1 Increasingly managers are faced with challenges far too complex for an organization to resolve singlehandedly. In the case of under-nutrition there are issues related to hunger, issues related to poverty and issues related to climate change, among others. The partners who collaborated on under-nutrition in Project Laser Beam had many differences – in technical expertise, organizational culture, governance structures, incentives, decision-making processes and timelines, etc.

Can you identify one or two key insights that this project offers on managing highly diverse interorganizational relationships?

The date is September 2014. A project regularly described as ‘transformational’ and ‘pioneering’

was just concluding after five years. Its stakeholders must now document achievements and lessons learned.

The project – Project Laser Beam or PLB for short – had brought together UN agencies and Fortune 500 companies with governments, NGOs and local companies in Bangladesh and Indonesia. Its ambition had been to create a sustainable, replicable and scalable public-private partnership model for significantly reducing under-nutrition in children.

The work was spearheaded by five key partners

– the World Food Programme (WFP, the world’s largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide), Unilever (a major consumer goods company with products sold in over 190 countries), Royal DSM (a global science-based company active in health nutrition and materials), the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN, a global alliance that supports public-private partnerships to increase access to the missing dietary nutrients necessary for a healthier world) and Mondelez International Foundation (formerly Kraft Foods Foundation, aiming to empower families and communities to lead healthier lives).