Harvard Business Revies on Strategic Alliances

Occupying the broad middle ground between cutthroat competition and outright merger, a strategic alliance can be almost any collaborative arrangement by which companies share capital, technology, distribution networks, manufacturing facilities or a host of other resources. It's a vast and somewhat amorphous topic, but this wide-ranging collection of papers from the Harvard Business Review gives a coherent and useful introduction. The writers, academics and business executives, provide both conceptual clarity and practical insight into a variety of collaborative arrangements. Gary Hamel, Yves L. Doz and C.K. Prahalad explore the tension inherent in strategic alliances, with partners who are often competitors in the same industry trying to learn each other's secrets without revealing too many of their own. Ashish Nanda and Peter J.Williamson show how joint ventures can refurbish a troubled business unit and prepare it for a lucrative sale. Carlos Ghosn recounts the turnaround of ailing car maker Nissan thanks to a partnership with Renault. Henry W. Chesbrough and David J. Teece use IBM's introduction of the PC as a case study in the promise and pitfalls of the""virtual corporation"" that outsources virtually everything to collaborators. A few papers, like Rosabeth Moss Kanter's facile comparison of strategic alliances to romantic alliances, are unhelpful. But for the most part, these readable essays manage to combine rigorous theory with down-to-earth detail. Business executives trying to get a handle on this bewildering subject will find this book a good place to start.