Digital Deals: Strategies for Selecting and Structuring Partnerships

Rating:
Summary: Industry Observer who knows people who KNOW!
Review: As a Recruiter who speaks to people constantly in the Industry (E-com, Biz Dev,Partnerships)...I can tell you I was excited about this book due to the content and the Buzz on the street. I found it to be Solid - top rate, insightful - with well thought out inovative,cutting edge stratagies. I found the writting style to be friendly even to the untrained ear and felt the book held up to everthing I'd expected from this team! Excellent stuff - Im anxious for the next project from these two!

Rating:
Summary: Great business resource
Review: Digital Deals is one of the few books on the market that gives practical advice on how to develop an overview of competition and make strategic decisions for your company. The step-by-step guide on how to build a database for business development and how to manage partnerships in an age when competitors are also partners is an incredibly useful tool for anyone in business today.

The George Geis team has developed a great study of how successful companies have structured deals that have made them the top in their field, but they also provide hands-on advice for smaller companies.

Rating:
Summary: Insightful, Accessible, Articulate
Review: Digital Deals provides a smart, straightforward methodology for evaluating the options and opportunities inherent in a variety of business alignment strategies. Insightful, accessible, and articulate, the book mines the results of a decade of high-tech deal-making to explain what happened, what works and why. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A framework for business development
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Incredibly valuable -- a must-read
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Dealmaking for the 21st century
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The One Book You Have to Read
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The One Book You Have to Read
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Provocatively systematic
Review: Provocative perspective on partnership strategy, essentially arguing for a systematic approach to what typically is an unsystematic process. That said, the authors do seem to appreciate the role of executive creativity in business development. I gained a lot from the case studies on Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, and AOL. Content is current - definitely post-2000 in thinking. Clearly worth the read.