Collaborative Strategic Management: Strategy Formulation and Implementation by Multi-Organizational Cross-Sector Social Partnerships

Qualitative Article

The point of this article was to create a conceptual model for dealing with cross-sector social partnerships (CSSP).  CSSP is a viable plan when an organization faces either a social, economic, or environmental problem that they can not handle themselves.  The authors claim that there are few other models available, but they are all lacking in some way.  They put together a 5 stage process of their own then tested this on 2 cases out of Canada.  Their 5 stages are:

1.       Assessing the context and forming the partnership

2.       Forming the collaborative plan

3.       Strategy implementation by the partnership

4.       Strategy implementation per the organization

5.       Realized collaborative strategy implementation outcomes

The authors found that their process was a more complete model of discovering value added to the two cases.  They also were the first to have feedback loops integrated within the processes.  They found that these were an integral part of each of the studies successfully implementing their CSSP.  The authors stress that in order to have a CSSP be successful, there needs to be feedback and adaptation at all levels of the process.

Manger implications:

If a firm is going to get involved in any sort of social partnership, then it needs to have some method in place to determine how they are doing at each step of their process.  This will be the only way that the firm will be able to tell if what they are doing will have a successful outcome or not.  Without any sort of feedback loop in place, a firm could be heading for a disaster of a relationship and not even know it.

Resource:

Amelia Clarke, Mark Fuller “Collaborative Strategic Management: Strategy Formulation and Implementation by Multi-Organizational Cross-Sector Social Partnerships”. Journal of Business Ethics, 2010: 85-101