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so this is a paper about how companies
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can Source Knowledge from outside the
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firm by sucing their employees to an
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alliance partner to work on a joint
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project so for example uh Nissan Rena
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has an exchange program for their
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employees with three other automobile
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manufacturers or Brazilian valet and
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Japanese firm mitsu have an immersion
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program for their employees and at the
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extreme some companies even go so far as
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to succ their employees to humanitarian
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sector Partners in emerging markets and
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their reasoning is that they'll be
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exposed to more challenging contexts and
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also different ways of doing things so
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for instance uh Global Logistics
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provider TNT they suced over a 10-year
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period almost 600 of their employees to
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work on joint projects close to 300 of
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them with the United Nations world food
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program in 43 Emerging Market
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countries now for these Alliance suun to
00:01:00
be successful it actually requires these
00:01:02
individual employees first of all to
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learn under very unfamiliar conditions
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what I call the spin out phase but then
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also to reintegrate the knowledge that
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they've acquired back into the company
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when they come back this is what I call
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the spin-in phase the problem is we
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don't really understand yet how these
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types of individual level processes
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contribute to Alliance outcomes and
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that's what this paper is about
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so I use archival interview and Survey
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data from both TNT and the world food
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program to try to explain first of all
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what can foster employee learning during
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this spin out phase but then also what
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might hinder reintegration during the
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spin-in phase um so what I find is first
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of all that in order for employees to
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learn from these radically different
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organizational and operational context
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requires very tight coordination with
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their Alliance Partners so they have to
00:01:58
really work as a team both making
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decisions together and implementing them
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together as opposed to say working
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autonomously and then putting everything
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together at the end the reason for this
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is that this tight coordination can both
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reduce Prejudice between the partners so
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this feeling of Us Versus Them it can
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also help employees understand better
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what kinds of knowledge they can access
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through their Partners but also where
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it's located and finally it can also
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help them find creative ways of
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recombining their different
00:02:26
approaches however this level of tight
00:02:29
coordination that's necessary for
00:02:31
learning is actually detrimental to
00:02:34
reintegration in two different ways so
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it has two unintended
00:02:38
consequences the first is that this type
00:02:40
of tight coordination creates learning
00:02:43
that is actually very difficult to
00:02:45
decontextualized and then translate for
00:02:47
your colleagues when you come back into
