It is spring 1995, and the CFM partnership-a joint venture between GE Aviation and France's jet engine manufacturer Snecma-is facing difficult challenges. The parent companies must decide whether and how to renew their nascent partnership agreement, in the face of global and national economic turbulence in an industry undergoing dramatic change. The JV's careful attention to an equitable split across both partners is suddenly jeopardized as conditions in the market have changed and new leadership at the parent companies brings different aspirations for each side. Now the partners must decide how to move ahead.

The governance of multilateral alliances is an increasingly important strategic option as firms face discontinuities and disruptions. But not all multilateral alliances present the same governance and leadership challenges. The partners' co-specialized contributions to the alliance call for more creative overall alliance management and for more open-ended forms of collaboration. Governance options range from a very autocratic "hub-and-spoke" model to democratic and participative governance. This puts different demands on the approach and the leadership skills required from the alliance managers.

As the cosmetics company L'Oreal has transformed itself from a very French business into a global leader, it has grappled with the tension that's at the heart of every global enterprise: Achieving economies of scale and scope requires some uniformity and integration of activities across markets. However, serving regional and national markets requires the adaptation of products, services, and business models to local conditions. Since the late 1990s, the L'Oreal Paris brand--which accounts for half the sales of the consumer products division--has dealt with that tension by nurturing a pool of managers with mixed cultural backgrounds, placing them at the center of knowledge-based interactions in the company's most critical activity: new-product development. L'Oreal Paris builds product development teams around these managers, who, by virtue of their upbringing and experiences, have gained familiarity with the norms and behaviors of multiple cultures and can switch easily among them. They are uniquely qualified to play several crucial roles: spotting new-product opportunities, facilitating communication across cultural boundaries, assimilating newcomers, and serving as a cultural buffer between executives and their direct reports and between subsidiaries and headquarters.

More and more companies recognize that their dispersed, global operations are a treasure trove of ideas and capabilities for innovation. But it's proving harder than expected to unearth those ideas or exploit those capabilities. Part of the problem is that companies manage global innovation the same way they manage traditional, single-location projects. Single-location projects draw on a large reservoir of tacit knowledge, shared context, and trust that global projects lack. The management challenge, therefore, is to replicate the positive aspects of colocation while harnessing the opportunities of dispersion. In this article, Insead's Wilson and Doz draw on research into global strategy and innovation to present a set of guidelines for setting up and managing global innovation. They explore in detail the challenges that make global projects inherently different and show how these can be overcome by applying superior project management skills across teams, fostering a strong collaborative culture, and using a robust array of communications tools.

This article proposes a framework to address a central conundrum in strategic management: How can firms transcend the trade-off between the momentum that results from the strong strategic commitments needed to gain industry leadership with the need for strategic agility in the face of strategic discontinuities? The article develops an analysis of the meta-capabilities underlying strategic agility, which is clustered around strategic sensitivity (both the sharpness of perception and the intensity of awareness and attention), resource fluidity (the internal capability to reconfigure business systems and redeploy resources rapidly), and leadership unity (the ability of the top team to make bold decisions fast, without getting bogged down in "win-lose" politics at the top). Based on an in-depth study of Nokia's evolution over the past twenty years, this article shows how these three meta-capabilities interact over time and proposes a framework to enable a firm to maintain and regain strategic agility as it matures.

What makes a company strategically agile--able to alter its strategies and business models rapidly in response to major changes in its market space, and to do so repeatedly without major trauma? Three years of in-depth case research on a dozen large companies worldwide showed the authors that one key factor is a new leadership model at the top. Senior executives at agile companies assume collective rather than individual responsibility for results. They build interdependencies among units and divisions, motivating themselves to engage with one another, and carefully manage their dealings to promote collaboration that is frequent, intense, informal, open, and focused on shared issues and the long term. Challenges to conventional thinking are encouraged. This is the new deal, and it's not easy to strike, because it requires executives to act in ways that are far from comfortable. After all, the corporate ladder at most firms favors independent types with a deep need for power and autonomy. At executive meetings, disagreement is suppressed or expressed passive-aggressively, eroding any real sense of belonging to a team. Switching to the new deal almost always requires a huge shift in the company's culture, values, and norms of interaction. The authors describe three approaches to making the shift: Executives can be given formal responsibility not for a business unit but for different stages in the company's value chain. This worked well for SAP, which has a relatively focused business portfolio. When a company's portfolio is less uniform, like Nokia's, business and functional units can be organized to crisscross on a matrix. And when a company is widely diverse, like easyGroup, it can emphasize the learning opportunities that units with common business models may share.

