With these key thoughts in mind, I want to look at some of the drivers and enablers that are making partnering of growing importance in today's business world and in tomorrow's so-called 'new economy'.
I would like to illustrate this by describing how we are making it work in The Post Office in terms of the skills, culture and process requirements. I will also touch on some of the issues that we face as a large public sector organisation where, for example, public procurement rules apply.
Finally, I want to highlight some of the pitfalls and benefits of partnering. I will draw out some lessons that we have learnt the hard way but which have then helped us build partnerships that are even more successful.
So firstly, the drivers. For me there are four major challenges facing business today, with the first two closely linked.
Globalisation is a word that we hear a lot. Borders are coming down in terms of international business. It is now far easier and far more common for even small and medium-sized enterprises to be trading internationally. Relationships between organisations are having to change. We are seeing a move away from relationships based on the physical proximity of customers and suppliers to one that is based on communication and information links.
Globalisation is stimulating brand new service propositions. The motor industry, for example, has moved away from regional platforms to develop worldwide common platforms. One of the first of these was the Ford Mondeo with the common chassis platform being used as the basis of new products built simultaneously in Brazil, the US and Europe.
The effect was to open to component suppliers the possibility that they would be required to supply common components to several sites around the world. This changed the way of doing business to the extent that local partnerships became the preferred way forward.
Thinking global, acting local. Yet the cause and effect don't really matter. To the customer it is the overall value of the offering that they will be looking at.
In order to face up to this competition, organisations increasingly need to look at their own value chains to ensure that they are adding value at every point. They also need to understand how they fit into the value chains of others.
Since the 1990s we have seen the growth of alliances in many of the key markets as they globalise, consolidate and become more complex. In this situation, we find that one supplier or group of suppliers often cannot fulfil the total needs of customers. They therefore join together to offer services and add value in a way that they could not achieve on their own.
So that is the impact of globalisation.
The second trend is e-commerce. Never a day passes without some new story from the e-world. Who has succeeded; who has failed.
Every MD of an e-commerce company has their own hockey-stick graph showing you how many trillions of dollars the market is about to be worth!
But I believe that it is fundamentally changing the way we do business - it is both a driver and an enabler to partnership working:
I am convinced we are seeing the start of a decline in the traditional physical customer/supplier relationship and a move towards more of a virtual relationship based on communication technology.
This brings with it an interesting dilemma. In a world where the barriers to entry are quite low to anybody who wants to get onto the Net, a website presence can look equally impressive for a one-man-band in a back room as it can for a blue-chip organisation.
So when that organisation is on the other side of the world and you might not know very much about them, how on earth do you know who or what you are dealing with, whether it is a customer or a supplier? In other words, if you are looking at partnering, how reliable a partner are they going to be?
E-commerce is changing the business model and the way we have to think about saluting and working with partners.
The final two challenges are also interlinked and very important for us in The Post Office. The first is sustainability, that is, not consuming resources faster than they can be replenished. It is about living on earth as if we intended to stay.
Many would argue that this is the biggest, most fundamental issue facing all of us. In the distribution industry we have quite a dilemma here, because we tend to run large vehicle fleets and that means that we produce carbon dioxide. In fact, someone once told me, probably enough each year to cover Wales. So if you are Welsh - many apologies.
But the vital and serious point for us was to build a partnership to address these kind of issues.
We have been working with a number of vehicle suppliers to develop dual-fuel technology and much cleaner engines. We have run successful trials in a couple of cities in the UK. One uses a hybrid diesel and electric-powered vehicle that uses diesel when it is up to speed and working at its most efficient. It switches to electric power for city centre use where there is stop-start motoring and where diesel fumes tend to cause most pollution. We have also been at the forefront of developing gas-powered vehicles and evaluating their use in a city centre and urban environment.
Working in collaboration with suppliers has enabled both parties to gain a greater understanding of the issues, costs and technologies involved. It helps us to share knowledge and experience and it is helping us to develop even more efficient and effective products.
And above all, we have shared a common view about sustainability.
The final trend is business ethics. For me this is about openness and trust and about managing your business in a way that is morally defensible. This does not mean that we have to impose our cultural values on other cultures in a global market environment - a sort of cultural imperialism. But it is about not using the global market place to allow exploitation of other people.
We were recently developing a relationship with a new supplier of work-wear - what my old GPO would have called 'uniforms'. This is a very big area for The Post Office, employing as we do 200,000 people. We were dealing with a supplier in a developing country where it is the norm for young people of 13 years old and up to work. We discovered that 11 and 12 year olds were being taken out of school to work for very low pay. So we actually broke off negotiations when we found out, despite the attractive financial benefits to The Post Office, because we felt it was exploiting people in a way that was unacceptable to us, our customers and other partners.
Copyright Partnership Sourcing Ltd 2001. All rights reserved.