The Alliance


Book Description

The New York Times Bestelling guide for managers and executives. Introducing the new, realistic loyalty pact between employer and employee. The employer-employee relationship is broken, and managers face a seemingly impossible dilemma: the old model of guaranteed long-term employment no longer works in a business environment defined by continuous change, but neither does a system in which every employee acts like a free agent. The solution? Stop thinking of employees as either family or as free agents. Think of them instead as allies. As a manager you want your employees to help transform the company for the future. And your employees want the company to help transform their careers for the long term. But this win-win scenario will happen only if both sides trust each other enough to commit to mutual investment and mutual benefit. Sadly, trust in the business world is hovering at an all-time low. We can rebuild that lost trust with straight talk that recognizes the realities of the modern economy. So, paradoxically, the alliance begins with managers acknowledging that great employees might leave the company, and with employees being honest about their own career aspirations. By putting this new alliance at the heart of your talent management strategy, you’ll not only bring back trust, you’ll be able to recruit and retain the entrepreneurial individuals you need to adapt to a fast-changing world. These individuals, flexible, creative, and with a bias toward action, thrive when they’re on a specific “tour of duty”—when they have a mission that’s mutually beneficial to employee and company that can be completed in a realistic period of time. Coauthored by the founder of LinkedIn, this bold but practical guide for managers and executives will give you the tools you need to recruit, manage, and retain the kind of employees who will make your company thrive in today’s world of constant innovation and fast-paced change.




Cobra Alliance: Cobra War Book I


Book Description

The colony worlds Adirondack and Silvern fell to the Troft forces almost without a struggle. Outnumbered and on the defensive, Earth made a desperate decision. It would attack the aliens not from space, but on the ground¾with forces the Trofts did not even suspect. Thus were created the Cobras, a guerilla force whose weapons were surgically implanted, invisible to the unsuspecting eye, yet undeniably deadly. And the Moreau family were the most famous of the Cobra warriors. Long after victory over the Troft was achieved, the Cobras made common cause with their former adversaries against a new enemy. Their reward was three planets that would be a home for the Cobras, whose deadly powers made them too dangerous to feel at home on Earth. Now, years had passed and not everyone on the Cobra worlds thought that the Cobras were worth the high cost of providing their training and maintaining their existing built-in weaponry, let alone supporting research to improve the Cobra weapons, and possibly even put an end to the negative effects of that built-in weaponry, which caused Cobras to die much too young. Many who had never known interplanetary war were convinced that the Cobras were not needed at all. That was a grave miscalculation, because a new menace was approaching, one that even the formidable Cobra warriors might not be able to defeat . . . At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).




The Alliance Revolution


Book Description

More than we ever anticipated, alliances among firms are changing the way business is conducted, particularly in the global, high-technology sector. The reasons are clear: companies must increasingly pool their capabilities to succeed in ever more complex and rapidly changing businesses. But the consequences for managers and for the economy have so far been underestimated. In this new book, Benjamin Gomes-Casseres presents the first in-depth account of the new world of business alliances and shows how collaboration has become part of the very fabric of modern competition. Alliances, he argues, create new units of competition that do battle with one another and with traditional single firms. The flexible capabilities of these multi-firm constellations give them advantages over single firms in certain contexts, offsetting the advantage of a single firm's unified control. When managed effectively, alliances can strengthen a firm's competitive advantage and narrow the gap between leading firms and second-tier players. This often results in intensified rivalry, and the competition within an industry is transformed. Alliances often spread swiftly through an industry as firms jockey for advantage. Yet the very spread of alliances increases their costs and poses new limits on their use. Gomes-Casseres concludes that firms need to manage their constellations to enhance collaboration within their groups, while raising what he calls "barriers to collaboration" for rivals. These ideas are developed and illustrated through original case studies of alliances among U.S., Japanese, and European firms in electronics and computers, including Xerox, IBM, and Fujitsu as well as other small and large companies. The book should be of interest to business academics, managers, and general readers concerned with contemporary capitalism.




Alliance Capitalism


Book Description

"For anyone interested in Keiretsu (Japan's enterprise groups), Gerlach's Alliance Capitalism is a must-read. He offers insightful and comprehensive analyses of their character, behavior, and recent rapid transformation. His knowledgeable discussion of their roles in Japanese economic performance supplements as well as challenges the increasing number of analyses offered by Japanese and American economists of the many aspects of Keiretsu."—Kozo Yamamura, University of Washington




The Supply Side of Security


Book Description

The Supply Side of Security conceptualizes military alliances as contracts for exchanging goods and services. At the international level, the market for these contracts is shaped by how many countries can supply security. Tongfi Kim identifies the supply of policy concessions and military commitments as the main factors that explain the bargaining power of a state in a potential or existing alliance. Additionally, three variables of a state's domestic politics significantly affect its negotiating power: whether there is strong domestic opposition to the alliance, whether the state's leader is pro-alliance, and whether that leader is vulnerable. Kim then looks beyond existing alliance literature, which focuses on threats, to produce a deductive theory based on analysis of how the global power structure and domestic politics affect alliances. As China becomes stronger and the U.S. military budget shrinks, The Supply Side of Security shows that these countries should be understood not just as competing threats, but as competing security suppliers.




