Joint ventures

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...

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...

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...

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.

No longer content with being the world's factory for low-value products, China has quietly opened a new front in its campaign to become the globe's most...

The Zhong-Lian Knitting Company joint venture in China is one of the region’s shining success stories. So why is general manager Mike Graves thinking about pulling the plug on it?

Western managers nurse a number of untested assumptions about Soviet management. The most common are: 1. The Soviets know little about management. Their system has failed and failed widely. They are basically trying with very limited success to apply superior Western management methods. 2. Western and Soviet management systems are operationally incompatible. 3. The two […]

The view from CVS Health.

Every company today exists in a complex web of relationships formed, one at a time, through negotiation. Purchasing and outsourcing contracts are negotiated...

Champions of virtual corporations urge managers to subcontract anything and everything. And because several high-profile corporate giants have been outperformed...

Companies are just beginning to learn what nations have always known: in a complex, uncertain world filled with dangerous opponents, it is best not to go it alone. Great powers operating across broad theaters of engagement have traditionally made common cause with others whose interests ran parallel with their own. No shame in that. Entente—the […]

Liu Peijin is the president of Almond China, a subsidiary of the German company Almond Chemical. Almond China's joint venture with Chongqing No. 2 Chemical...

When the author became executive director of the United Nations Office for Project Services, in 2014, she faced a big challenge: moving the operational...

Collaboration between competitors is in fashion. General Motors and Toyota assemble automobiles, Siemens and Philips develop semiconductors, Canon supplies photocopiers to Kodak, France’s Thomson and Japan’s JVC manufacture videocassette recorders. But the spread of what we call “competitive collaboration”—joint ventures, outsourcing agreements, product licensings, cooperative research—has triggered unease about the long-term consequences. A strategic alliance […]