Corporate Romance -- Is Your Company an Item?

Consortiums Tango... I love the headline: When Competitors Are Partners, How Bare Do They Dare? (New York Times, Oct 25, 2000). According to the article, "Conversations in the boardroom are using the language of the bedroom -- openness, commitment, vulnerability and trust -- as e-enabled companies give one another come-hither looks. It isn't mergers that they want, but partners. With the Internet cutting the cost of information exchanges and transactions, e-commerce executives say networked partnering is the best way to create goods and services."

And isn't that exactly the dynamic faced by the consortiums like Project Octane (CB, Insignia, JLL, Trammell), Constellation Real Technologies and the Office Technology Consortium? How do you partner without divulging your "secret sauce"? Remember Geoffrey Moore's exhortation to outsource all non-core activities and dedicate your firm’s best resources to only those activities that create and sustain differentiation. Everything else is "context." (From Living on the Fault Line) So what is your company's core competence, your secret sauce?

For example, some service providers consider a transaction management system to be an important ingredient of their secret sauce. Hey, two service providers competing for the same corporate assignment recently bragged to me about their Internet-enabled responses. On the other hand, Sven Pole of Trammell Crow, a member of Octane, spoke forcefully at IDRC in Orlando about Octane's commitment to a transaction management system -- to be developed internally or by an outside vendor/partner. So for Octane members, it sounds like transaction management will be context, not core. Question: Do you think that transaction management should differentiate your firm?

--Peter Pike