Your strategic alliances, partnerships, and other devices for collaboration are also important and necessary resources. As your organizational structure flattens, there must be some way to let go of control without losing control. Instead of the favored vertical integration, where all the work is done in-house (a model common in some big corporations), there may be another way. Why not give up some of the control and profits through shared work? Why not form relationships with vested interest in mutual success? In a rigid structure this may be hard to do, but given the need to add and subtract work units, this model fits very nicely with the relationship organization.
A good resource is your competition. In the old model of seeing the world, the competition was the enemy to be met and defeated on the business battlefield. Today we have many examples of how organizations thought to be enemies are now working together to achieve even greater returns. Twenty years ago who would have thought IBM and Apple Computers would be working off the same platform, or that BMW would be building cars in Alabama (known in slang language as “bubba beamers”), or that Honda would be making cars in the United States.
Sometimes that competition even got out of hand to the point of being unethical, unprofessional, and illegal. Now you are telling employees to work in harmony with the competition; that the company’s once fiercest competitors are now its new best friends. Write out that speech. What are three or four logical explanations for these new relationships and alliances? Practice your speech in front of a mirror until you believe it yourself. Congruency of your story is important in this situation.