So, let’s start from the beginning. Strategic partnership is a mutually advantageous collaboration between business entities based on the pooling of resources and mutual coordination of actions to create economic impact, which can be achieved through synergistic effects.

As a result, the achievement of synergetic effect, stimulation of partner synergy, as well as increased competitiveness aimed at product or service promotion both within and outside the country, and, as a whole, increased efficiency of activity of each subject of partner relations, are key criteria of strategic partnership efficiency.

For a better understanding, let us present the main characteristics of strategic partnerships, including:

– interaction of partners on long-term basis to achieve common goals;

– development and implementation og joint high-margin projects;

– the abillity of partners to freely choose to make forward-looking management decisions.

Thus, the emergence of distinct competitive advantages, which have a major impact on the effective functioning and business development of enterprises involved in a strategic partnership, distinguishes strategic partnerships from other types of partnerships and long-term contracts.

The main forms of strategic partnerships are the following:

– minority equity investments;

– joint ventures;

– joint R&D;

– outsourcing in various areas.

We’ve now grasped the essence, forms, and distinguishing characteristics of strategic relationships. The benefits of partnership partnerships for each partner are also obvious, because companies can achieve results that they could not have achieved alone by efficiently engaging and pursuing common goals. But let’s take a closer look at how they create this impact and what the intricacies are.

Each partner company has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Someone has more financial resources, someone has a stronger management team, someone has stronger skills in this or that field of business or extended capabilities in other resources, and so on, implying that partner organizations can complement and strengthen one another. It is critical to recognize that mutually beneficial cooperation and interaction, i.e. the establishment of a strategic partnership, creates a new system that allows for a synergetic impact to be achieved. And besides, a synergistic impact is defined as an increase in the effectiveness of operations as a result of the integration and connecting of distinct pieces into a unified system, allowing them to produce more value, reach more ambitious goals, and achieve spectacular results in the aggregate.

Strategic partnerships, on the other hand, confront a number of obstacles, including maintaining sensitive data, processing massive volumes of information, managing big amounts of knowledge, and administering the new system in general in a flexible and efficient manner. As a result, such obstacles must be appropriately addressed in order to ensure the long-term viability of a strategic partnership.

Thus, strategic partnerships will extend business potential by attracting investment, enhancing expertise and competence, and accessing new markets, allowing enterprises to not only survive but also thrive in times of macroeconomic uncertainty.

What are the advantages of telecommuting?

• Fewer obstacles to enter. The remote passing process in the company has won out of the traditional office in the absence of overhead costs.
• Overcoming distances. You can work from anywhere. During this time, I worked in two different cities.
• Flexible schedule. Usually, such companies have flexible hours and the ability to work part-time, full-time, or a combination of both.
• Time to work. In big cities, in the morning and evening, it always means traffic jams when people go to and back from work, it can take up to 2 hours one way. You have extra hours per day that you can spend however you want.
• Food. You no longer need to spend money on dinners in a cafe (some can refund money), it is also not always possible to eat according to your preferences in the city center. When cooking at home, you can eat healthy food, follow different diets, which is quite difficult in public places. I switched to healthy food and optimized my daily calorie intake.
• Salary. By saving on costs, you can pay a higher wage than the average for the region, but lower than with the capitals. There is one of the key benefits for the employer.
• International experience. The distances for such companies not a big deal and the boundaries are erased, often possible to work with international clients or partners.

What are the disadvantages in this case? I want to point next few main disadvantages:

• Distraction. At home, there are a lot of things that might distract you from the work process (people, pets, messengers, cozy atmosphere, lack of control).
• Social communication. By working from home, your social network is limited by remote communication. You will feel hungry for real communication that can sink you into depression.
• Self-motivation. In most cases, remote work means performing any tasks or KPIs on your own. Which requires high inner motivation and time management. Draw your schedule: what time to wake up, complete the work plan, lunch, the second work plan, …, dinner, do sport.
• Weak corporate culture. Nobody else brings pizza or cakes to the office after work to share or celebrate an event, no business trips, and joint events.

In the long run, the listed disadvantages become highly significant and you constantly need to deal with them so that productivity does not suffer.

• it should be a professional in both managing cross-functional teams and understanding the details of the new tech used;
• level of the Digital Transformation Officer in the hierarchy is vital – reporting directly to CEO and/or being a member of the decision board being the most efficient ways to do it;
• project oriented approach works best with agile attitude to drive change;
• transformation objectives need to be shared by all divisional unit heads – while your digital champion will be the central driver of change they can’t make it happen alone.

Step 1: Design the new organizational structure – be careful to make all crucial decision-makers participate, choose the best standard organization type for your company and then tailor it to your needs, be aware of the potential conflicts.

Step 2: Have a designated person in charge of transformation – better not appoint the CEO for this role, desirable to have an outsider.

Step 3: Present the new structure – the presentation must be easy to understand but to also include some detail, key changes to be highlighted.

Step 4: Discuss individually with the key personnel — the questions at this stage central to your employees are “Do I keep my job?” and “Am I promoted or am I moving down the ladder?” so be very careful and specific addressing these issues.

Don’t be confused by the online marketers’s chit-chat – here’s an explanation. Micro Business interest in SEO is due to the obvious lack of human resources and marketing budget. Therefore, the most effective in this case will be the concentration on SEO. Growth Hacking is a relatively new trend that emerged from the start-up sphere. Here, the interest comes from the flexibility of the own marketing team. It is easier for them to find right strategies. In case of an error, this “locomotive” easily stops and can be direct another way. Why do large companies choose content marketing? Content marketing is a rather resource intensive strategy. You need to have a clear idea of ​​what and where you will publish, constantly generate something new. This requires a well-staffed qualified staff or a dedicated budget and a good manager who will control the process. Not everyone can afford this.

Of course, the choice of marketing strategy also depends on other characteristics of the company: industry, product, resources, ambition, etc. However when choosing a marketing strategy consider the size of your company as the first approximation of what strategy is right for you.

¹ —Under the main channel, we understand the direction in which the company is invest more human and financial resources.

• State your main advantage on the first screen. Your unique selling proposition (USP) must be at the very beginning.
• Keep the first proposal as short as possible (only useful words). Each subsequent proposal should develop the main one (one video for the entire landing page). Remove any information that is not supported by USP.
• Add emotions if possible. Website content should evoke emotions. Facts and statistics may be reported where possible and appropriate. A call to action is needed at the end (e.g. a contact requestform).
  • Define one main message and center your LP design around it. Use straightforward and clear illustrations. Add a simple infographic if possible.
  • Conduct A / B testing. Oddly enough, only 17 % of marketers said in a survey¹ they were doing it.

¹State of Marketing Report, HubSpot, 2020

The obvious answer to all these questions has always been a proctoring. So why could we all miss the online proctoring? All important tests and exams are to be taken under control, both human and automatic with eye-tracking, screen recording and such. Of course, there should be a healthy balance, since 24/7 studying in front of the camera is making students nervous. Nonetheless, online proctoring and other types of online monitoring are the only things that could provide the quality education which is instrumental for universities. Otherwise, the prestige of school certificates and university degrees would drop drastically, and that’s unacceptable for all but a few institutions.

Agile allows to give employees more freedom at their workplace, which is instrumental for boosting creativity and innovativeness. This, in turn, helps to tear down the organizational barriers. As such, Agile becomes the snowballing movement in the company: when done right change imbues the company from bottom to the very top. Is implementing the Agile mindset as easy as it sounds? Of course not, but it still so worth it.