IF YOU CAN READ THAT WARNING IN YOUR OUTSIDE car mirror, you’re not paying nearly enough attention to the core issue, driving without committing either suicide or manslaughter. But it is disastrously easy to become mesmerized by mentally Photoshopped images and contemplate the magnificence of a false—sometimes referred to as “enhanced”—image.

Business relationships are a little like that, too, in that what we think we see may not be a wholly accurate depiction of reality. And in the new age of collaboration, successful supply chain management demands robust, rock-solid, and really long-term relationships.

Those are not the last century’s 3Rs of elementary education, but the new century’s hallmarks of effective hand-in-glove, arm-in-arm, joined-at-the-hip planning, operations, and continuous improvement that make for happy customers, employees, and shareholders.

But even some really smart people don’t get the essentials of how to build and maintain those intimate relationships that transcend mere opportunistic cooperation.

PSEUDO-SCIENCE AND THE STUDY OF RELATIONSHIPS

Some observation and writing in the field appears to have missed the lifeboat and is going down with the Titanic. A common failing among the sinking cynics is to examine a business relationship as if it were a fire. It gets lit; it catches; it roars to life; it stays hot for a period; it begins to fade; and it finally dies out, pretty much useless in the end stages even though technically still alive. Their typical scenario is to outline the stages of a relationship, which got me to immediately contemplating Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of death and dying:

b Stage I, Establishment. This is the initial connection, the friend or foe, fight or flight moment in which we decide whether to work and play well together or fight common foes at arm’s length, with limited communications, closed minds, and protected, privileged information for our eyes only.

b Stage II, Acceptance. Here, we mutually decide that the other

BY ART VAN BODEGRAVEN AND KENNETH B. ACKERMAN basictraining

Objects in mirror are closer
than they appear

has credibility as well as the competency, the access, the power, the judgment, and the breadth to get done what needs doing.

b Stage III, Action. Action takes time to genuinely initiate, because, to be most effective, it must be based on trust, which takes a long, long time to be fully embraced (by both parties to a relationship). Broken or violated trust can, long-term, derail the relationship, but with sufficient competence, tasks can be completed, even if suboptimally. But the quality and effectiveness of the relationship can seldom return to the previous level.

b Stage IV, Wind-Down. Inevitably, relationships dissolve over time. The deal was only for a year. The project is over. It’s been fun, but the sun has long set, and all we have left are dying embers.

THE MISSING LINK

All those are essentially so, if one imagines the parallel of a fire that is lit and left to follow its own course. Many fires do, in fact, play out in about that way. But for those who are serious about fires—or relationships—it’s a much different story. Remember the under-appreciated film “Quest For Fire,” with Rae Dawn Chong? Fire was a wonder and a life-giving tool for early humankind, kept perpetually burning. One village let its fire go out and dispatched a team to venture forth to find new fire, without which the village would fail and disappear.