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Chapter 21 examines ways in which the national context of alliances is relevant to cooperative strategies. It focuses on two salient contextual features. One is national culture. The other is the institutional environment, which particularly refers to governments and interest groups such as NGOs. National context is consequential for alliances in several ways. The context from which international alliance partners originate encourages each of them to internalize a particular set of norms and practices. So, if there is a substantial difference (“distance”) between those contexts, misunderstanding and friction can readily arise between the partners. Additionally, it may be problematic for an alliance partner to build sympathetic and constructive relationships with governmental bodies and interest groups in the host country location of the alliance unit (such as a joint venture), if that location is culturally and institutionally distant from the partner’s domestic environment. The chapter considers “distance” arising from country differences and how it can be highly consequential for the management and ultimate viability of an international strategic alliance.

Chapter 9 considers the critical issue of what sort of company would make a good partner. It notes that most companies assess their prospective partners in terms of the complementarity of their assets and skills and the possible synergies that arise as a result of them. Fewer, however, devote sufficient attention to the cultural compatibility between the partners. Yet this factor is often responsible for the breakdown of alliances. The culture web (symbols, power structures, organization structure, controls, rituals and routines, and stories) depicted by Johnson et al. (2017) and the cultural profile (employee orientation, environmental orientation, international orientation, customer orientation, technology orientation, innovation orientation, cost orientation, and quality orientation) proposed by Bronder and Pritzl (1992) are both useful tools for assessing the presence of cultural difference between prospective alliance partners and hence the likelihood of culturally-related problems arising.

Regardless of how well a firm manages to create a distinctive culture, sustaining a culture is a tremendous challenge in an era in which there is frequent movement of lawyers among law firms. Firms attempt on an ongoing basis to attract partners in the lateral market who can enhance the firm's profitability, while providing sufficient rewards to their own profitable partners to persuade them to stay. The departure of partners can drain a firm of lawyers who understand its norms and culture, while the arrival of new ones may bring to the firm partners with very different expectations about behavior. Firms can try to address this challenge in various ways. One is to confine recruitment to laterals who can "expand the platform" of the firm by bringing opportunities for work for a wide range of the firm's practices. This is contrasted with "buying a revenue stream," which involves hiring laterals who simply add to the firm's profitability without generating much work for others. Devoting substantial time to vetting a potential lateral by a large number of partners in the firm also can provide some assurance that a new partner would be a good cultural fit for the firm.

This chapter examines how headhunters identify good job prospects, persuade them to become candidates, prepare them for job interviews, and convince them to accept job offers. At every step of this process headhunters encounter resistance and rejection from candidates and potential candidates, particularly those who were not actively looking – the passive candidates. The chapter shows that headhunters deal with this problem in two ways. First, they “construct” candidates by finding out whether they have right skills and would be a good fit with the client and by identifying the “wounds” that would encourage them to take a new job. Second, they “prep” candidates for interviews and act as a broker between client and candidate to ensure that an offer is not lost to a counter-offer.