White Papers

Managing Relationship Assets: 

Survival in Shifting Markets Depends on Adaptability

 By Brad Mitchell and Sallie Sherman, S4 Consulting

An unavoidable conclusion having advised American business over the last two decades: in a rapidly changing industry, firms need to keep a close eye on critical business relationships. The industries vary-manufacturing, financial services, health care and many others-but the shifting global economy creates similar challenges in all of them: a rush toward consolidation, an erosion of margin, heated-up global competition, an explosion of niche players, a much greater need for cost control and a growing need to treat business relationships as assets. We believe these dynamics apply to the pharmaceuticals industry and that you might benefit from what other industries already have learned.

Let's examine how firms from another highly regulated industry, such as financial services, treat their relationships as assets.

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The Termite Fable

A Relationship Management Fable

by Joe Sperry, S4 Consulting

In the remotest part of the African jungle, far beyond the cameras of National Geographic, there was a river valley clearing, within which lived a colony of termites. They were industrious insects, working twelve-hour days on their fifteen-foot-tall termite mounds, the architectural wonders of the jungle. From the trees they took wood and from the rushing river they took water to drink and to help make their mounds. Nearly every termite spent that time either building mounds and finding or growing the fungus on which they lived.

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