Strategic Alliances as Social Facts: Business, Biotechnology, and Intellectual History

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Strategic alliances are generally analyzed as planned and rational developments with clearly measurable outcomes in traditional management textbooks. Mark de Rond argues that such a view is unrealistic. Instead, he emphasizes the social dimension and the importance of the individuals involved inside alliances. Based on in-depth case studies of three major biotechnology alliances, the book combines insights from social theory and intellectual history with more mainstream strategic management literature. It provides a thought-provoking analysis that appeals to the reflective professional as well as academic researchers.

Strategic Alliances as Social Facts: Business, Biotechnology, and Intellectual History Review

If you're a businessperson, most academic literature about strategic alliances (SAs) seems to have been written about another planet. I've been involved in lots of SA deals, but most management scholars' papers about them either belabor the obvious, or else provide little that I can recognize from real life.

The present book is adapted from the author's Oxford U. Ph.D. dissertation, and definitely shows it. It's full of citations to the academic literature, methodological hand-wringing about interviews with businesspeople, and repetitious recaps for nodding dons about what previous chapters have shown, what the present one will show, etc. (A footnote on p.142 even contains a fossil reference to the book as a "thesis".) However, the author recognizes the drawbacks of most other academic work and tries to make this one a bit more practical. He partly succeeds.

The best chapters are the detailed case studies of three different biotech alliances. They're much deeper than typical business book case studies, and lack the customary hype. They give you a very vivid overview of the many unexpected ways in which SAs can get screwed up -- as well as the many ways in which they can bounce back from disaster, or be reckoned by all parties to have succeeded even though they didn't meet their original milestones. These studies are worthwhile reading even if you don't work in the biotech field. While some of the author's "evolution diagrams" in these chapters aren't always coherent or intelligible, you lose nothing by ignoring them.

Another well-made practical point is that if you think you'll manage an SA by planning and control, forget about it. Continuous adaptation, navigation and consultation are more useful. If your actions tend to be swayed by business books and Harvard Business Review articles, then the critique in chapter 1 of many economic and sociological approaches to SAs might be a useful antidote.

I also liked the author's attention to philosophy, e.g. Hume, Heidegger, I. Berlin et al. This is all too rare in business books, but useful to help you examine many assumptions that you might have taken for granted. (A philosophical point of view is especially valuable for recognizing and understanding the impact of metaphors on management, though that topic isn't really addressed directly in this book.)

That said, I think the presentation could have been greatly simplified, in order to convince business folks that philosophy has something to say to them. A key point for the author is that we shouldn't expect something as messy as a real-life SAs to fit neatly into one consistent economic, managerial or philosophical paradigm. To explain this, he nicely enlists help from Isaiah Berlin's essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox". But from the build-up he gives the essay you'd think it was as complex as Hegel, existentialism or the "Critique of Pure Reason". At least when I was in college, "Hedgehog" was more or less standard reading for most undergraduates, even if you didn't take a course that assigned it. (One of my classmates even named a software company after it.) The reason is that it's both wonderful and short -- and isn't rocket science, either. So while I was happy to see it mentioned, its treatment in the book is a little pompous, given the modesty of the essay itself. The author's discussion of the structuration theory of A. Giddens is less useful or convincing.

If you're a businessperson new to SAs or looking for a how-to, this isn't the book for you. But if you have a few deals under your belt and are looking to enrich your perspective about them, you might find it worth wading through the academic passages of this relatively short book. And if you're an academic in this field, my guess is that you could benefit quite a bit from reading it.

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