Smart Alliances: A Practical Guide to Repeatable Success

by Peter Pekar Jr. and John R. Harbison

Book Overview

8 steps to successful strategic alliances--from the experts at Booz Allen & Hamilton Turn to any business section in any newspaper today and you'll find no shortage of stories about high-profile international strategic alliances. Many are success stories. The majority, however, are not. Now, you can learn what separates the successes -- like those of Corning, Mazda, and Oracle -- from the failures. In Smart Alliances, the two senior consultants who...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0787943266
• ISBN13: 9780787943264
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.6" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Practice meets theory

Smart Alliances is an excellent review of the benefits of and best practices for strategic alliances. The authors move beyond theory and give the reader practical guidance in the new brave world of alliance making. While no one book on this topic would be sufficient, if I were stranded on a south sea island and had to make alliances with the natives to survive, this is the one book I would want to use as a guide.

INDUSTRIAL TEAMWORK PAYS OFF !

After reading "Smart Alliances", any business executive will have gained valuable insight into the fast growing world of strategic alliances. This book provides an easy to read yet detailed look at what makes an alliances work and what does not. The insights are reliable as they are drawn from current direct feedback from top executives of companies in the Fortune 500, the Business Week top 1,000 and more. The book explores the real opportunities and challenges that alliances create, explores various domestic and international case studies, and develops an eight-step road map for alliance success. It provides guidance for significant organizational challenges such as the management of alliance legal and governance issues and the challenge of institutionalizing alliance capabilities for repeatable success. This book stands alone as a road map to any company considering the development of strategic business initiatives with complementary organizations. In 1980 less than 2% of revenues driven by the top 1,000 US firms came from alliances where as today (1997) more than 21 % of revenues are alliance driven. Through the strategic sharing of resources and risk, companies who develop successful alliances are clearly producing higher returns on earnings than those who are not.

Superb - a Must Read!

Concise well written. I have read several books on strategic alliances. Mostly, I find antidotes, limited examples and experiences -- simply words and frameworks not based on facts backed by little research. This book, however, is based on a wealth of research and experience. Having done numerous alliances, our firm found that our experiences dovetail with the knowledge discussed in this book. We highly recommend the book. We have bought and distributed 70 copies to our senior management. practical insights. This book provides lots of tools and frameworks to assess real work on strategic alliances. I believe this is a must read in the subject.

A Must Read For Those Considering Strategic Alliances

Smart Alliances is a must read for those looking for new ways of creating value within their organizations. The book does an excellent job of showing statistics and considerations which support a case for using alliances as a means of leveraging upon existing company strengths. In addition the book has a good roadmap of issues that should be considered in the process. We work in helping companies to create successful alliances and encourage our clients to read this book for confirmation that they are pursing the right strategic approach for the right reasons.

a bit dry but very, very useful

Booz.Allen & Hamilton consultants John Harbison and Peter Pekar make a compelling case for the following: (1) Strategic alliances have consistently produced a return on investment that is 50% more than the average on investment that the companies produce overall.(2) There is a positive correlation between experience in alliances and return on investment per alliance. In other words, there is an experience curve that one needs to go through.The ambitious goal of this book is captured by its title: provide leaders with a repeatable, pragmatic framework for alliance planning and implementation. Through this framework, the experience curve might be shortened.The framework is based on the authors' consulting experiences as well as surveys of more than five hundred major corporations.From a Board of Director perspective, alliances create value but how the investment community reacts to alliances will vary depending on the structure of the alliance and the industry within which the alliance is formed. Pages 85-86 offer a useful framework for Board members when questioning CEOs about alliance efforts.Based on our own experiences in developing an alliance of international firms offering senior level career consulting services as ours, we think the book is a useful addition to your bookshelf.But it is a dry, abstract book.In relation to our own experience, we think the authors did not devote enough space to the unanticipated pleasant and unpleasant conceptual leaps that one must make in day-to-day alliance work. The term "transfer of technology" does not capture these unanticipated leaps. For example, we had certain expectations about an alliance we formed in 1987.These expectations materialized but only weakly.On the other hand, the alliance created opportunities we had not planned for. These opportunities included leveraging our participating in the original alliance to yet another alliance that was even more fruitful. The alliance forced us to create new services and gained leverage in areas unrelated to the original alliance objectives.We call these events happy surprises.Both the happy surprises and the unhappy surprises are worthy of more mention.They are one of the reasons to enter alliances.....and one of the reasons to be careful about them!