I am an international authority for my award-winning research on the Vested® business model for highly collaborative relationships. I began my research in 2003 researching what makes a difference in successful strategic business deals. My day job is being the lead faculty and researcher for the University of Tennessee’s Certified Deal Architect program; my passion is helping organizations and individuals learn the art, science, and practice of crafting highly collaborative win-win strategic business relationships. My work has led to seven books and three Harvard Business Review articles. I’ve also shared my advice on CNN International, Bloomberg, NPR, and on Fox Business News.
I wrote...
Vested: How P&G, McDonald's, and Microsoft are Redefining Winning in Business Relationships
In today’s rapidly changing world, business relationships based on an outdated “win-lose” mentality won’t withstand a market that demands constant change and adaption. Companies like P&G, McDonald’s and Microsoft are redefining winning in business relationships—adopting what University of Tennessee researchers coin as a “Vested” business model. The results are transformational: new levels of opportunity and innovation, increasing market share, greater efficiency and fast-paced problem-solving—for both companies and suppliers. In Vested, we take the reader beyond the win-win theory to show how real companies are redefining winning by building strategic relationships grounded in mutual commitment to desired outcomes and shared value principles.
Covey writes about the "taxes" of not having a trusting relationship, which is very poignant for me because trust is the foundation of any strategic collaborative relationship. He suggests distrust in relationships results in various "taxes,” including:
redundancy, bureaucracy, politics, disengagement, turnover, churn, and fraud.
If you are structuring a strategic business deal, you should seek to understand these taxes and seek to avoid them by consciously creating trust with your future business partner.
From Stephen R. Covey's eldest son come a revolutionary book, now in handy B-format, that will guide business leaders, public figures and their organizations towards unprecedented productivity and satisfaction. Trust, says Stephen M. R. Covey, is the very basis of the 21st century's global economy, but its power is generally overlooked and misunderstood. Covey shows you how to inspire immediate trust in everyone you encounter - colleagues, constituents, the marketplace - allowing you to forego the time-killing and energy-draining check and balance bureaucracies that are so often relied upon in lieu of actual trust.
I like this book because Robert Axelrod has put powerful empirical research around what I have been researching for years—the power of collaboration and positive reciprocity.
While it is easy for people to get the need to embed a collaborative spirit into their deals, unfortunately, many companies fall victim to saying cooperation on the one hand and then turning around and playing hard-ball negotiations on the other. Axelrod’s pioneering research on the "Prisoner's Dilemma" shows the consequences of what can happen if individuals don’t take a path of cooperation and make short-term I-win-you-lose-decisions. This book is a must-read for anyone structuring a strategic business deal because it helps people understand the impact of short-term non-collaborative decisions.
This widely praised and much-discussed book explores how cooperation can emerge in a world of self-seeking egoistswhether superpowers, businesses, or individualswhen there is no central authority to police their actions..
I recommend this book because Tamm and Luyet provide useful, common-sense ideas that will help you put collaboration into practice. Their approach includes themes such as truthfulness, intent to collaborate, self-awareness and awareness of others, accountability, and negotiation. Collaboration begins with people and their attitudes individually and within the organization. I often say, “Change the people or change the people,” and this book reflects that approach to instilling true organizational collaboration.
The second edition of the essential guide, updated with new research and observations to help twenty-first century organizations create models for effective collaboration.
Collaborative skills have never been more important to a company's success and these skills are essential for every worker today. Radical Collaboration is a how-to-manual for creating trusting, cooperative environments, and transforming groups into motivated and empowered teams. James W. Tamm and Ronald J. Luyet provide tools that will help you increase your ability to work successfully with others, learn to be more aware of colleagues, and better problem-solve and negotiate.
You might ask why I am recommending a book on change management for a book list on structuring business deals. It is because anytime two organizations come together in a business deal something will change within their organizations. All too often people rush to sign the deal and forget there that often hundreds of critical changes behind the scenes are needed for the deal to be a success long after the ink is dry. If you are structuring a big business deal this book will help you think two steps ahead to lay the foundation so the organization can implement the changes needed.
The international bestseller--now with a new preface by author John Kotter. Millions worldwide have read and embraced John Kotter's ideas on change management and leadership. From the ill-fated dot-com bubble to unprecedented M&A activity to scandal, greed, and ultimately, recession--we've learned that widespread and difficult change is no longer the exception. It's the rule. Now with a new preface, this refreshed edition of the global bestseller Leading Change is more relevant than ever. John Kotter's now-legendary eight-step process for managing change with positive results has become the foundation for leaders and organizations across the globe. By outlining the process every…
When AG Lafley became the CEO of P&G he had an idea that the best way to drive innovation was through collaboration. His book goes behind the scenes on how he encouraged P&Gers to look to suppliers and even competitors' help P&G take innovation to a new level. In fact—Lafley set the lofty goal that 50% of all innovations would not come from P&G—but through P&G by working with strategic partnerships. The book has several examples of how the CPG giant is using collaboration to drive innovation.
It is by making innovation an intimate, intentional part of the business that A. G. Lafley - the Jack Welch of the 21st century - has recently transformed Procter & Gamble from a $39 into a $76 billion dollar company that touches more than 3 billion people around the world. On the brink of collapse when he joined in 2000, it became a model for growth and innovation. In this inspiring and practical book Lafley explains how making innovation more than just a stand-alone activity enabled him to turn around growth, productivity and the bottom line.
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
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