ChristianDigital Deals Strategies for Selecting and Structuring Partnerships
In the New Economy, an organization’s success depends on its ability to identify and execute effective partnerships, mergers, alliances and/or investments with other companies in order to provide its services and products. To successfully do so means the opportunity to have the competitive advantage in the respective market. Business competition has been profoundly changed by the Internet. The business press covers this type of activity on a daily basis. This book presents a model for enhancing your corporate development strategy that can be applied across all industries. A new method is needed for partnership planning. This book enables exectives to implement coherent corporate development plans. As the digital revolution spreads and accelerates, market value is migrating to organizations with superior execution of a plan for corporate development involving partnerships and investments, which applies to companies of all sizes. Books like “Digital Capital” focus one or two chapters on the importance of alliances. The reader will learn a systematic methodology for competitive analysis and partnership planning. The book goes into specific corporate development strategies illustrated through corporate examples from Microsoft, Intel, Scient, Sapient etc. In the end, the reader should have a blueprint for developing the informational resources needed to support stategic marketspace thinking. The book specifically covers the major structural forms for deals, the digital database and its significance to corporate strategy, details on effective minority equity investments, determining complementary value activities, and why a traditional deal approach is no longer adequate. It discusses the five classic structures: M&A, joint venture, minority equity investment, commerce alliance and spin-off – providing valuable insights into what’s different and what’s the same about the deal structure in the digital economy. It covers how to select target partners by reducing a player universe to a short list. Learn from big leaders, such as Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and AOL through case studies outlining the deal structure used and what worked/what didn’t. The authors are in a position to bring this crucial information to the reader in a proven and effective manner through their connections with McKinsey and their clients.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Incredibly valuable — a must-read
For an organization to survive in today’s economy, it’s not just a matter of doing deals, but of doing deals in a strategic and systematic way. Geis and Geis emphasize this tenet and provide substantial evidence why a well-planned partnering methodology is critical for the future of any organization. Not only does “Digital Deals” explore a number of partnering models, but also uses extensive real world examples and case studies from familiar companies who battle with these challenges every single day.
This is a book that puts partnerships and alliances in perspective in terms of their usefulness, value and criticality for the future of any organization in today’s complex, competitive business world. Highly recommended reading for executives in general and Business Development professionals in particular.
5 Stars Dealmaking for the 21st century
Geis and Geis have produced an extraordinary product that will serve business leaders and deal makers well in both old economy and new economy companies. Their methodology of digital deal mapping provides a very necessary organic approach to identifying, organizing, and strategizing deals in the new millenium.
As a marketing/brand consultant to both Fortune 500 companies and to start-ups I will be handing out this book as Christmas presents to my favorite clients.
5 Stars The One Book You Have to Read
If you ‘do’ strategy, if you ‘do’ planning, this is a must read for you. Time is, without a doubt, the most perishable asset on the planet. Where and with whom we spend our times now defines our social and workplace identities. The efficacy associated with our use of time charts our career trajectory. Spending time `strategically’ on `strategic issues’ is what executives are supposed to do. In almost two decades serving as trusted advisor to executives, I have never heard an executive say, `We have no time for strategy.” Having huddled around my fair share of top-of-the-house campfires, I find that as the libations taken at CXO watering holes loosen tongues and the executive elders start to tell stories, the most memorable narrative emerging revolves around a review of past decisions. I have heard, stated quietly and in confidence, “We focused on the wrong things. We made the wrong decision.” The payback on time spent strategically was, in many instances, negative.
Is time spent strategically a bad thing? Is strategy dead? Was time spent on strategy wasted? Does strategic planning have no place in our time-crazed, execution-obsessed New Economy? In 1983, the uber-executive of our age- General Electric Chairman Jack Welch dismantled the company’s once heralded planning department. We have empirical evidence that those spending the most on traditional forms of resource-centric `strategy consulting’ [the cerebrally challenged SWOT – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats dance] performed the poorest in the market place. The biggest strategic planner of them all, the Soviet Union appears to have just about finished its pre-Millennial journey from totalitarianism to disintegration. Strategy is not dead, but it had certainly fallen out of favor. Few companies don’t have strategic plans. Yet few devote the resources to them they used to. Most disturbing, is that efforts to fix the problem, often had the effect of making things worse – or at least making them bad in a different way. Crusades and reforms intended to reinvent, relaunch and reposition the practice strategy have failed.
Lewis Mumford divided history into epochs characterized by their power sources. Traditional strategy tended to emphasize a focused single line of attack, executed by a single economic enterprise- a clear statement of where, how, and when to compete. Noticeably lacking was the question of `with whom?’ The new power source in the New Economy is the ability to assemble the most resource-rich, market-savvy, technology-gifted, fleet-of-foot, known-and-trusted-by-the-consumer armada of partners. The way you do that is the subject of Digital Deals.
No book can promise infallibility. No book can guarantee that good decisions will be made. This book will help you spend the time you can allocate to strategic thinking more efficaciously. As such, this is not a coffee-table book. This is not a Great-Title-No-Content book. This is not a Good-article-unbelievable-they-stretched-it-into-a-book-book. This most definitely is not a I’ll-buy-it-but-I-won’t-read-it book. Digital Deals is the new, new thing in strategic thinking. Using the framework in Digital Deals to analyze the ur-protangonists of our evolving New Economy [Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, AOL, AT&T, Amazon] I experienced something akin to the joy that must have accompanied Galileo’s use of the telescope to study the heavens or Robert Hooke’s (1635-1703) use of the microscope to study bacteria. The tools contained in these pages will let you see new things. It will simplify what heretofore has been an incoherent jumble of pieces parts. This book has helped me understand the players, the deals and the deal rationales of the market I work in – digital security and privacy. As I read the book, I continued to ask myself whether the two Georges were adding words to the existing vocabulary of strategic planning or creating a new grammar into which the old words might be conjugated. There is no doubt that the process of market modeling described within these pages fundamentally changes the types of conversations we will be having as we try to plan our respective futures.
3 Stars Disappointing
I have been involved in private equity, acquisitions, and joint ventures for the last several years, and bought this book to learn more about other types of deals, such as e-commerce partnerships, etc. Given the multiple five star ratings for this book, I expected quite a read. Unfortunately, although the book is fairly informative, I cannot say that it imparts anything that could not be gained by an attentive reading of the business press–just a chronology of various deals along with their rationale. I would say that this book would probably be quite useful for a novice or someone that doesn’t keep up with their business magazine subscriptions.
5 Stars A framework for business development
Excellent framework for business development analysis from market overview to deal implementation. Terms for some sample deals are provided, but wish even more was written on deal structure specifics. The book covers turf not previously explored and advanced my professional thinking. Very useful.