Alliance Advantage: The Art of Creating Value Through Partnering

Rating:
Summary: The gaps that separate people in an alliance
Review: "Strategic alliances are a logical and timely response to intense and rapid changes in economic activity, technology, and globalization, all of which have cast many corporations into two competitive races: one for the world and the other for the future. Globalization opened the race for the world as firms entered once-closed markets and pursued untapped opportunities. The race for the future compels firms to discover new market opportunities, new solutions for customers, new answers to poorly met needs...This book aims to help managers and their companies to be more successful in creating and guiding their strategic alliances. To that end it offers both conceptual and practical tools for analyzing the design and performance of alliances and presents a wide range of examples of both successful and unsuccessful collaborations" (from the Introduction).

In this context, Yves L.Doz and Gary Hamel assume that "two corporations have agreed to work together.They have assessed the value creation potential of their alliance and their own strategic compatibility. And they have decided on a design that promises to enhance collaboration and minimize tension. Everything looks good. Yet the fledgling partners find themselves unable to move from planning to implementation. Why?" Hence, in Chapter 6, after exploring in detail the gaps that separate these corporations from the start, they summarize these gaps as following:

1. Frame Gap: Perspective and definition for understanding the relationship and heuristic gap rules for behaving within it, driving day-to-day interaction.

2. Expectations Gap: Benchmark against which the actual performance (or the strength of early signals alerting to performance difficulties) is to be assessed.

3. Organizational Context Gap: Structure and process for decision making, work, oreganization and performance, and organizational learning may be more or less compatible between partners.

4. Confidence Gap: Self-confidence allows strong personal commitments and personal risk taking in cooperation; lack of confidence makes wholehearted cooperation difficult.

5. Skill Understanding Gap: Need to combine and blend differentiated skills between partners, in particular where process integration is required.

6. Task Definition Gap: Need to define a concrete set of tasks in order to start operational and tangible cooperation.

7. Information Gap: Need to share information.

8. Time Gap: Need to keep balance of costs and benefits in perspective over time, for each partner and between partners.

Hence, they explore how these gaps can be closed. And they say as a common theme runs through their recommendations that "companies should invest in their understanding of the situation and gather intelligence about their partners. They should view the inception of the partner relationship as an opportunity to learn and to improve. This may be more important than blindly rushing into implementation of joint task."

Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: The gaps that separate people in an alliance
Review: "Strategic alliances are a logical and timely response to intense and rapid changes in economic activity, technology, and globalization, all of which have cast many corporations into two competitive races: one for the world and the other for the future. Globalization opened the race for the world as firms entered once-closed markets and pursued untapped opportunities. The race for the future compels firms to discover new market opportunities, new solutions for customers, new answers to poorly met needs...This book aims to help managers and their companies to be more successful in creating and guiding their strategic alliances. To that end it offers both conceptual and practical tools for analyzing the design and performance of alliances and presents a wide range of examples of both successful and unsuccessful collaborations" (from the Introduction).

In this context, Yves L.Doz and Gary Hamel assume that "two corporations have agreed to work together.They have assessed the value creation potential of their alliance and their own strategic compatibility. And they have decided on a design that promises to enhance collaboration and minimize tension. Everything looks good. Yet the fledgling partners find themselves unable to move from planning to implementation. Why?" Hence, in Chapter 6, after exploring in detail the gaps that separate these corporations from the start, they summarize these gaps as following:

1. Frame Gap: Perspective and definition for understanding the relationship and heuristic gap rules for behaving within it, driving day-to-day interaction.

2. Expectations Gap: Benchmark against which the actual performance (or the strength of early signals alerting to performance difficulties) is to be assessed.

3. Organizational Context Gap: Structure and process for decision making, work, oreganization and performance, and organizational learning may be more or less compatible between partners.

4. Confidence Gap: Self-confidence allows strong personal commitments and personal risk taking in cooperation; lack of confidence makes wholehearted cooperation difficult.

5. Skill Understanding Gap: Need to combine and blend differentiated skills between partners, in particular where process integration is required.

6. Task Definition Gap: Need to define a concrete set of tasks in order to start operational and tangible cooperation.

7. Information Gap: Need to share information.

8. Time Gap: Need to keep balance of costs and benefits in perspective over time, for each partner and between partners.

Hence, they explore how these gaps can be closed. And they say as a common theme runs through their recommendations that "companies should invest in their understanding of the situation and gather intelligence about their partners. They should view the inception of the partner relationship as an opportunity to learn and to improve. This may be more important than blindly rushing into implementation of joint task."

Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Written by academics for academics
Review: I have to admit I am thoroughly dissappointed by this book and cannot understand the positive reviews it received from several of the other readers, except that they may be academics. If you are somebody who is only interested in the theory and philosophical background of corporate partnerships, this might be the book you are looking for, but if you are, like myself, a practical doer, who is looking for hands-on insight and knowledge on this topic, you will be deeply dissappointed. Also several of the examples of "showcase" alliances, such as Iridium, are not only outdated, but in fact, bankrupt. Very annoying to read about these "great" alliances, that several months after publishing went belly up. To sum it up, for the practical business professionals among you, I suggest you keep on researching on other books in this genre. Unfortunately, since I didn't read yet any other books on this topic, I cannot offer an alternative book advice.

Rating:
Summary: Framework for capturing advantage through partnerships
Review: The goal of the book is to help managers and companies to become more successful in creating and guiding strategic alliances. It offers conceptual and practical tools for analysing alliances, whereby the authors use a several examples of successful and unsuccessful partnerships.

The authors describe the purposes of alliances (co-option, cospecialisation, learning and internalisation), compare modern alliances with traditional joint-ventures, value creation in partnerships, and the management (of a web) of alliances.

This book provides a good, solid framework for management of partnerships, which is supported by numerous, clear examples.

Rating:
Summary: Should have stayed as a Harvard Business Review article
Review: This book is disappointing in too many ways. As is often the case with works by Hamel, the ideas are interesting but there is little practical description of how one might implement them. In the time since most of the research was compiled (evidently in the late 1980s and early 1990s), several of the profiled alliances have failed. This is the danger of any business book (viz: In Search of Excellence), but it seems particularly problematic here. Perhaps it's from skepticism borne by all of the Wall Street meltdowns over the past year, but as the book prattles on about this "new" way of doing business, one cant help wonder whether there is any wisdom here, given that Doz and Hamel couldnt seem to separate the successes from the failures. The inclusion of failures (like Iridium) seem all the worse because there are so few alliances covered. By the third chapter, with the umpteenth mention of the GE-SNECMA alliance, I wondered: why not base this book on a little more than five or six case studies? And that's the biggest problem with this book. There is so little material here that even though the text is only about 280 pages, by the third chapter it is getting grossly repetitive; if you make it to chapter seven (which is one of the few good ones), you win a prize.

Rating:
Summary: Should have stayed as a Harvard Business Review article
Review: This book is disappointing in too many ways. As is often the case with works by Hamel, the ideas are interesting but there is little practical description of how one might implement them. In the time since most of the research was compiled (evidently in the late 1980s and early 1990s), several of the profiled alliances have failed. This is the danger of any business book (viz: In Search of Excellence), but it seems particularly problematic here. Perhaps it's from skepticism borne by all of the Wall Street meltdowns over the past year, but as the book prattles on about this "new" way of doing business, one cant help wonder whether there is any wisdom here, given that Doz and Hamel couldnt seem to separate the successes from the failures. The inclusion of failures (like Iridium) seem all the worse because there are so few alliances covered. By the third chapter, with the umpteenth mention of the GE-SNECMA alliance, I wondered: why not base this book on a little more than five or six case studies? And that's the biggest problem with this book. There is so little material here that even though the text is only about 280 pages, by the third chapter it is getting grossly repetitive; if you make it to chapter seven (which is one of the few good ones), you win a prize.

Rating:
Summary: Delves deeply into the dynamics of strategic alliances.
Review: This insightful and detialied work challenges the assumption that the economics of alliance are the same as those of joint venture. The authors explore the effectiveness of strategic alliances and how they can best be managed. This is a highly informative work that is rich in content. It also makes excellent use of charts and illustrations to drive home key points. If alliances is a subject you want to learn a lot about, this book is for you.

Rating:
Summary: A truly strategic work on strategic partnerships
Review: This is a very important book which should be owned and used by anyone who is in any way concerned with the process of globalisation. The formation of effective strategic alliances lies at the heart of success as a global organisation or in dealing with global majors, and this book provides a great deal of the 'why' and 'how' of building and maintaining robust and mutually beneficial partnerships and alliances.

In addition, careful reading will provide valuable insights into the nature of competition in today's global market economy (which is vastly different from the underlying market economy theory that still informs much national economic policy). Indeed, it goes to the heart of the practicalities of achieving success in globalisation. It provides equally valuable insights into the nature of leadership in a world of networks, skills that are different in kind from those covered by more traditional authors such as Ulrich in his recent Results-Based Leadership.

The sub-title is The Art of Creating Value through Partnering, and I am sure that the word 'Art' was chosen very deliberately. Partnering decisions are among the most important strategic decisions and organisation can make, and the authors, while offering invaluable tools to assist the decision process, make it very clear that this can be no simple 'tick a box' exercise. They place culture, personal attitudes, vision and motivation and learning at the centre of the preconditions for success.

It is an essentially strategic book, written by two leading strategic thinkers, that also reaches down to the nuts and bolts of working through the why, what and how of successful and enduring partnerships and networks of partnership.