unimagined futures

Developing a work approach that is adequate to the challenges ahead
a world moving toward new and different futureS

Alliances and Collaborations

This is a working draft. It is also an attention directing tool.

This topic will bubble to the top of my to do list following my conceptual resource wip

Note to self: HoudahSpot Scrivener search for "outsourcing." Initial search found lots of hits.

From Peter Drucker's Managing for the Future

The Trend Toward Alliances for Progress

While mergers and takeovers, imports and exports grab headlines, business alliances rarely do. Nor do they generally show up in statistics. Yet for small and medium-sized businesses they are increasingly becoming the way to go international, and for big business, they are the way to become multitechnological.

Alliances of all kinds are becoming increasingly common, especially in international business: joint ventures; minority holdings (particularly cross-holdings, in which each partner owns the same percentage of the other); research and marketing compacts; cross-licensing and exchange-of-knowledge agreements; syndicates, and so on. The trend is likely to accelerate. Marketing, technology and people needs all push it.

In Japan in the '60s and '70s a foreign business could gain access to the domestic market only with a joint venture with a local company. Increasingly, such joint ventures are needed in Europe and the U.S. as well.

A few years ago AT&T entered an alliance with the Italian telephone monopoly to reach a European market dominated by government monopolies. Even more often an alliance is the only way to obtain new, distinct, and foreign technology. Large computer makers buy into small software houses; large electronics manufacturers buy into small designers of specialty chips; large pharmaceutical companies buy into genetics start-ups; large commercial banks buy into bond traders or underwriters.

More and more, such alliances are also the way to get access to people with the know-how. The many research pacts between American universities and large European, Japanese, (and American) businesses are good examples.

And then there are the international alliances within industries. Two years ago, two medium-sized manufacturers of specialty machinery—one Japanese, one American—sealed their agreement to exchange research results and to sell and service each other's products in their respective home markets by swapping 16 percent of each other's stock. All three big U.S. auto makers have substantial minority holdings in independent Japanese and Korean car makers and sell on the U.S. market, under their own name plates, cars made by these Asian "friends."

These are all dangerous liaisons. While their failure rate in the early years is no higher than that of new ventures or acquisitions, they tend to get into serious—sometimes fatal—trouble when they succeed.

Find "Alliances" in the contents of Peter Drucker's work

List of topics in this Folder

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