Paybox.net AG was the world's first mass-marketable mobile payment system. Launched in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom, it has been steadily losing ground. The company's founder, and architect of the technology underlying Paybox, must decide if his product has a future and, if so, what the market strategy should be.

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.