This suite of cases begins with an overview of a promising alliance between a multinational Swiss pharmaceuticals firm and a start-up with cutting-edge technology in drug delivery systems. At the end of the case, the alliance has slid into crisis. In the six B caselets, three stakeholder groups from each partner in the alliance prepare to advance their visions of how it should continue - or end.

This suite of cases begins with an overview of a promising alliance between a multinational Swiss pharmaceuticals firm and a start-up with cutting-edge technology in drug delivery systems. At the end of the case, the alliance has slid into crisis. In the six B caselets, three stakeholder groups from each partner in the alliance prepare to advance their visions of how it should continue - or end.

This suite of cases begins with an overview of a promising alliance between a multinational Swiss pharmaceuticals firm and a start-up with cutting-edge technology in drug delivery systems. At the end of the case, the alliance has slid into crisis. In the six B caselets, three stakeholder groups from each partner in the alliance prepare to advance their visions of how it should continue - or end.

This suite of cases begins with an overview of a promising alliance between a multinational Swiss pharmaceuticals firm and a start-up with cutting-edge technology in drug delivery systems. At the end of the case, the alliance has slid into crisis. In the six B caselets, three stakeholder groups from each partner in the alliance prepare to advance their visions of how it should continue - or end.

This suite of cases begins with an overview of a promising alliance between a multinational Swiss pharmaceuticals firm and a start-up with cutting-edge technology in drug delivery systems. At the end of the case, the alliance has slid into crisis. In the six B caselets, three stakeholder groups from each partner in the alliance prepare to advance their visions of how it should continue - or end.

This suite of cases begins with an overview of a promising alliance between a multinational Swiss pharmaceuticals firm and a start-up with cutting-edge technology in drug delivery systems. At the end of the case, the alliance has slid into crisis. In the six B caselets, three stakeholder groups from each partner in the alliance prepare to advance their visions of how it should continue - or end.

Sooner or later, most companies can't attain the growth rates expected by their boards and CEOs and demanded by investors. To some extent, such businesses are victims of their own successes. Many were able to sustain high growth rates for a long time because they were in high-growth industries. But once those industries slowed down, the businesses could no longer deliver the performance that investors had come to take for granted. Often, companies have resorted to acquisition, though this strategy has a discouraging track record. Over time, 65% of acquisitions destroy more value than they create. So where does real growth come from? For the past 12 years, the authors have researched and advised companies on this issue. With the support of researchers at Harvard Business School and INSEAD, they instituted a project titled The CEO Agenda and Growth. They identified and approached 24 companies that had achieved significant organic growth and interviewed their CEOs, chief strategists, heads of R&D, CFOs, and top-line managers. They asked, "Where does your growth come from?" and found a consistent pattern in the answers. All the businesses grew by creating new growth platforms (NGPs) on which they could build families of products and services and extend their capabilities into multiple new domains. Identifying NGP opportunities calls for executives to challenge conventional wisdom. In all the companies studied, top management believed that NGP innovation differed significantly from traditional product or service innovation. They had independent, senior-level units with a standing responsibility to create NGPs, and their CEOs spent as much as 50% of their time working with these units. The payoff has been spectacular and lasting. For example, from 1985 to 2004, the medical device company Medtronic grew revenues at 18% per year, earnings at 20%, and market capitalization at 30%.

