Ranjay Gulati, Harvard Business School professor and author of "Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business," recently spoke at the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong.

Katharine Schafli, Business Director at TrinityP3 Hong Kong was there and found his talk, which focused on re-organising companies to become customer centric, placed a heavy emphasis on developing collaborative relationships between companies.

Here, he discusses what is the role of interfirm collaboration in shaping organizational success.

A key factor in developing collaborative relationships is having a methodology for managing these relationships.

Evalu8ing is an online survey system that allows you to measure, manage and then maximise multiple interdependent relationships in one survey.

To find out more on Evalu8ing, check out this video presentation on how it could help you measure, manage and maximise the level of alignment and collaboration in your organisation or between organisations.

At the ANA Marketing Financial Management Conference I attended in Boca Raton, Florida, Bruno Gralpois, Director, Global Agency Management at Microsoft Corporation spoke with Casey Jones from Brief Logic on how improving inputs (briefs) can improve outputs (results).

Here, Bruno speaks about how the relationship between procurement, agencies and marketing can be improved.

Bruno's four recommendations are:

1. Alignment to the business outcomes and objectives
2. Clarity in roles and responsibilities
3. Constant dialogue with regular reviews
4. Mutual respect and trust

Could not put it better myself Bruno.
What do you think?
Are you doing this?

Everyone sits in meetings discussing work in progress, presenting concepts, discussing ideas, providing feedback etc, but how does your agency or agencies really feel.

Here is a very clever view of the relationship from the agency's perspective using the wilds of Africa as a metaphor.

But how do your agencies really feel? And how do they feel about working and collaborating with each other? And how do you really feel about them?

You can find out the answers to all these questions in just 15 minutes with Evalu8ing.

Download the free White Paper about measuring, managing and maximising collaborative agency relationships here.

Marketing communications continues to become more complex and challenging. More consumer channels is leading to more specialist service providers meaning more agencies and other suppliers to manage and align.

Long term issues of aligning the agency to the marketing team continue as you will see in this video.

Only now it is more complex as no longer is it just the marketers and their creative and media agency. Relationships with digital, search, experiential, promotion, activation, public relations, sponsorship make the whole process increasingly more complex.

Imagine being able to not only be able to measure and qualify and quantify your perspective on these multitude of commercial relationships, but that also that of your team and all of the others teams?

Then you could quickly identify were there is misalignment in beliefs, values, perceptions, expectations and more importantly bring these into the open for discussion and agree strategies for addressing these.

The process is called Evalu8ing.

I was meeting yesterday with Florence Garnier from Marketing Efficiency in Paris and telling her how some people have difficulty understanding the multi-stakeholder group benefits of Evalu8ing compared to other systems in the market place.

Florence, who had previously worked at VT Scan and used the Aprais system, said she found it easy if you use personal relationships as a metaphor.

360 degree relationship systems like Aprais and Decideware are like looking into each others eyes and telling each other what you think of them.

Evalu8ing is to all stand together and ensure you are all looking in the same direction.

Could not put it any better myself.

The only thing I would add is that customer satisfaction surveys as simply asking your clients what they think of you and being told.

In March this year we released an on-line survey system that allows marketers to measure, manage and maximise the level of collaboration between their various specialist suppliers - creative, digital, media, direct marketing, public relations agencies etc.

Often marketers will invest a significant proportion of their fees across these suppliers with no way of being able to measure of manage the alignment of their efforts to maximise this investment.

In the past six months we have been demonstrating the Evalu8ing system both in Australia and around the world.

Today we can announce that the system is being used by IAS in South Africa. See the press release below.

IAS joins Evalu8UK and Navigare as consultant partners of Evalu8ing and we are currently in discussions with more consultants in Paris, London, New York and Singapore.

Evalu8ing has also been licensed by a major US financial services company for use across five countries and is being piloted by a major telecommunications company in Europe as well as several Australian based marketers across FMCG, automotive and financial services.

Continue reading "Evalu8ing collaboration and relationship improvement system expands globally" »

What percentage of the potential of a business strategy do you think CEO believe is delivered during implementation?

90%? 80%? 70%?...

A paper from the Harvard Business Review was sent to me by my friend Shawn Callahan at Anecdote.

In it, there research shows that on average CEO believe just 63% of the potential return of a strategy is realised through the implementation.

It is called the Strategy-to-Performance gap.

Continue reading "Turning great strategy into great performance" »