Until recently India was seen by Western businesses primarily as a source of cheap, low-skill labor. But over the past decade the country has attracted a flood of high-skill jobs from the West. Meanwhile, India's economy has grown at roughly 9% a year, and some of its largest companies have grown at twice that rate. What accounts for this? A host of economic, policy, and other environmental factors have played important roles, but the authors ascribe much of this success to the distinctively inward-focused managerial approach of Indian leaders. Through interviews at 98 of the largest India-based companies, they have identified four ways in which these leaders develop and motivate employees: Far more than their Western counterparts, they create a sense of social mission, engage employees in give-and-take, empower them to find solutions, and invest in their training and development. Western leaders should understand the managerial approaches that have fueled the rise of India's largest companies, and mindfully adapt them.

A takeover usually signals the demise of one of the two corporations involved in the tussle - no prizes for guessing which one. Breaking with this practice, some companies from emerging markets are preserving the identity of companies they've taken over and giving them near-total autonomy. The acquirers (the AV Birla Group, the Mahindra group, and the Tata group in India; the Ulker Group in Turkey; and AmBev in Brazil, among others) have also retained the incumbent management teams, including the CEOs, of the corporations they bought. The new parents lay down new values and create a fresh sense of purpose, but they leave it to the acquisitions to carry them out. Some companies are better suited to adopt the partnering approach than others. Organizations with collaborative, inclusive cultures will have an easier time than companies with a hierarchical, command-and-control style. Senior executives in acquiring companies must be comfortable achieving goals through influence rather than control. They must also have a higher-than-average tolerance for ambiguity. Respect for new ideas is critical because executives must recognize the strengths of the acquired company and resist the urge to impose their way of doing things. These traits are encoded in some organizations' DNA, but others will have to develop them. These are early days yet, but the authors' research shows that the partnering approach to takeovers seems to work better than traditional postmerger integration practices, and it has created value for shareholders.

Acquisitions and alliances are two pillars of growth strategy. But most businesses don't treat the two as alternative mechanisms for attaining goals. Consequently, companies take over firms they should have collaborated with, and vice versa, and make a mess of both acquisitions and alliances. It's easy to see why companies don't weigh the relative merits and demerits of acquisitions and alliances before choosing horses for courses. The two strategies differ in many ways: Acquisition deals are competitive, based on market prices, and risky; alliances are cooperative, negotiated, and not so risky. Companies habitually deploy acquisitions to increase scale or cut costs and use partnerships to enter new markets, customer segments, and regions. Moreover, a company's initial experiences often turn into blinders. If the firm pulls off an alliance or two, it tends to enter into alliances even when circumstances demand acquisitions. Organizational barriers also stand in the way. In many companies, an M&A group, which reports to the finance head, handles acquisitions, whereas a separate business development unit looks after alliances. The two teams work out of different locations, jealously guard turf and, in effect, prevent companies from comparing the advantages and disadvantages of the strategies. But companies could improve their results, the authors argue, if they compared the two strategies to determine which is best suited to the situation at hand. Firms, such as Cisco, that use acquisitions and alliances appropriately grow faster than rivals do. The authors provide a framework to help organizations systematically decide between acquisition and alliance by analyzing three sets of factors: the resources and synergies they desire, the marketplace they compete in, and their competencies at collaborating.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. New research shows that among today's numerous strategic alliances, the most successful are in companies with a department specifically assigned to oversee alliances. Management professors Jeffrey H. Dyer, Prashant Kale, and Harbir Singh came to that conclusion after conducting an in-depth study of 200 corporations and their 1,572 alliances. They set out to discover why some companies manage alliances effectively when others fail. They found that organizations such as Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Eli Lilly & Co., and Parke Davis, which excel at generating value from alliances, have a dedicated strategic alliance function. Companies with a dedicated function were better at solving problems related to the four key alliance management elements: knowledge management, external visibility, internal coordination, and accountability. A dedicated function, the authors show, acts as a focal point for learning and for leveraging feedback from prior and ongoing alliances. It systematically establishes processes to articulate, document, codify, and share alliance know-how. One benefit of creating an alliance function was that it compelled companies to create metrics for evaluating the performance of all their alliances. And regular evaluations alerted senior managers to intervene when a particular alliance was struggling. Many companies with dedicated alliance functions report codifying alliance management knowledge. They create guidelines to help with specific aspects of the alliance life cycle, such as partner selection or alliance negotiation. When done properly, dedicated alliance functions offer internal legitimacy to alliances, assist in setting strategic priorities, and draw on resources across the company.

Corporate restructuring has been the focus of much debate in the past few years. This article addresses the debate about the effectiveness of corporate restructuring by examining 52 studies presented within 25 research articles on restructuring and its impact on economic performance. The authors distinguish three forms of restructuring: financial, portfolio, and organizational. Based on the research reviewed here, financial restructuring has the highest positive impact on performance, followed by portfolio restructuring. Organizational restructuring has little consistent impact on performance.