Ten 'Sins' That Can Destroy Your Alliances

No IT department operates in a vacuum. To deliver on key goals, you and your tech colleagues must work with other departments, outside vendors and partners. Without such alliances, even the most talented IT team amounts to little more than a collection of untapped intellectual assets. The book Paid to Think: A Leader's Toolkit for Redefining Your Future (www.paidtothink.com, BenBella Books/Available now), is a hefty tome that covers a broad range of topics and strategies to improve your enterprise thinking potential. In one section, author David Goldsmith and his wife, Lorrie Goldsmith, focus on the importance of key alliances and reveal 10 "sins" that can cause an alliance to fail. In many cases, the failures result from a lack of professionalism, integrity, awareness and/or fear. What's key here, the authors indicate, is to recognize these negative qualities and address them head-on. The Goldsmiths are founders of the leadership consultancy Goldsmith Organization.