Diversity Alliance


Book Description

Everyone is searching for Bornan Thul. Not only is he father to one of Jacen and Jaina's fellow students, he holds the key to a secret coalition gaining power in the New Republic. The young Jedi Knights race across the galaxy to find him--but they may be too late. For their tru enemy is about to show its treacherous face. And it will be shockingly familiar...







Management Dynamics in Strategic Alliances


Book Description

Management Dynamics in Strategic Alliances is a volume in the book series Research in Strategic Alliances that will focus on providing a robust and comprehensive forum for new scholarship in the field of strategic alliances. In particular, the books in the series will cover new views of interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks and models, significant practical problems of alliance organization and management, and emerging areas of inquiry. The series will also include comprehensive empirical studies of selected segments of business, economic, industrial, government, and non-profit activities with wide prevalence of strategic alliances. Through the ongoing release of focused topical titles, this book series will seek to disseminate theoretical insights and practical management information that will enable interested professionals to gain a rigorous and comprehensive understanding of the field of strategic alliances. Management Dynamics in Strategic Alliances contains contributions by leading scholars in the field of strategic alliance research. The 12 chapters in this volume cover a number of significant topics relating to the management of strategic alliances. The chapters discuss both the broader issues, such as governance structure choice, dynamics of alliance conditions, co-evolutionary dynamics, learning dynamics, and the management of internal tensions, and the more focused problems of controls in interfirm settings, dilemmas of cooperation, value creation in alliance portfolios, and alliance management experiences in the construction and automobile industries. The chapters include empirical as well as conceptual treatments of the selected topics, and collectively present a wide-ranging review of the management dynamics in strategic alliances.




Mastering Alliance Strategy


Book Description

Erfolgreiche Unternehmensallianzen sind heute für viele Unternehmen absolut wichtig, wenn es darum geht, sich einen Wettbewerbsvorteil zu sichern. "Mastering Alliance Strategy" ist ein umfassender Leitfaden zum Thema Allianzstrategie. Er entwirrt die haarigsten Themen rund um das Allianzmanagement und erläutert die aktuellsten Gedanken, Ideen und Praktiken für eine effektive Nutzung von Partnerschaften. Ob absoluter Anfänger oder erfahrener Allianzexperte, ob Fachmann im Bereich Unternehmensentwicklung, Linienmanager oder Führungskraft - hier lernen Sie, Allianzen besser zu verstehen und auszunutzen. Die Autoren zeigen, dass das Erfolgsgeheimnis nicht nur in den Feinheiten einer Vereinbarung liegt, sondern auch in der Strategie und Organisation hinter dieser Vereinbarung. Aus ihrer langjährigen Forschungsarbeit und Berichterstattung präsentieren sie hier Ideen und Tools zu den vier Kernelementen einer effektiven Allianzstrategie: Planen der Allianz und Entwerfen der Vereinbarung, Managen der Allianz, sobald sie gegründet ist, Vorteile ziehen aus einer Konstellation von Allianzen, Aufbau einer internen Allianzfähigkeit Verständlich geschrieben. Mit anschaulichem Beispielmaterial. "Mastering Alliance Strategy" - die ultimative Pflichtlektüre für alle Unternehmensstrategen und Führungskräfte.




M&A Versus Alliances: The Impact of Partner-specific Alliance Experience on Governance Choice


Book Description

When companies decide upon a strategy to achieve and sustain growth, they can choose between different options to reach this goal. If external growth is chosen, alliances and acquisitions are typically considered alternative governance structures that involve cooperative efforts on the inter-organizational level. Despite this similarity, each of the two governance types has its own strengths and weaknesses: alliances are based on contracts and offer the firm a substantial level of flexibility while acquisitions are ownership-based and imply a higher degree of commitment but also control. In the course of the governance decision, tradeoffs have to be made between flexibility and control. The challenge managers have to decide, which of the two governance modes suits a specific situation best and will achieve superior results for the company. Prior research shows that a company?s history in inter-organizational governance influences its future governance choices. Firms that have cooperated in an alliance in the past make different governance choices than firms who lack this experience. In general, companies tend to choose governance modes they are already familiar with for future transactions. In addition, whether the partner firms know each other and have worked together before also influences the choice between alliances and acquisitions. This book lays its focus on situations, where companies have allied in the past and are now deciding upon the appropriate governance form for yet another cooperation. Situations where no alliance experience exists and governance choices other than alliances and acquisitions are not considered here. For academics as well as practitioners, it is then of major interest to identify exactly how knowing the target firm from past alliances affects the decision between alliances and acquisitions. However, prior research on the influence of partner-specific alliance experience on governance choice yields mixed results. While it has been proven repeatedly that prior alliance experience with a partner influences the governance choice decision, research has reached a dead end concerning the direction of this effect. The purpose of this research is to contribute to the conversation concerning the effect of partner-specific alliance experience on the choice between alliances and acquisitions and help to close the literature gap by investigating the exact circumstances under which each effects prevails. Financial capacity, market uncertainty and rivalry are chosen as promising moderating variables that are expected to interact with the effect of prior ties and foster the choice for an alliance or an acquisition in a particular situation.