While companies of all types and sizes stand to benefit from strategic alliances, the relevant literature indicates that companies competing in the hospitality industry are particularly well situated to gain a competitive advantage in this way. In this regard, Rahatullah and Raeside report that, "The strategic alliance literature reveals that resources alone can not bring competitive advantage, but complementary resources can contribute to the strategic fit of partners in the

Strategic Alliances in Multinational Corporations Hewlett-Packard, Starbucks and Wal-Mart all have invested decades of time and expertise into how they structure strategic alliances globally, and each has taken a unique and differentiated approach to fulfilling their strategic objectives for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the context of these relationships. The intent of this analysis is to address how strategic alliances benefit these companies, an analysis of CSR initiatives arising out of

Strategic Alignment In the last several years, the Strategic Alignment Maturity model is focusing on understanding how an organization can evolve with the different challenges they are facing. This is achieved by carefully examining the business and IT configuration of the firm. To fully understand how this works requires comparing the model with an actual health care organization (i.e. Kaiser Permanente). These insights will illustrate its effectiveness and how it helps

Strategic Direction of Apple in the Enterprise Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has emerged as one of the most profitable and prolific companies in the world, generating a market capitalization rate of $623B as of this writing in late August, 2012, delivering $148B in Revenues in their latest fiscal year and $40B in Net Income (Apple Investor Relations, 2012). One of Apple's greatest strengths is its ability to quickly translate innovative product concepts

However the lack of stability in these partnerships is a major weakness for the company today. In 2008, Apple released the following graphic illustrating just how pervasive they believed video-based devices would be, which clearly makes the value of digital content providers critical to their future business model. Market Assessment of Video-Capable iPods source: (Apple Investor Relations, 2008). Implementation: Apple will need to work closely with their research and development team to

Google Introduction and Description of the Company Organizational Structure Industry Analysis Value Proposition Financial Performance Figure 1.1 Revenue and Net Income Growth TOWS Strategies BCG Matrix Leadership Alliances Measures Google is a highly successful Internet company that makes most of its money through online advertising. It has been able to achieve this success through a combination of leadership and culture. The company's many strengths are in general aligned with the opportunities that exist in the marketplace. As a result, Google has the