Introduction
Despite their critical strategic importance, corporate collaborations often are ill-conceived and badly executed. A clearer understanding of the new realities of alliance management will lead to greater success in the future.

Strategy and Design
Alliances traditionally have been likened to marriage. In fact, the dynamics of self-interest give alliances distinctly unmatrimonial attributes that are more characteristic of diplomacy.

Alliance Integration
Successful integration is crucial to both alliances and mergers. But while post-merger integration is about speed, efforts to integrate alliances need to focus instead on the individual company's potential bargaining power within the partnership.

Governance
A significant number of alliances unravel because of governance issues. The solution: Systematically tailor the governance of each alliance to reflect resource capability and value.

Internal Capabilities
Companies should rethink how they use the tools, systems and staff needed to spread alliance-management expertise throughout an organization.

Performance Measurement
Because alliance success is based on intangibles and each alliance is different, performance is virtually impossible to measure—right? Wrong: The use of innovative measures can accurately gauge the many dimensions of alliance performance.

Contributors
Charles Kalmbach Jr. and Charles Roussel