Examples of alliances mentioned in the slim book include: Sony and Ericsson (which have ‘combined their mobile-handset units in a joint venture to leverage both companies’ R&D and distribution competencies to take on larger competitors, like Nokia and Motorola’); Chevron and Texaco (which have ‘a time-tested alliance in West Asia that produces more than $11 billion in revenues for both companies’); and ‘three airline alliances,’ which now account for ‘half of the global passenger market’.

The terrain of alliances is fraught with failures, despite more than two thousand strategic alliances being launched worldwide each year, at a growth rate of 15 per cent annually. More than half of all strategic partnerships fail, the author observes. “More than one-third of companies that take part in alliances struggle with them. Only 9 per cent consistently build alliances well.”

Alliances only make sense if you do them right, avers Steinhilber. “Creating strategic alliances is not for those companies that manage their business on a quarter-to-quarter basis, that are unwilling to take risk, and that do not make the investment required to do it well.”

Urgent read before you sign the next big alliance!

Communication is a key skill that ‘business professionals cannot ignore,’ say Saugata Mitra, Seema Bangia and Jayati Mitra in 18 Management Competencies ( www.sterlingpublishers.com).

To facilitate communication, companies need to practise the right policies. For instance, HP (Hewlett Packard) follows an ‘open-door policy’ that encourages employees to discuss their personal and job-related matters with their managers.

“Every one at HP, including the CEO, works in open plan doorless offices,” reads a quote of Bill Hewlett cited in the book. “This ready availability has its drawbacks, in that interruptions are always possible. But at HP, we have found that the benefits of accessibility far outweigh the disadvantages.”

A section on ‘building relationships’ discusses how the HR vision of Narayana Murthy has been effective in Infosys. Being sensitive to the needs of the employees, he arranged for the provision of world-class facilities, such as “a quality day-care centre, tennis and golf, fully staffed medicare centre, highly-subsidised cafeteria, indoor games, buses to ferry to and from office, crèche facilities for kids, credit cards or house loan applications and flexible working hours.”

One other competency discussed in the book is ‘continuous improvement,’ where the authors look at lessons from Nokia, a company that recognises talent to be the raw material of successful innovation.

Unlike the common centralised R&D structure, Nokia’s research operations are scattered in more than 60 locations around the world, and its nearly 20,000 engineers, designers and sociologists are given complete freedom to operate and develop their own ideas, over and above their officially designated research projects. The flat structure of the creative pool worked wonders, find Mitra et al.

Ready takeaways for emulation.

A considerable sense of wonder — and in some cases a measure of alarm — frequently accompanied the development of technologies of instantaneous communication, writes Stephanie Marriott in Live Television: Time, Space and the Broadcast Event ( www.sagepublications.com).

“The first message sent over Morse’s telegraph link between Washington, DC and Baltimore, Maryland when the commercial telegraph network was inaugurated in 1843 (‘What Hath God Wrought!’) nicely demonstrates the profound sense of awe that accompanied early real-time encounters-at-a-distance.”

Over the years, however, these mediated encounters have become a fundamental element in our routine engagement with the world at such pace that “their workings appear unremarkable and their complicated underpinnings in time and space a routinised element of our mundane moment-to-moment encounters with other individuals and with the localities they inhabit,” the author notes.At any given moment, day or night, innumerable messages ricochet from one point to another, carried near-instantaneously between remote sites by media both wireless and wired, she finds.

Then follows a vivid description: “Pagers beep; phones ring; fax machines announce the imminent arrival of a new document; a sound on a computer indicates that a new e-mail has arrived; a voice on the radio informs the listener about local weather conditions or rain hundreds of miles away or storm-force winds on another continent; on the television a correspondent clutches a railing, nearly bowled over by the wind and drenched by sea spray as he delivers a live report from the site of an incoming hurricane to a viewer on the other side of the world.”

To seize upon some individual instant and attempt to map these communication flows in the manner of a time-and-motion expert charting the movements of individuals around a workplace would be an impossible endeavour, frets Marriott. “The world is thick with messages, invisibly crossing and re-crossing each other in apparently endless and interlinked circuits of interaction…”

Passionately argued research material.

When Chinese character domain names were first made available for registration, there was a rush to register for fear of ‘cyber squatters,’ but for the most part, the majority of registered Chinese character domains are rarely, used write Rebecca Ordish and Alan Adcock in China Intellectual Property Challenges and Solutions: An Essential Business Guide ( www.wiley.com).

“Both Chinese domain names and Internet keyword domains require plug-ins available from CNNIC (the China Internet Network Information Centre), which makes them arguably less attractive and user friendly,” the authors reason.

They advise companies operating mainly in Hong Kong or China to secure the .hk or .cn domain. “So long as you have adequate trademark protection in China and Hong Kong, if a third party registers a similar domain name in bad faith, you would be able to challenge this under the Domain Name Dispute Resolution Procedure, which applies to most domain names.”

In a section on Internet infringements, the authors speak of China’s struggle to come to terms with IP infringements in the online world, alongside the rest of the international community. “There have been a number of high-profile cases relating to unauthorised uploading, linking, and search engines, with inconsistent outcomes, so some clarification will be welcome in this area,” they suggest.

Important addition to the IP-professionals’ shelf.

Tailpiece

“To counter the slowdown pressures…”

“You are working more?”

“And also we have asked our staff bus drivers to drive in faster!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

More Stories on : Books | Books 2 Byte | Alliances & Joint Ventures

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page