Rating: 
Summary: INDUSTRIAL TEAMWORK PAYS OFF !
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: a bit dry but very, very useful
Review: 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!
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Summary: The best book about Strategic Alliances available!
Review: I am familiar with Dr. Pekar's work on strategic alliances for the past decade, and am very impressed with his business acumen and knowledge about this topic. I believe that he is the top expert in the world in this field.
"Smart Alliances" is hands-down the best book on the topic of strategic alliances published today. Unlike the other books on strategic alliances, Pekar and Harbison rely on data to back-up all of their findings. They are the only people in this discipline that have conducted the kind of extensive research and analysis that can support their conclusions. The alligorical stories are used to provide the reader with true, specific examples of particular issues associated with strategic alliances, rather than general fluff and filler as in most of the other books. This book serves more as a primer for determining where your organization stands with regard to understanding strategic alliances, institutionalizing the strategic processes behind forming and maintaining alliances, and giving some insight to what many of the most prominent problems organizations struggle with when forming alliances. "Smart Alliances" is about identifying the gap between your company and some of the more important best practices that other successful alliance companies employ. This is not a "how-to" book. It does not step the reader through forming, building, or maintaining alliances. It would be irresponsible to say that this book intends to walk the average reader through a process on creating strategic alliances. Being disappointed because you expected that, would be like saying that a book on how to write a business plan was poorly written because it wasn't specific to a certain company's needs. The reality is that strategic alliances are, in many cases, more difficult to form and maintain than a typical business and each have their particular issues and quirks that must be resolved. Without the proper knowledge and guidance, disaster is lurking around the corner. Does this book encourage hiring consultants to assist with building strategic alliances? I don't think that's its purpose. However, the book does make clear that knowledge and planning are the most critical elements of building strategic alliances, and does include enough information for the introspective executive to determine where her organization stands. If you haven't played this game before and been successful on your own, why wouldn't you approach an expert? If you're interested in learning more about strategic alliances, would like to view strategic alliances in a different light, or learn to think about business differently, than this is the book for you. If you want something that is going to teach you, or hand-hold you through the strategic alliance process, look elsewhere, and be wary!
Rating:
Summary: Best Book on The Subject
Review: I have been following Harbison's and Pekar's work for over a decade. I have also attended their annual alliance conference in NYC sponsored by the conference board. For those not familiar with their work, they have completed 10 alliance studies covering the top 1,000 global companies as well as a recent study sponsored by the Association of Corporate Growth of the top small & medium size firms in the U.S. and Europe. Their work is the cutting edge. We have passed out copies to our executive core. I highly recommend this book which discusses just the tip of their work and is based on a number of their studies. To become more familiar with their thinking, I would suggest the reader also go to the web site "smartalliances.com" to read some of their latest Viewpoints on the subject. Simply, they are the leaders in this area. Being an executive in a major high tech firm that does mutiple alliances, I can state that no other consulting firm or academic institution has amassed such a wealth of information or experience on this important subject.
Rating:
Summary: A 'Best Practice' Approach is the Key
Review: It is one thing to conceptually frame how alliances may add value to a business; it is another to actually execute an alliance strategy in a way that creates measureable value. Rooted in research, not theory, the authors offer a 'best practice' approach to alliancing that can be readily applied to any large company.
Rating:
Summary: A solid and practical guide to alliances.
Review: Most of the literature in this field has been restricted to the elements of technical discontinuity and capital scarcity as the key drivers for the alliance. The authors admirably widen the scope and in the process alter the reader's perspective from 'a kind of a deal' to a continuum based approach of business. There still exists a scope to expand upon the roadmap to alliances with lot more details and examples from non-technology sectors.
Rating: 
Summary: SmartAlliance Provides a Framework for Business Growths
Review: Smart Alliances clearly articulates the complex subject of strategic alliance in simple terms. The book also includes step-by-step "best practices", in general terms, to mitigate the uncertainties and variability (or increase the probability of success) in the outcome of an alliance. There are sufficient details in the book to provide the reader with an insight to the critical issues in formulating successful alliances as well as common pitfalls. While the book is short on case examples, it quantifies its position throughout the book. When compared to other strategic alliance books (e.g., De La Sierra's "Managing Global Alliances", Hamel's and Doz' "Alliance Advantage", and Yoshino's "Strategic Alliances"), Smart Alliances gets pasted the (sometime obvious) generalities and assertions, as well as just observations found in these books. Smart Alliances provides the details for formulating and selecting the right partner(s), and getting to the execution of an alliance in the strategic context.
Rating:
Summary: SmartAlliance Provides a Framework for Business Growths
Review: Smart Alliances clearly articulates the complex subject of strategic alliance in simple terms. The book also includes step-by-step "best practices", in general terms, to mitigate the uncertainties and variability (or increase the probability of success) in the outcome of an alliance. There are sufficient details in the book to provide the reader with an insight to the critical issues in formulating successful alliances as well as common pitfalls. While the book is short on case examples, it quantifies its position throughout the book. When compared to other strategic alliance books (e.g., De La Sierra's "Managing Global Alliances", Hamel's and Doz' "Alliance Advantage", and Yoshino's "Strategic Alliances"), Smart Alliances gets pasted the (sometime obvious) generalities and assertions, as well as just observations found in these books. Smart Alliances provides the details for formulating and selecting the right partner(s), and getting to the execution of an alliance in the strategic context.
Rating:
Summary: Practice meets theory
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Overview but no best practice details
Review: What a ripoff! I bought this book to get a great look at best practices for managing strategic alliances. But on page 75 in chapter 5, here's what I got: "The complete set of one hundred best practices and the associated skill levels is a proprietary tool that Booz-Allen uses with its clients, but let us consider here a few examples..." Yet another overview book that talks about the subject without giving you the meat.
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