Our proprietary measurement tools bring leaders the voice of their partners, their customers, and their stakeholders. With these voices, we chart the route to better outcomes for all. Get to the root of an underperforming or dysfunctional alliance with our VitalSigns™ Alliance Operational Effectiveness Assessment—and create alignment around a new “North Star” to guide your Executive Sponsors and Steering Committee along the increasingly complex partnering journey.
Our publications and presentations inject current, groundbreaking, and actionable insights into the management conversation. Our highly accessible thought leadership informs your organization’s practices and helps build higher-level consensus around partnering strategy and execution.
There is no aspect of partnering that is easy. You face the challenges—and rewards—of pursuing a common objective across corporate boundaries, strategies, cultures, and ways of working. We’re a shoulder to lean on, a sounding board to bounce ideas off of, a voice of the third way you may never have found to resolve an issue or solve a problem.
Rhythm of business что это
Forge your path to partnering and alliance success—with The Rhythm of Business at your side. Unleash innovation. Create advantage and loyalty among partners and customers. Engage stakeholders, producing desired business outcomes. Innovate the partnering experience—from ideation through monetization. Master alliance management for the ecosystem. Tame complexity and risk of partnering with strategy, governance, and execution. It’s all possible—with The Rhythm of Business by your side.
Our customized services enable and develop the partnering mindset, skillset, and toolset throughout your organization—from the executive suite to the front lines of research in the lab or sales in the field. Harnessing our proven strategies, frameworks, and tools, unleash the creativity, collaboration, effectiveness, and performance of your people and partnerships. Lift your partnering performance far above the “best practices” baseline. Partner with new players, new models, and leverage myriad forms of value to achieve your objectives in the ecosystem.
The Rhythm of Business employs the principles of design thinking and lean startup—the essence of the rhythm of business methodology. Partnering success requires the entrepreneurial agility to identify critical assumptions and find the data needed to validate or invalidate them as quickly as possible. If not valid, we help you iterate your assumptions quickly, saving resources to allocate to a better approach.
Principals
Twombly works as an extension of partnering and alliance management teams, helping them accelerate outcomes from partnering and alliances. She helps business leadership move organization, operations, and behavior to a more collaborative way of working, both internally and externally. She guides companies to reach higher levels of alliance success by integrating partnering into all aspects of the business. Customized education and training bring alliance and collaboration skills to all who interact with partners.
Twombly serves on the Executive and Management Committee of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP). She is editorial advisor and frequent contributor to ASAP Media, publisher of Strategic Alliance Magazine, and contributed to the ASAP Handbook of Alliance Management: A Practitioner’s Guide. Her volunteer responsibilities previously included the program content of ASAP conferences.
Together with business partner Jeffrey Shuman, Twombly has a rich history of developing, publishing, and presenting strategic and practical thinking that advances the art and science of partnering and alliance management.
Her first career was as a Certified Public Accountant, becoming partner in a regional CPA firm, serving technology and knowledge-based entrepreneurial companies. Twombly continues to leverage her financial knowledge. She serves as Treasurer and a Member of the Executive Committee of RESULTS and the RESULTS Educational Fund, sister organizations that empower individuals around the world to use their voices and collaborative skills to influence decisions by governments and other institutions that will bring about the end of poverty. She is also a member of the Finance Commission of her town government, evaluating and making recommendations about the town’s overall budget and financial operations.
His mix of operational, consulting, research, and classroom experiences allow him to blend the theoretical with the practical, providing useful, easily implementable and repeatable advice.
At The Rhythm of Business Shuman helps global companies in multiple industries advance their partnering and collaborative capability. Consulting engagements focus on driving results through enabling all functions of the business to work effectively with their partners, from ideas to monetization. He works with senior executive teams to shape partnering strategy, enable operational and organization readiness, and implement overarching governance. Partnering professionals benefit from his ability to quickly diagnose underperforming alliances, and accelerate the path to profitability. Customized education and training bring alliance and collaboration skills to all who interact with partners.
