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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.

When does it make sense for companies to grow from within? When is it better to gain new capabilities or access to markets by merging with or acquiring other companies? When should you sacrifice the bottom line to nurture the top line? In a thought-provoking series of essays, five executives--Kenneth Freeman of Quest Diagnostics, George Nolen of Siemens USA, John Tyson of Tyson Foods, Kenneth Lewis of Bank of America, and Robert Greifeld of NASDAQ--describe how they have approached top-line growth in various leadership roles throughout their careers. They write candidly about their struggles and successes along the way, relaying growth strategies as diverse as the companies and industries they represent. The leaders' different tactics have almost everything to do with their companies' particular strengths, weaknesses, and needs. Freeman, for instance, emphasizes the importance of knowing when to put on the brakes. When he first became CEO of Quest, he froze acquisitions for a few years so the company could focus on internal processes and "earn the right to grow." But for Greifeld, it's all about innovation, which "shakes up competitive stasis and propels even mature businesses forward." The executives agree, though, that companies can grow (even profitably) by distinguishing their offerings from those of other organizations.

Why are some companies able to sustain high growth while others are not? To answer that question, Insead professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne spent five years studying more than 30 companies around the world. They found that the thinking of less successful organizations is often dominated by the idea of staying ahead of the competition. In stark contrast, high-growth companies pay little attention to matching or beating their rivals. Instead, they seek to make their competitors irrelevant through what the authors call "value innovation." Conventional strategic logic and value innovation differ along the basic dimensions of strategy. Many companies take their industry's conditions as given; value innovators don't. Whereas many organizations let their rivals set the parameters of their strategic thinking, value innovators do not use competitors as benchmarks. Rather than focus on differences between customers, value innovators look for things that customers value in common. Instead of viewing opportunities through a lens of existing assets and capabilities, value innovators ask, "What if we start anew?" In this classic HBR article, first published in 1997, the authors tell the story of the French hotelier Accor, which discarded the notion of what a hotel is supposed to look like in the interest of delivering what customers really want: a good night's sleep at a low price. And Virgin Atlantic challenged airline industry conventions by eliminating first-class service and channeling savings into innovations for business-class passengers. Those companies didn't set out to build advantages over the competition, but in the end, their innovative practices led them to do just that.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Traditional models for developing and managing corporate portfolios are based on financial frameworks, business synergies, or leveraging core competencies into related businesses. In this article, the author goes beyond those traditional approaches and offers an alternative--the corporate sphere of influence. Like nations, says the author, companies build spheres of influence that protect their cores, project their power outward to weaken rivals, and prepare the way for future moves. By recognizing the strategic purpose of each part of the portfolio, the sphere of influence model focuses attention on the company's overall strategy, including how it wants to structure the division of product and geographic markets in an industry, which threats it will address or ignore, and how the company's portfolio enhances or detracts from its competitive or alliance strategy. Thinking in terms of building a sphere of influence forces managers to draw together corporate- and business-level strategic analyses that are often treated as separate. The corporate-level concern about where to fight and the business-level concern about with whom and how to fight are brought together into a coherent view. In this article, the author defines the components of a sphere of influence and explains how senior executives can use his framework to assess their company's current sphere and map their desired one. He offers examples of how companies have managed their spheres, drawing from a wide range of industries and companies, including Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Anheuser-Busch, Nokia, Harley-Davidson, and Mexican cement company CEMEX.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Every industry leader lives in fear of the low-end competitor--a company offering much lower prices for a seemingly similar product. The vast majority of such low-end companies fall into one of four types: strippers, predators, reformers, or transformers. Each of these is defined by the functionality of product and the convenience of purchase. Strippers, for instance, typically enter a market with a bare-bones offering, reduced in function and usually in convenience. Industry leaders have significant advantages for combating low-end competition, but they often hesitate because they're afraid their actions will adversely affect their current profit margins. The answer, then, is to find the response that is most likely to restore market calm in the least disruptive way. An industry leader could choose to ride out the challenge by ignoring, blocking, or acquiring the low-end competitor. Or it could decide to strengthen its own value proposition by adding new price points, increasing its level of benefits, or dropping its prices. Such tactics can be effective in the short term, but the industry leader also needs to consider strategic retreat, particularly when certain conditions make future low-end challenges inevitable.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Getting more value from knowledge--especially from a firm's own hard-won knowledge--is one of the central challenges facing companies today. Many organizations have approached this problem in recent years by making big investments in IT systems, but the payoff has often been disappointing. Companies would do better to emulate the innovative giants of the Internet--Google, eBay, and Amazon--whose success has in part derived from their ability to make it easy for customers to find what they are looking for, to browse for products and services, and to evaluate potential purchases. These are exactly the things that are hard to do in most companies. That is, employees find that it is not intuitive to search for information in company repositories; they cannot easily browse within categories of knowledge; and they are not given the context they need to evaluate the quality of the knowledge they do find. The authors assert that if organizations apply the basic, proven approaches of the Internet success stories to capture the attention of their employees, they should be able to improve their ROI on sunk IT costs while increasing knowledge-worker productivity.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. As China prepared to enter the World Trade Organization in 2001, many multinationals planned to invest new billions in operations there. But their ambitious growth plans must be viewed with caution. Experienced multinationals have long been aware of the challenges, summed up by the adage that in China "everything is possible, but nothing is easy." But few predicted the most formidable obstacle to success: the emergence of tough competition from local Chinese players. The authors' research over the past five years reveals that although market dominance by local champions is not universal, it's becoming more frequent. Multinationals must face the fact that the competitive edge that is potentially available to them from superior technologies, products, and systems will be blunted unless they build stronger local competencies. Specifically, multinationals must show a new determination to master the complexities of distribution, sales, and service in China's secondary cities and rural heartland and to learn how to adapt products, processes, and marketing messages more sensitively to the peculiarities of the Chinese market.

