Organizational Alliances

Published on 12th July 2005

Certainly the era of strategic alliances is here with us, organizations must look up and down the value chain critically evaluating the role and importance of these alliances at the same time looking for opportunities that come with them. Alliances all over the world are an up-to-date way of organizing closer links between enterprises so that they can achieve the optimum size for transnational operations.

 

Starting up, developing and bringing into life alliances offers an innovative way for organizations to grow and prosper, it offers an alternative to external or internal growth as it allows an enterprise to achieve its objectives that it could not envisage on its own because of lack of essential resources.

 

Given the major changes in the market and the ever-changing customer needs, it’s very rare for any organization on its own to have the resources to find appropriate and sustainable responses to these needs. Therefore the need for alliance building between organizations in Africa is justifiable now that major trading blocks such as COMESA are alive.

 

Organizations in Africa can no longer disregard the international dimension even if they deliver only to a local site in the immediate vicinity of their offices, in the future. It may well be that their customers will want them to supply to another site in another country thus making it difficult for an organization that only exist in one country to access its customers in other countries.

 

Here forging links with partners across the continent or even worldwide if Africa is there yet will make it possible to remain competitive and credible in the market and among brand loyal customers, seeking out and setting up national or international alliances will also help organizations to find new customers that they need to survive. Furthermore organizations should not hesitate to examine the opportunities of inter-firm cooperation agreements or strategic alliances to pool strengths of partners at the same time overcoming risky international drawbacks such as cost burden, political instability as well as economic stagnation.

 

Africa is endowed with top CEOs and executive directors in major enterprises all over the world, but in spite of these bright leaders or even a qualified work –force it will never be easy for organizations to cope quickly with necessary restructuring processes to meet all the conditions necessary for alliances to work because the competitors they face are not subject to the sane economic production conditions.

 

Indeed African organizations must struggle, look up and decide about their future. The never-ending wars, diseases and illiteracy cast a dark cloud in the continent struggling to catch up with the first world that seems to be moving fast leaving Africa to drown in its own tears. But African organizations have no one to blame other than themselves, its leaders do not consider the overall coherence of globality facts; they look back narrow mindedly instead of looking ahead constructively. The challenge is for them to take full responsibility of the ills bedeviling Africa and climb up the ladder in an effort to catch up with the rest of the world and learn how to build effective alliances not only in politics as the case may be but also in organizations.

 

This is not the end of the road for those organizations contemplating closing down due to one reason or another, they must wake up and reach out to the more stable ones and forge alliances that will strengthen them to live and see the next day. This is what it means to come alive, start fighting back, gain control and break the chains that enslave Africa.

 

 

 

 

 

 


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