Shuman has been a member of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) since 2002. He was a member of the teams that developed the Certificate of Achievement-Alliance Management (CA-AM) certification and the Certified Strategic Alliance Professional (CSAP) certification and contributed to the ASAP Handbook of Alliance Management. He frequently presents at ASAP and other organizations’ conferences and events.
Believing that one can’t teach without experience, he’s founded or been part of the founding team of five companies across multiple industries—including a computer company that was the first to build an alliance with Microsoft to distribute Windows 3.0 through an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) environment. All of his companies have had partnering as a core strategy and organizing principle of the business.
Our Clients
The Rhythm of Business is proud to have worked with many leading companies and organizations within the US and abroad throughout our rich 20-year history. We learn from every engagement. Each client benefits from our understanding of the current business context and challenges. This experience complements our ongoing research to continually advance our offerings, frameworks, and thought leadership. A partial list includes:
Rhythm of business что это
Grow your alliance management capability with The Rhythm of Business as your guide. Whether you are just getting alliance management started in your company or evolving an existing program, our consulting, training, digitization, and assessment services empower you to reach higher levels of partnering success.
Empowering Collaboration and Partnering Success
Conceptually Simple, Operationally Challenging.
For 20 years, we’ve helped clients cut through complexity, manage risk, and drive business outcomes through partnering. Let The Rhythm of Business show you how, too.
Thought-Provoking Presentations
Everybody partners now. The winners know how to drive real results—faster. Speed your path to measurable partnering outcomes.
We’ll be your guide.
Featured Case Studies
The technologies of the Fourth Industrial Age have greatly magnified the speed, scale, and scope of partnering.
The technologies of the Fourth Industrial Age have greatly magnified the speed, scale, and scope of partnering required to develop the complex solutions companies need to win with today’s powerful customers.
It requires new partnering models and the ability to quickly orchestrate the right mix of partners—many of whom could be very different from a company’s typical partners.
With our partner Alliancesphere, we saw the opportunity for our client, a well-known technology company thought to be a bit of a dinosaur, to assume a role as thought leader and orchestrator in the evolving ecosystem. Working with the channels acceleration team, we guided strategy development and helped management to think about partnering in a whole new way. Working with leadership, we developed a campaign of white papers and presentations so executives could share what it takes to partner in this new world. The channels acceleration team hardened a number of use-case-specific solutions, solving billion-dollar problems. The company is recognized by analysts as one of the leading players in helping its customers use new technologies for advantage.
Two tech giants saw an opportunity to launch a significant new initiative within an already existing alliance.
Two tech giants saw an opportunity to launch a significant new initiative within an already existing alliance.
But no one from either partner was comfortable taking on the entrepreneurial and collaborative challenge of designing the offering and preparing to get and go to market.
It also required developing a new contract and carefully segmenting the shared customer base between each partner’s sometimes competing professional services organizations and sales teams.
To multiply the challenges, neither party was able to get together face-to-face to work out differences. Amidst these difficult circumstances, together with our strategic partner, Alliancesphere, we facilitated joint sessions and smaller breakouts in two locations, plus engaged several remote participants, alternating between video conference, web conference, and teleconference, to ultimately arrive at an agreed plan to shape this billion dollar initiative.
A global biopharma company with a large number of alliances and other collaborations— academia, service providers, consortia, emerging biotechs, and other big pharma— engaged us to create both in-person and online alliance management training and tools, customized for their portfolio and way of working.
A global biopharma company with a large number of alliances and other collaborations— academia, service providers, consortia, emerging biotechs, and other big pharma— engaged us to create both in-person and online alliance management training and tools, customized for their portfolio and way of working.
The participants were to include both alliance managers and alliance team members who regularly interacted with partners.
We delivered a turnkey comprehensive curriculum covering alliance management principles and practices, such as launching an alliance, designing and running governance, understanding alliance finances, and measurement and reporting. We also created specific modules on collaborative problem solving, the impact of culture on alliances, and understanding motivations. All of the courses and modules included case studies, as well as a toolkit. The curriculum forms the basis of the company’s alliance management center of excellence.
