Business structures

In recent years, the practice of management has often felt like an exercise in putting out fires. Facing one social, environmental, and economic crisis...

As the parents of two children with Down syndrome, the authors learned that 80% of people with disabilities in the United States are unemployed. They...

Your organization can become more decisive—and can implement strategy more quickly—if you know where the bottlenecks are and who’s empowered to break through them.

When a crisis forces outside directors to navigate major changes, investors and directors must adopt new roles. The largest such case to date provides some useful lessons. The Royal Dutch/Shell Group was a 60/40 joint venture between Royal Dutch Petroleum and Shell Transport and Trading. It was run by a five-person committee of managing directors […]

As the traditional avenues of corporate growth become less attractive, many companies find the appeal of new venture strategies harder to resist. Though difficult to implement and often slow to repay investment, these strategies do offer the promise of facilitating entry into new business areas with innovative, usually technology-based products. And for large companies with […]

Increasingly, senior executives who wish to expand their company's product, geographic, or customer reach consider alliances to be the strategic vehicle...

Encourage them to build a career outside the firm first.

Market leaders maximize returns by actively shaping — and reshaping — their partnership portfolios.

More than 5,000 joint ventures, and many more contractual alliances, have been launched worldwide in the past five years. Companies are realizing that...

PC maker Lenovo started out as a distributor of equipment made by IBM and other companies; now it has formed a joint venture with IBM and will eventually...

First, accept that you will be under constant scrutiny.

Outsourcing has become strategic—yet many executives remain unprepared. A new era of capability sourcing will trigger organizational redesign and require a new set of managerial skills.

Collaboration in business is no longer confined to conventional two-company alliances, such as joint ventures or marketing accords. Today groups of companies...

Family directors are critical for aligning owners' interests with those of other shareholders.

In the midst of hardship, the climate for foreign investment in Russia has never been better. But Westerners should learn from the mistakes of the first wave of joint ventures.

Susie Gordon and Antonio Barile, a married couple, own a manufacturing company together. When their first child was born, they agreed that Susie would...

Start by understanding why they might be reluctant to inherit it.

This form of ownership may be new in the U.S., but it's relatively common in Europe.

You can't expect to just step into mom or dad's shoes.

Advancing the sustainability goals of the author’s grandfather, his company’s founder