You have the potential to be a great partner and to create successful, long-lasting, trustworthy, and mutually beneficial partnerships. The formula is simple. Again and again I have emphasized the importance of understanding yourself first. It all begins with you. You need to know what you want. You need to select a partner who can help you close the gap between what you can currently do and where you want to be. You need to follow a partnering process: the Partnership Continuum. You need to be sure to keep the task and relationship dynamics in balance. You need to practice the Six Partnering Attributes. And you need to improve continuously by using the Plan–Do–Check–Act cycle.
Follow the outline I have used in this blog. It works. Don’t deviate from it and don’t take shortcuts. Relationships take time to build; trust takes time to build; it takes time to communicate. But once you have laid the foundation, partnerships will create endless value for your business and help build the smart alliances you need to successfully compete in the future.

Corporate bond investors should target industries with a balanced business risk and financial risk profile. In mature industries cash flows become increasingly predictable and capital expenditures of companies tend to stabilize.

In such an industry the task is to select those companies who succeeded in controlling their cost structures and operate at efficient levels.

Those sectors will show a stable credit trend. Structural changes might push a whole industry into a declining stage. Companies out of those industries will experience structural losses, hence their credit metrics will deteriorate. Management will have no options available to stop this trend. In a next step the competitive environment of an industry has to be analyzed.

The 5-Forces diagram by Michael E. Porter summarizes best the interaction of an industry with its economic environment. An understanding of those relationships is essential for the projection of credit trends in a sector. The competitive environment determines profit margins and the pricing power of companies.