This suite of cases begins with an overview of a promising alliance between a multinational Swiss pharmaceuticals firm and a start-up with cutting-edge technology in drug delivery systems. At the end of the case, the alliance has slid into crisis. In the six B caselets, three stakeholder groups from each partner in the alliance prepare to advance their visions of how it should continue - or end.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Many companies have supply chains that are global. They start with the sourcing of components and raw materials from around the world, then move their basic manufacturing to low-cost locations overseas. But few organizations have innovation processes that are equally global. That is, rarely do businesses have innovation activities that integrate distinctive knowledge from around the world as effectively as global supply chains integrate far-flung sources of raw materials, labor, component, and services. But some companies--Nokia, Airbus, SAP, and Starbucks, among them--have managed to assemble an integrated "innovation chain" that is truly global. They have been able to implement a process for innovating that transcends local clusters and national boundaries, becoming what the authors call "metanational innovators." This process requires three steps: prospecting (finding relevant pockets of knowledge from around the world), assessing (deciding on the optimal "footprint" for a particular innovation), and mobilizing (using cost-effective mechanisms to move distant knowledge without degrading it). When done properly, metanational innovation can provide companies with a powerful new source of competitive advantage: more and higher value innovation at a lower cost.

easyGroup is contemplating its entry into the cinema exhibition business in the UK through the launch of a no-frills cinema. The company believes that it can redeploy the capabilities, such as yield management, that led to the success of easyJet, its low cost airline business, into this new venture. The case examines the market for cinema in the UK, as well as the evolution of easyGroup's portfolio of companies, with a view to assessing the attractiveness of the company's planned launch of easyCinema.

ADP is an American success story. The founder, with modest beginnings and a good idea, turns a company that does the payroll for a few companies in New Jersey, to a successful company that can boast 136 consecutive quarters of revenue and income growth since going public in 1961. The company is built on a solid economic model of providing outsourcing of payroll and other key applications to earn a recurring revenue stream. In the summer of 1995, management of the US-centric company with a few lackluster overseas experiences must decide whether it should acquire French-based GSI. The case asks the reader to take the position of Gary Butler, President of ADP Employer Services, weighing the risks of a large overseas purchase with the rewards of growth that a new market can promise.

This last document in the ADP-GSI series describes the outcome of the acquisition through interviews with ADP and former GSI managers. ADP management is very pleased with the results. ADP Europe management, particularly Philippe Gluntz, has played a key role as leader and buffer between the ADP and GSI culture and operations. During Gluntz's tenure as President (1995- 2001), much of the previous GSI culture and relative high level of autonomy has continued, albeit in an environment focused on growth. Gluntz's successor now has to determine if and how he should continue the autonomy.

GSI is a computer services company, the leader in payroll outsourcing in France. The company founder sees the value in selling computer services to create a recurring revenue stream. His years in the French public administration prompt him to create a decentralized and non-bureaucratic company, taking to an extreme the values of empowerment, trust and respect for the individual. Success in the 1970s and 1980s allows the company to grow by acquisition, resulting in a multi-business company with pan-European reach. The founder's ideals play a large part in achieving an employee leveraged buyout in 1987, resulting in much sought-after independence from the large French conglomerate that had given GSI its start. By the early 1990s, several factors pressure results. An economic downturn crimps sales. Huge outlays to develop software and implement a quality program pressure profitability. The plethora of business units, with totally different business models becomes unwieldy. Impatient and angered financial investors from the 1987 leveraged buyout distract top management with petitions to exit. The management team becomes increasingly dysfunctional. At the end of 1994, the founder and Chairman respond abruptly by firing half of his top managers. The Abridged version can be used as an introduction to the ADP-GSI case series on M and A.

The follow-on to the GSI A case presents the alternatives available to GSI in the summer of 1995. Former senior manager Gluntz has returned in February after a 10 year hiatus and created a plan to turnaround the company. By summer, it's obvious that the option of selling GSI to an appropriate acquirer must be evaluated, given the mounting pressure of financial investors. The case places the reader in Gluntz's shoes to determine whether to resuscitate the company from crisis or sell to one of three alternative buyers, one being ADP.