Cambridge Business Association
Dance Lessons
Book

Dance Lessons

Six Steps to Great Partnerships in Business and Life

Heather Shea and Chip R. Bell
Berrett-Koehler, 1998
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Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • For Beginners

Recommendation

Chip R. Bell and Heather Shea take a crack at a much overlooked business skill: partnering. While many management gurus espouse the growing importance of partnerships and alliances to modern business, advice on how to actually implement and manage these relationships is much harder to find. Dance Lessons uses simple, emotional language in mapping out guidelines for successful partnering. These guidelines tend more toward general, interpersonal relationships than specific business cases. In fact, much of the book’s content could be re-titled "How to Have a Successful Marriage" without changing so much as one word. Despite this lack of hard business focus, getabstract recommends this book on the strength of the intelligent exercises that the authors suggest for use in each stage of the partnering process. While Dance Lessons might be light on the numbers and factual examples that business readers have come to expect, the passion that the authors bring to the subject will leave you highly conscious of the critical, but often neglected, personal aspects of business partnerships.

Summary

The Partnership Dance

Success in today’s world depends on the ability to develop and maintain partnerships. Yet partnering is an art, not a science. Learning how to form an effective partnership resembles learning a great dance. In both, the learning and mastery occur in stages.

Partnership is a deliberate blending of capacities for the continuous mutual benefit of involved parties. That can mean a business partnership or a personal relationship. The principles are the same. A partnership is a process, not a single event. Great partners also spend a surprising amount of time preparing before they actually join together.

Like dance partners, great personal or business partners and partnerships go through six stages: focusing, auditioning, rehearsing, dancing, hurting and bowing out.

Step One: Preparing for Partnership

Different kinds of partnerships exist. The type of partnership that is appropriate depends on how involved the partners want to become. Choose your kind of partnership according to your purpose, and find someone who wants the same kind of partnership.

The highest level of partnership is The Tango. Tango partners symbolically complete...

About the Authors

Chip Bell is a senior partner at Performance Research Associates in Dallas. He has been a trainer or consultant to companies including IBM, Microsoft, Cadillac, Motorola, Sprint and Harley-Davidson. He is author of 11 books, including three bestsellers. Heather Shea is CEO of Inspiritrix, Inc., a training and consulting firm in Orlando, Florida. She has been a speaker, trainer or consultant for many firms, including 3M, Ford, Hewlett Packard and Walt Disney World.

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