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Showing posts with the label Strategic alliances

Idea 41 - Strategic alliances (50 Management ideas you really need to know)

Idea 41  -  Strategic alliances 'It's partner or perish', declared Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy. She was announcing yet another in the chain of strategic alliances that her company has built, to powerful effect, over many years, starting with Fuji of Japan in 1960. It may have sounded like roll-of-the-drums hyperbole, but in today's fast-moving markets - and particularly in the high-tech arena where Xerox competes - it was no more than a reasonable observation. Managers and shareholders want their businesses to grow, though not always for the same reasons. Growth comes from building share in existing markets or expanding into new ones, and there is more than one way of doing either. The conventional options have always been either to build growth, or to buy it. Companies can grow organically, the hard, backbreaking way. The (deceptively) easy alternative is go out and acquire a competitor or a business in the chosen new market. The trouble with acquisition is that