Customer Reviews

Smart Alliances: A Practical Guide to Repeatable Success (A Strategy & Business Book)

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is targeted to large traditional corporations - not the "new economy" companies that are doing a lot of the alliances these days.

It also lacks depth, providing only an outline of the Booze Hamilton approach to alliances. The book is a sales tool in that if you want to learn all the details of their process, you must buy an engagement in addition to the book.

So, if you are with a large corporation, skip the book and call a consultant. If you are in the new economy skip the book.

I gave this book 2 stars rather than 1, as it is a decent introductory text (with its share of fluff) with a couple of good charts (though a preponderance of "filler" charts). However, the book is a thinly disguised publicity push of Booz Allen (and a few others). And the book is impractical since it is virtually devoid of tools--rather useless for the professional. Caveat emptor.

Covers the subject at a very high level with lots of consultant charts, tables and matrices. Great stuff if you need to fill a presentation with a lot of fluff. Deffinitely a teaser for a Booz&Allen consulting gig. You get a glimps of their template tools and lots of reference to how effective they are. Some interesting reading regarding major corporate alliance success stories, but never much drill-down. This book is targeted for the completely clueless exec, the dilentante on a long flight, any consultant-type who wants to look like they know something, or the B-school prof who adds this title to his supplemental reading list. Not recommended if you are the one who needs to make an alliance happen at your company. Let me know if there exist a more hands-on guide to making alliances happen.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book is really an introduction to alliances, preaching the Booz Allen mantra, and NOT a practical guide to alliances. The conflict of interest between helping the reader be self-sufficient in alliance building (ie, delivering what the reader is paying for)and enticing the reader to contact Booz Allen for work is clearly evident. Generally speaking, the book conveys excitement about the prospects of alliances, delivers some general anecdotal information and templates, and addresses some structural issues (without resulotion)--all without providing the tools needed for business development. I expected more of this book and was disappointed. Caveat emptor.

There used to be a time when books were written to educate or entertain the reader(or, if it was a very good book, it would do both). Sadly, we have entered an age when books are written as mere marketing foder - as invitations to become a consumer of an author's product line. This book is just such an invitation, an excuse, a marketing exercise. While the authors fill the pages with charts and statistics there is little or no substance to the book. It is as though the authors had tried very hard to make it appear as though they were saying something new or exciting. However, the text is repetitive and almost totaly devoid of concrete suggestions regarding the creation or maintenance of strategic alliances. The authors could have very easily placed all the information that was useful in a fifteen page report. Unfortunately, fifteen page reports don't sell that well. In addition, without the other 289 pages none of us would have known how much we needed Booz-Allen to structure our strategic alliances.