News & Media

Emory Business Professor Examines "Frenemy" Phenomenon
In New Book Partnering with the Frenemy

Atlanta, Nov. 16

Partnering with the Frenemy is about the dark side of business relationships. Why do crucial business partnerships and alliances fail so often, and how organizations keep it from happening? Jap answers these questions, helping to anticipate, prevent, and solve the problems that lead close professional relationships to implode – applicable to businesses, nonprofits, government agencies, and any other group whose success depends on ongoing external partnerships.

Drawing on cutting-edge research, Jap illuminates the widespread "frenemy" phenomenon in organizational partnerships, where partners who start as non-competitive "friends" become "enemies" over time. First, she identifies the economical and structural causes of "frenemization," in which success creates imbalances in power dynamics, leading partners to rebalance their relationships in ways that cause resentment, contempt, and often direct competition.

Professor Jap speaks frequently on issues related to organizational collaboration and partnering. Here is a clip of her remarks to the Marketing Science Institute's Board of Trustees on the topic of organizational trust. She launched the Marketing Analytics Center at Emory and is a former faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Wharton School. She is an expert on business-to-business management, channels of distribution, and go-to-market strategies. Her current focus is the development of decision support systems for multichannel sales attribution and media optimization.

Jap has won numerous awards for her impact on the field and the work has received significant attention from the academic community and the marketplace, including The Wall Street Journal, CFO Magazine, and Harvard Business Review. Her work appears in a variety of books and she is an editorial board member at leading marketing journals. Partnering with the Frenemy is her first book.