Partnering With The Frenemy A Framework for Managing Business Relationships, Minimizing Conflict, and Achieving Partnership Success

by Jap, Sandy

• ISBN13: 9780134386355
• ISBN10: 0134386353
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-11-30
• Publisher: Pearson FT Press

Summary

Selected as a finalist for the 2018 Leonard L. Berry Marketing Book Award! 

Why do crucial business partnerships and alliances fail so often and how can you keep it from happening to you? Partnering with the Frenemy answers these questions, helping you anticipate, prevent, and solve the problems that lead close business relationships to implode.

 

Drawing on cutting-edge research, Sandy Jap illuminates the widespread “frenemy” phenomenon in organizational partnerships, where partners who start as non-competitive “friends” become “enemies” over time.

 

She identifies key economical and structural causes of “frenemization,” in which success creates imbalances in power dynamics, leading partners to generate resentment, contempt, and often direct competition. She also illuminates crucial social causes for partnership failure, where seemingly innocuous acts of interpersonal opportunism and “sins of omission” gradually poison collaboration.

To support her insights, she offers numerous case studies, both ongoing and historical, including Samsung/Google, Martha Stewart/Macy’s, Oracle/Sun Microsystems, Best Buy/Apple, Calvin Klein/Warnaco, and Nike/Footlocker. Most important, she offers specific recommendations for avoiding problems, revitalizing weakening partnerships, and recognizing when a partnership can’t be saved.

IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT CONTRACTS AND MONEY
Understand how to better manage emotions, suspicions, and expectations from Day 1

WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM OTHERS’ FAILING PARTNERSHIPS
Anticipate, prevent, and mitigate the core causes of business relationship failure

RECOGNIZE PARTNERING “OPPORTUNISM” BEFORE IT DESTROYS COLLABORATION
Fix partnering problems while you still can

IT’S NOT A MARRIAGE: HOW TO BECOME COMFORTABLE SAYING GOODBYE
Know when to end a partnership, and how to part as “friends”

Author Biography

SANDY JAP (Atlanta, GA area) is Goizueta Term Chair Professor of Marketing at Emory University. She joined the school in 2001 and is a co-founder of the Emory Marketing Analytics Center (MAC). Her research centers on the development and management of interorganizational relationship and multichannel strategy as well as e-procurement design of industrial reverse auctions. Jap has won numerous awards for her impact on the field and is currently developing decision support systems for multichannel sales and media management with a number of firms. Her research efforts have been conducted throughout the aerospace, automotive, chemical, petroleum, high-tech and consumer product industries, and has been covered in The Wall Street Journal, CFO Magazine, and Harvard Business Review. Before joining Goizueta, she served on the faculty at MIT’s Sloan School of Management; in 2009, she was visiting Associate Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania

Table of Contents

1: When the Good Goes Bad

2: How Partnerships Develop

3: How We Get in the Way

4: How We Justify Our Bad Behavior

5: Why Trust Is Not Enough

6: Antidotes to Frenemization