Strategic Alliance Magazine Q3 2017 - 16

What Can History Teach Us About Building
Great Alliances To Resolve Conflict?
By Cynthia B. Hanson
"If two people agree on everything, one of them
is unnecessary." So stated Winston Churchill, prime

minster of the United Kingdom, winner of the 1953
Nobel Prize in Literature, and one of the most successful alliance orchestrators of modern times.

His wise words on the value of conflict in alliances will be on stage at the 2017 ASAP BioPharma
Conference Sept. 13-15, "Accelerating Life Science
Collaborations: Better Partnering, Better Outcomes,"
to be held at the Royal Sonesta Boston, Cambridge,
Massachusetts. In the "Alliance Management Learnings from Great Leaders" session, three alliance
management professionals-David Thompson,
CA-AM, chief alliance officer at Eli Lilly and Company, Steven Twait, CSAP, vice president, alliance
and integration management at AstraZeneca, and
Harm-Jan Borgeld, CSAP, head of alliance management at Merck KGaA-plan to dress as famous
historic leaders and discuss topics such as great leadership, exceptional alliances, and resolving conflict.
Standing beside them to provide historical context
will be Cyrus Veeser, visiting scholar, Weatherhead
Initiative in Global History at Harvard University,
professor of history at Bentley University, and author
of A World Safe for Capitalism (Columbia, 2002) and
Great Leaps Forward (Pearson, 2010).
How did the Big Three-Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin-share
the goal of winning the war while pursuing
distinct national goals? If Churchill were
your alliance manager, how would he
handle disputes? How do you best
16
STRATEGIC ALLIANCE MAGAZINE | Q3 * 2017

build an alliance between partners who have cultural
differences? How can you strategize together and coordinate big decisions to end conflict?
Every once in awhile, a great alliance forms and
serves as a historical guidepost. For example, in
WWII, there was a lot of dialogue going on before
actions took place, such as D-Day, explains Borgeld,
when discussing the impetus for the session. "The
daily fight was a chess game. ... There was a whole
preparation stage, which goes back to negotiation.
Everything needed to be coordinated and executed. What the Big Three did before the war was not
aligned at all, but once the war progressed, they had
a common goal. And when you have a common goal,
you can achieve success."
The session aims to provide skills and techniques that
were used to align the Allied forces to defeat the Axis
powers. Prepare yourself for big, bold questions, such as:
n How did Roosevelt and Churchill cooperate with

Stalin and a very different political system with a
history of conflict?
n Why did Roosevelt's face-to-face meetings work to

overcome basic disagreements?
n What concessions did Churchill and Roosevelt make

to Stalin to keep the Soviet Union in the alliance,
and how did they decide which problems to sidestep
and which to tackle head on?
n What do post-war events tell us about the poten-

tial unintended consequences of successful alliance
management?

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Strategic Alliance Magazine Q3 2017