An alliance that spent several years conducting research and doing early stage development achieved proof of concept and was ready to move to late stage clinical trials.
An alliance that spent several years conducting research and doing early stage development achieved proof of concept and was ready to move to late stage clinical trials.
The alliance manager newly assigned to the partnership quickly realized the relationship was dysfunctional and the collaboration agreement woefully inadequate for a co-development, co-commercialization relationship that required consensus decision making and equal sharing of all revenues and expenses.
Using our Vital Signs™ Alliance Operations Effectiveness Assessment, we quickly uncovered the root causes of the dysfunction, designed and implemented appropriate governance and collaboration models, and conducted a reset of the alliance. With an effective structure in place and leadership aligned, the alliance has been able to advance into a pivotal trial with a promising molecule.
Can Your Biopharma Company Go There?
Biopharmaceutical leaders harness partnering to execute beyond the pill strategies. Let us help you uncover new revenue and value streams, too.
Rhythm of business что это
Forge your path to partnering and alliance success—with The Rhythm of Business at your side. Unleash innovation. Create advantage and loyalty among partners and customers. Engage stakeholders, producing desired business outcomes. Innovate the partnering experience—from ideation through monetization. Master alliance management for the ecosystem. Tame complexity and risk of partnering with strategy, governance, and execution. It’s all possible—with The Rhythm of Business by your side.
Our customized services enable and develop the partnering mindset, skillset, and toolset throughout your organization—from the executive suite to the front lines of research in the lab or sales in the field. Harnessing our proven strategies, frameworks, and tools, unleash the creativity, collaboration, effectiveness, and performance of your people and partnerships. Lift your partnering performance far above the “best practices” baseline. Partner with new players, new models, and leverage myriad forms of value to achieve your objectives in the ecosystem.
The Rhythm of Business employs the principles of design thinking and lean startup—the essence of the rhythm of business methodology. Partnering success requires the entrepreneurial agility to identify critical assumptions and find the data needed to validate or invalidate them as quickly as possible. If not valid, we help you iterate your assumptions quickly, saving resources to allocate to a better approach.
Principals
Twombly works as an extension of partnering and alliance management teams, helping them accelerate outcomes from partnering and alliances. She helps business leadership move organization, operations, and behavior to a more collaborative way of working, both internally and externally. She guides companies to reach higher levels of alliance success by integrating partnering into all aspects of the business. Customized education and training bring alliance and collaboration skills to all who interact with partners.
Twombly serves on the Executive and Management Committee of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP). She is editorial advisor and frequent contributor to ASAP Media, publisher of Strategic Alliance Magazine, and contributed to the ASAP Handbook of Alliance Management: A Practitioner’s Guide. Her volunteer responsibilities previously included the program content of ASAP conferences.
Together with business partner Jeffrey Shuman, Twombly has a rich history of developing, publishing, and presenting strategic and practical thinking that advances the art and science of partnering and alliance management.
Her first career was as a Certified Public Accountant, becoming partner in a regional CPA firm, serving technology and knowledge-based entrepreneurial companies. Twombly continues to leverage her financial knowledge. She serves as Treasurer and a Member of the Executive Committee of RESULTS and the RESULTS Educational Fund, sister organizations that empower individuals around the world to use their voices and collaborative skills to influence decisions by governments and other institutions that will bring about the end of poverty. She is also a member of the Finance Commission of her town government, evaluating and making recommendations about the town’s overall budget and financial operations.
His mix of operational, consulting, research, and classroom experiences allow him to blend the theoretical with the practical, providing useful, easily implementable and repeatable advice.
At The Rhythm of Business Shuman helps global companies in multiple industries advance their partnering and collaborative capability. Consulting engagements focus on driving results through enabling all functions of the business to work effectively with their partners, from ideas to monetization. He works with senior executive teams to shape partnering strategy, enable operational and organization readiness, and implement overarching governance. Partnering professionals benefit from his ability to quickly diagnose underperforming alliances, and accelerate the path to profitability. Customized education and training bring alliance and collaboration skills to all who interact with partners.
