Strategic Alliances & Partnerships
Program Details
About the Program
Enhance your ability to structure, negotiate, and sustain high-value alliances.
Strategic alliances have become a central mechanism for growth, innovation, and global market expansion. Yet many fail not due to flawed strategy, but due to breakdowns in execution, governance, and trust. This two-day executive program equips senior leaders with frameworks and practical tools to design, evaluate, negotiate, and manage alliances that create sustained strategic value.
Participants examine why organizations form alliances, when alliances are preferable to acquisitions, and how to structure partnerships that remain effective under shifting strategic, cultural, and performance conditions. The program also addresses how alliances evolve over time, including when and how to restructure or exit them as conditions change.
Experience
Through faculty-led discussion, real-world cases, and interactive dialogue, participants explore the critical drivers of alliance success, including partner selection, trust across organizational and national boundaries, governance design, and negotiation dynamics.
The program emphasizes the full alliance lifecycle, from formation and structure to management, evolution, and termination, helping leaders apply lessons directly to their own existing or potential alliances. Participants leave with a deeper understanding of how to architect, lead, and sustain alliances that strengthen capabilities and unlock new strategic opportunities.
Bundle & Save
Bundle this course with the Valuation for Strategic Decision-Making course and the Mergers & Acquisitions course to receive preferred pricing and the Certificate of Excellence in Strategic Growth and M&A. Upon completion of the program, you will be awarded a digital badge to display on LinkedIn and a certificate to celebrate your accomplishments.
Learn how you can customize this program for your organization.
Program Contact
- Email: [email protected]
- Phone: 612-625-5412
- Request Course Catalog
Who Should Take This Course & Why
Schedule
Session Overview
- The Strategic Rationale for Alliances: Examine why alliances have become central to competitive strategy, where the pressures to ally are coming from, and how to determine when an alliance is the right choice over an acquisition.
- Choosing the Right Alliance Partner & Structure: With a partner in mind, the focus shifts to fit: Are their goals compatible with yours? Do they have the resources you need, and are they willing to share them? You will work through how to structure alliances to achieve your strategic objectives while managing risk.
Session Overview
- Practitioner Perspectives: Ben Irby, President, Snacks, General Mills: Drawing on the General Mills–Nestlé Cereal Partners alliance, Ben Irby will share lessons on how strategic alliances create value, the complexities of managing joint ventures across organizations, and the leadership practices that sustain long-term partnership success.
- Managing for Alliance for Success: Culture, Processes, and Termination: Effective alliances require more than good intentions. You’ll explore the role of corporate and national culture in alliance performance, the processes needed for smooth operation, and what it takes to lead an alliance well, including recognizing when an alliance has outlived its strategic purpose.
- The Role of Trust: Trust is the foundation of any successful alliance and one of the hardest things to build and sustain. You’ll examine what drives trust creation, how it can be damaged, and why rebuilding it is so difficult once lost.
Session Overview
- Practitioner Perspectives: Jim Lawrence, Former EVP and CFO, General Mills: Drawing on experience with PepsiCo and other global firms, Jim Lawrence will share lessons from managing complex international alliances, including the challenges, missteps, and insights that distinguish enduring partnerships from those that fail.
- Applying the Lessons: In structured breakout groups, you’ll apply the program frameworks directly to your own alliance contexts, stress-testing your thinking and pressure-testing your assumptions with peers and faculty.
Session Overview
- Negotiating the Alliance: The program closes with a deep dive into alliance negotiation, focusing on how agreements are structured to balance value creation and value capture while managing risk, control, and trust between partners. Through an experiential exercise, participants apply these concepts to negotiate alliances that are both strategically sound and operationally durable.
Faculty
Professor, Curtis L. Carlson Chair in Strategic Management
Professor, Department of Work and Organizations