00:02:48
the company so somewhat
00:02:51
paradoxically the more you learn in
00:02:54
these projects or Alliance cment the
00:02:56
more reintegration difficulties you're
00:02:57
going to tend to experience afterwards
00:02:59
now the second unintended consequence
00:03:02
actually reinforces this because the
00:03:03
tight coordination that is required for
00:03:05
learning is actually going to create
00:03:07
shifts in the way that employees
00:03:08
perceive what it means to be a part of
00:03:10
the company and so when they come back
00:03:13
their sense of what it is to be an
00:03:15
employee is going to be misaligned with
00:03:17
their colleagues and in particular for
00:03:19
them the importance of their role as
00:03:21
part of this Alliance um is going to be
00:03:24
different than what it is for their
00:03:26
colleagues potentially fortunately I
00:03:28
find also that this effect can dampened
00:03:30
when managers actually Foster a sense
00:03:32
that employee suuns uh these Alliance
00:03:34
Suman experiences are really valued by
00:03:36
the company so finally I also test out
00:03:39
the original premise of the paper that
00:03:41
for firms to actually benefit from these
00:03:43
Alliance suuns employees not only need
00:03:45
to learn during Alliance sment they also
00:03:47
need to reintegrate what they've learned
00:03:48
when they come back what I found is
00:03:50
really intriguing so uh suant managers
00:03:54
at TNT uh I found that they actually
00:03:56
initially evaluated the success of
00:03:59
alliance M ments exclusively based on
00:04:01
the amount of employee learning that
00:04:03
happened in the field during projects
00:04:05
but over time you could see them
00:04:07
actually start to realize that this
00:04:08
reintegration phase was also important
00:04:10
and increasingly come Incorporated in
00:04:12
their evaluations of Alliance cment and
00:04:15
actually what eventually happened was
00:04:18
that they even gained such a Nuance
00:04:20
understanding of the whole process that
00:04:23
the reintegration difficulties that they
00:04:25
sometimes saw were actually factored in
00:04:28
positively in their evaluations of
00:04:29
Reliance thatment and so in a way they
00:04:31
sort of realized that this was a bit of
00:04:32
a no pain no gain situation and that
00:04:35
reintegration difficulties might be
00:04:36
indicative of a deeper learning
00:04:38
experience so really over a 10-year time
00:04:41
period we're seeing this um effective
00:04:44
experience as managers really come to
00:04:46
have a more nuanced understanding of the
00:04:48
entire process and really understand the
00:04:50
entire
00:04:55
cycle so the phenomenon is a real life
00:04:58
phenomenon the research was really done
00:05:00
jointly with uh TNT and the United
00:05:02
Nations world food program um with the
00:05:05
help of the inad social Innovation
00:05:07
Center so it really already is a paper
00:05:09
that's very much grounded in the real
00:05:10
world and so the findings are already
00:05:12
pretty directly applicable but beyond
00:05:14
Alliance cment I think we could also
00:05:16
think about how the findings might apply
00:05:18
to different kinds of contexts where
00:05:20
employees are asked to learn their
00:05:21
familiar learning working environment um
00:05:24
especially when they're going into more
00:05:27
complex turbulent or geog gically
00:05:30
institutionally or culturally distant uh
00:05:33
environments or when they're just
00:05:34
working with partners that are very
00:05:35
different from them and you know even
00:05:37
without leaving the firm you could think
00:05:41
about a multinational corporation where
00:05:42
you could also see similar kinds of
00:05:44
things playing out for example when you
00:05:46
have scouting units or virtual teams or
00:05:49
you know even in your relationships with
00:05:51
your subsidiaries um and in fact we
00:05:54
could also think about broader
00:05:55
applications as more and more firms are
00:05:58
using uh knowledge or project or team
00:06:01
based work so you can think about the
00:06:03
creative Industries or the Professional
00:06:04
Service
00:06:08
firms so my broader research agenda
00:06:11
focuses on cross- sector Partnerships
00:06:13
between private sector public sector and
00:06:15
nonprofit sector organizations as a way
00:06:17
to create value in Emerging Markets both
00:06:19
for the organizations that are involved
00:06:21
and for the societies that they evolve
00:06:23
in so there's actually a follow-up
00:06:25
project uh that I'm working on right now
00:06:27
with incad colleagues Professor Luke Van
00:06:29
renov and Julian clo where we're
00:06:31
actually doing a study of the norstar
00:06:33
alliance which is a foundation that TNT
00:06:35
and the world food program help to
00:06:37
create through their own partnership
00:06:39
together uh it actually sets up and
00:06:42
manages health clinics along African
00:06:44
transport corridors to um reach mobile
00:06:48
populations that are at risk of HIV and
00:06:50
Aid so for example truck drivers or
00:06:52
commercial sex workers and what we're
00:06:54
trying to do in this study is try to
00:06:56
understand first of all how in a
00:06:58
multinational organ ganization that
00:07:00
crosses borders such as this one how do
00:07:02
you actually Foster internal
00:07:04
collaboration between members of the
00:07:06
organization uh in order to spread best
00:07:09
practices about how you can establish
00:07:11
these cross- sector Partnerships and how
00:07:12
you can manage them and then we're also
00:07:14
trying to look at then in turn how do
00:07:16
these uh combinations of very diverse
00:07:18
Partners help you reach populations that
00:07:20
are difficult to access in these parts
00:07:22
of the world
00:07:34
[Music]
