It has been almost impossible to read the business pages in recent years without seeing more evidence of this last trend. The writing has been clearly placed on the wall: the days of the totally independent company, building through internal growth and without reliance on other companies, are largely over.

The initial driving force has come from rapid consolidation within many industries. By 1995, the number of mergers per year was over double the rate in 1985. During this time period, few industries have been shielded from "merger mania." Retailers, restaurants, hotels, airlines, hospitals, software companies, and even accounting firms, to name just a few, have experienced major consolidation. As previously noted, health care has gone through some of the most dramatic consolidation of any industry. In 1992, fewer than 3% of physician group practices were part of publicly-traded physician management companies. By the year 2000, it is projected that 29% of physician group practices will have been merged into these larger physician management companies.

For those companies that were not included in mergers, their survival depended on responding in a way that allowed them to compete effectively against the huge, well-financed organizations that resulted from mergers. The answer was tight collaboration between capabilities-driven organizations. An example that was inconceivable only a few years ago was the recently announced partnership between Apple and Microsoft. Once bitter rivals, these companies have joined forces to take on a common enemy, IBM. For Apple, the partnership may be its last and best chance to regain a degree of prominence in the computer industry it once ruled.

In the human services world, the first source of pressure in this direction has come from various funding sources that have pushed for collaboration between agencies to address problems of overlapping programs, turf battles, and a lack of coordination between services. The demands of funders have prompted some providers to collaborate more closely, but in most cases the result has simply been joint grant writing that has not truly changed how the providers work on a day-to-day basis. This will not be sufficient to thrive in the future.

The James Irvine Foundation just released a report entitled "Beyond Collaboration: Strategic Restructuring of Nonprofit Organizations" that provides an important glimpse into the future. In the report, they note the following:

• Contributors to their report were united in their belief that the "writing is on the wall" that there will be a noticeable increase in the rate of strategic restructuring in the nonprofit world, involving mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, and other forms that fundamentally change the organization structure and control of the entities involved.

• Many of these changes will be forced by economic realities. One of the quotes from the report is, "mergers will become an increasingly prevalent means of organizational survival during the next several decades, and increased competition for declining funding and community support is the primary reason for this trend."

• Funders are increasingly considering ways to encourage non-profits to undertake strategic restructuring, but are also preparing to assist organizations in pursuing these significant organizational changes.

Mergers, joint ventures, or even true collaborations are scary to most organizations because they mean a change of control, involving a lot of risk and emotion. The flip side is that these forms of restructuring will become more and more prevalent; agencies do not want to be left without a chair when the music stops. In many cases, the choice truly will be to collaborate, consolidate, or die. Consider this quote contained from the Irvine Foundation report: "Why would we want to merge? We would lose our independence. We have our own way of doing things. We don't want to be taken over by some other group with different priorities. We would lose our identity. This will never happen while I am president." These words were spoken by the board chair of a nonprofit that dissolved six months later.

The good news is that mergers and collaborations can work as long as improving community outcomes is the focus rather than maintaining the status quo or protecting organizational turfs. These efforts can quite literally save the organizations involved, producing stronger agencies that are better able to serve their target clientele.