A Harvard Business School professor distills decades of research into the 10 most important insights that should guide every corporate venturer.

Keeping a tight focus on your value proposition will light the way toward your company's most profitable growth strategy.

Companies attempting to grow by entering new businesses fail nine times out of 10. The problem isn't that big companies are too risk averse. Quite the opposite--new research shows that managers go after far too many phantom opportunities.

Managers are often told they should be swinging for the fences, hoping for the next blockbuster product or business model. In fact, breakthrough innovation should be the growth strategy of last resort.

In December 2003, Paolo Rocca, chairman and CEO of Tenaris S.A., could look back on a momentous first year for the company. Much had been accomplished since the formation of this leading global supplier of seamless steel pipe and related services in December 2002 via an exchange of the shares and American Depository Receipts of three separately listed pipe companies--Siderca in Argentina, Tamsa in Mexico, and Dalmine in Italy--for shares in the new company. The new company had eight manufacturing facilities variously located in South and North America, Europe, and Asia and distribution and sales centers present in over 20 countries. It enjoyed annual sales of $3.1 billion to the oil and gas, energy, and mechanical industries, a market-leading 19% share globally in seamless OCTG pipes (sold to the oil and gas industry), with particularly strong market shares in a number of national OCTG markets where it had local manufacturing. Despite these accomplishments, Tenaris faced challenges ahead as it sought to transform itself strategically and organizationally. Faced with a mature seamless steel pipe market, Rocca looked to further geographic expansion and a move into service provision to maintain growth and consolidate its market position. Both of these would require new skills and new ways of managing, especially on the human resources side. Building on the legal unification to transform Tenaris' 14,500 employees from eight heritage companies into one centrally aligned, unified operation was also proving to be a major managerial challenge as the company sought to realize the potential advantages of a sophisticated new organizational design. Further, the new organization needed to generate significant cost savings from the consolidation. What should Rocca expect from himself and his managers in the face of these changes? How would they need to manage differently in a unified global organization?

Discusses the adaptation of the private sector concept of strategy to the public education sector.

Surveys Microsoft's expansion into new businesses, such as mobile and embedded devices, home and entertainment, and business solutions, as it faces challenges due to size and maturity and outside threats from Linux and Google. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

NonStop Yacht S.L. is a Web site that provides e-commerce service to the mega-yacht industry. Originally, the founder had planned to run NonStop Yacht as an Internet business. However, success with this business model is proving elusive and investors are growing restless as performance continues to fall short of the business plan. Substantial pressure to improve the company's performance had the founder considering a variety of alternative business models that would enable him to capture value more effectively from the concept of nonstop parts procurement for high-end yachts. These options involve key decisions about the strategic positioning of the company and the relative advantages and disadvantages of pursuing strategic alliances with players at different points in the industry value chain.

Audible Inc. is one of the largest providers of audio content, such as books, magazines, and newspapers. The company has a large "library" of hours of content; strong alliances with partners, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Random House; and a growing customer base. But the company has lost money since it began. The chief executive officer and chief financial officer must decide how to raise funds to keep the company going while maintaining its partner and customer relationships.

Vancity Credit Union is one of the largest credit unions in Canada with $9 billion in assets and 300,000 members. The company's success was based on three key elements: member experience, employee experience, and community leadership. With the pressure of increased competition from financial institutions and changing market characteristics, the chief executive officer must review the corporate strategy and resources to determine how the company can stay competitive and further increase its members and services.

By 2004, Singapore International Airlines (SIA) enjoyed a run of exemplary profitability and service performance. It had built its strategy around the principles of a differentiated positioning using its brand image, geographic location, and outstanding service as the cornerstones of its strategy. The case offers enough data to launch into a rich discussion of the industry factors that drive profitability, and complements it with an in-depth look at the model of strategy that SIA had built in order to compete in the airline business. In recent years, there have been many environmental shocks, such as SARS, that have challenged the continued viability of the model. The company entered into an equity alliance with Virgin that has destroyed significant value. It found itself challenged by the entry of many low-cost airlines in its home market. The case closes with a decision that SIA needed to make about how it would address the onset of low-cost competitors, and whether it would make sense to move away from its differentiated premium approach.

The case explores the fundamental features of the business model that Wal-Mart has been adopting, both in the U.S. and abroad. It places particular emphasis on the company's supplier management approaches, supplier strategies in doing business with Wal-Mart, and the company's track record in international operations. It offers insights into the ways in which Wal-Mart's suppliers can design their own strategies to ensure continued viability amidst significant pricing pressure from the retail giant. It closes with important questions about the continued success of the company in the face of allegations of labor violations, increasing competition in foreign markets, and the likelihood of a supplier push-back against Wal-Mart's continued pressure to bring down their prices.

After 25 years of building a network of interdependent, national organizations delivering relief and development that are responsive to local needs, World Vision's International office is planning to implement a major global HIV/AIDS initiative that challenges the strategic direction, organizational capabilities, and even underlying values of its carefully constructed world partnership. Not only does the new AIDS initiative require much more central direction than is customary in this global partnership of World Vision organizations, each with its own independent board of directors, but it also is acknowledged to have little support among World Vision's donor base and even its internal organization. Involves a trigger decision about whether and how to proceed.