Shuman has been a member of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) since 2002. He was a member of the teams that developed the Certificate of Achievement-Alliance Management (CA-AM) certification and the Certified Strategic Alliance Professional (CSAP) certification and contributed to the ASAP Handbook of Alliance Management. He frequently presents at ASAP and other organizations’ conferences and events.
Believing that one can’t teach without experience, he’s founded or been part of the founding team of five companies across multiple industries—including a computer company that was the first to build an alliance with Microsoft to distribute Windows 3.0 through an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) environment. All of his companies have had partnering as a core strategy and organizing principle of the business.
Our Clients
The Rhythm of Business is proud to have worked with many leading companies and organizations within the US and abroad throughout our rich 20-year history. We learn from every engagement. Each client benefits from our understanding of the current business context and challenges. This experience complements our ongoing research to continually advance our offerings, frameworks, and thought leadership. A partial list includes:
Why We Should Change The Rhythm Of Business
Yes, something is definitely wrong, but maybe more in the Finance manager’s head than with the fisherman’s work rhythm!
It is amazing to observe how the fiscal year totally dominates the rhythm in our management processes. It is equally amazing that so few question the practice. This happens even if January to December (or any other fiscal year period) is often a completely artificial construct from a business point of view. Business has its own life and its own rhythms. Even when there is a seasonality to it, as with winter sports or the ice-cream business, year-end divides the high (or low) season.
We know why: “It’s always been done like this”, or “Everybody else is doing it”. Another reason might have to do with the background of many Finance people working with performance management. They often have a statutory accounting history. Here, the fiscal year is not just less of an issue, it is a legal requirement. The problem arises when people bring their accounting background and mindset with them into business management. Decimals, precision, consolidation, reconciliation and repeatable structures no longer works very well when the focus is on a future with lots of dynamics and uncertainty and not on a past with none of it.
Business has its own life and its own rhythms. Even when there is a seasonality to it, as with an ice-cream business, year-end divides the seasons. We know why: “it’s always been done like this”, or “everybody else is doing it”.
The problems
The myopic calendar focus can be stupid, or funny, or both. “Accordion” forecasting is a classic example. When the budget is made, we want to understand all of next year, twelve months ahead. But into next year, in the first quarter, nine months is enough, we can still see till year end. Then six months and then three months is enough, before we suddenly need to see twelve months ahead again (budget time…).
An annual resource allocation is also meaningless. You might have heard it before, the unthinkable parallel to a bank telling its customers “we’re only open for business and loan applications once a year, in the autumn”.
The solution is simple: (1) Targets must have natural deadlines; (2) Forecasting must be dynamic or rolling; (3) Resource allocation must be dynamic; and (4) Performance evaluation must take place when work is completed.
Resource allocation must be more continuous and dynamic. A key concept in Agile software development is ”continuous delivery” of new functionality. The big old projects were too big one-off batches, forcing users to decide on all system requirements up front. It’s the same in an annual budget. It is a too big batch, with too many decisions made too early.
The solutions
The solution is simple. Where possible and meaningful, we must organise our management processes on business- and event driven rhythms.
Possible and meaningful is important. Sometimes, we have no choice but to comply with fiscal or annual periods. Even when we have a choice, it might not make sense.
Going dynamic
Going dynamic is not just a Finance issue. It is just as relevant for HR. It is great to observe an increasing number of organisations going in this direction, including my own employer Statoil. For HR, it is about moving away from the annual stunts of setting goals and providing feedback/evaluating performance. This is being replaced with a much more continuous and natural rhythm, in the case of Statoil with no deadlines set for the process.
Bjarte Bogsnes has a long international career, both in Finance and HR. He is currently heading up the implementation of Beyond Budgeting at Equinor (formerly Statoil), Scandinavia’s largest company. Bjarte is Chairman of Beyond Budgeting Roundtable (BBRT) and the author of “Implementing Beyond Budgeting – Unlocking the Performance Potential“, where he writes about his twenty years long Beyond Budgeting journey.