Business Core · Partners · Module
Governance
How the partnership is run day to day: who talks to whom, how decisions are made, and how problems escalate before they become disputes.
The idea
How it works
Contracts describe obligations; governance determines whether they are met. A partnership with excellent terms and no named owner on either side will drift within two quarters.
The escalation path matters more than the meeting schedule. Problems that have nowhere to go accumulate quietly and surface as a decision to terminate.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Name an owner on each side
One person accountable for the relationship, not a committee and not a mailbox.
- 02
Set a rhythm proportional to the stakes
Monthly for material partnerships, quarterly for the rest. Meeting only when there is a problem trains everyone to avoid meeting.
- 03
Define decision rights
What each side can decide alone, and what requires both. Ambiguity here produces the slowest failures.
- 04
Build an escalation path
Named people at the next level on both sides, with an agreed trigger for using them.
One level in
The components of governance
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
A partnership with excellent terms and no named owner drifts within two quarters. Name the owner first.
The other modules in partners
Partner selection
Deciding who to work with, and on what basis. Most partnership failures are selection failures that management could not fix afterwards.
LearnThe agreement
What each side commits to, in writing, including what happens when it stops working. The last part is the one most often left out.
LearnValue review
A periodic honest assessment of whether the partnership is still worth what it costs — including the cost of managing it.
Learn