High Risk Collaboration
With risk comes reward. Collaborate at a high level, increase reward. There is a hierarchy of partnerships worth considering, from transaction based partnerships, shared learning, customer interactions through service innovation, and, finally, end-to-end collaboration (Tyagi, 131). Collaborations can focus on increasing market position, reducing costs, increasing responsiveness, growth and reducing time to market (Tyagi, 131-131).
Why bother? OK, increased profits are one reason. They're a given. In this marketplace, however, they're not enough. A brutal word might be more apt: survival. Collaborate. Survive.
Tisch talks about collaborating to help lower income potential employees to succeed as hotel workers by applying Workforce Investment Board technologies during the welfare to work process a decade ago. It's still working for him (Tisch, 21). This was a pretty high level rish for him, as he was making investments in up-grading his hotels to four-stars (five-stars were too expensive and too risky. Four star hotels have the ambience of five but without, maybe, a quarter of the staff.) The federal/company collaboration worked. He suggested it to other hotels nation-wide.
Tisch, Jonathan M. and Karl Weber. Power of We. Succeeding Through Partnerships. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2004.
Tyagi, Rajesh K. and Praveen Gupta. A Complete and Balanced Service Scorecard. Creating Value Through Sustained Performance Improvement. Pearson Education Inc. as FT Press. 2008.