(FORTUNE Magazine) – HERE'S A CHALLENGE: Find any internationally minded company that isn't trying to go global faster by joining hands with rivals, suppliers, and customers to form so-called strategic alliances. Looking for allies is as much a part of the 1990s corporate Zeitgeist as achieving total quality, and the reason is clear: Even the biggest corporations need help launching a new product or breaching a new market. Once proudly isolated and secretive giants like AT&T and IBM are embracing these partnerships. AT&T has links with many of the world's biggest telephone and electronics companies. IBM has created an alliance council of senior executives who meet monthly to keep track of more than 40 partnerships around the world. Boeing is the world's premier manufacturer of commercial jets but has still taken on three Japanese allies -- the heavy-industry divisions of Fuji, Mitsubishi, and Kawasaki -- to make the new 777, a long-range, wide-body plane set for delivery in 1995. Says Roland Smith, chairman of British Aerospace, which got together with counterparts from France, Germany, and Spain to form aircraft manufacturer Airbus Industrie: ''A partnership is one of the quickest and cheapest ways to develop a global strategy.'' It's also one of the toughest -- and riskiest. Many alliances fail. Others end up in a takeover in which one partner swallows either the joint venture or the other company. That's just what happened to the nine-year alliance between Fujitsu and International Computers Ltd., a British manufacturer. Fujitsu bought 80% of ICL in July. McKinsey & Co., the management consulting firm, recently surveyed 150 companies involved in alliances that had been terminated. It found that three-quarters of the alliances had been taken over by Japanese partners. Gary Hamel, a professor at the London Business School, regards partnerships as ''a race to learn'': The partner that learns fastest comes to dominate the relationship and can then rewrite its terms. Thus, an alliance becomes a new form of competition. The Japanese excel at learning from others, Hamel says, while Americans and Europeans are not so good at it. So how can you gain the benefits of an alliance without succumbing to its dangers? In the view of consultants and business professors who specialize in this field, these are some of the keys: -- Pick a compatible partner and take the time to get to know and trust him. -- Choose one with complementary products or markets, rather than one who competes head-on with you. -- Be patient. Don't rush into a deal, and don't expect immediate results. -- Learn all you can about your partner's technology and management, but try not to give away your core secrets. In other words, trust your partner, but . . . CLEARLY, this asks a lot. Nobody knows for sure the success rate of strategic alliances. But Paul Beamish, a professor of international business studies at the University of Western Ontario, reviewed nine studies of alliances made in the past decade. He found a range of 34% to 61% of the executives surveyed were dissatisfied with their deals. Even so, the corporate imperative for forging such partnerships continues. A model alliance, say experts: CFM (for Commercial Fan Moteur) International, a 17-year, fifty-fifty partnership between GE's jet engine subsidiary and Snecma, a French counterpart. It makes engines used to power Boeing, Douglas, and Airbus planes. The alliance has taken orders for 10,300 engines, totaling $38 billion. Of those, 4,000 have been delivered. The success of the enterprise owes a lot to the friendship between its original instigators, GE's Gerhard Neumann, now retired, and the late General Rene Ravaud, the head of Snecma. The two World War II veterans met at the 1971 Paris air show and recognized in each other a fellow rules-be-damned doer and shaker. That same day Ravaud proposed the joint project. The failures? Many are born and die unnoticed; some crash resoundingly. Chrysler and Fiat spent about six months trying to negotiate a variety of deals, most recently a proposal that Fiat distribute minivans and Jeeps outside the U.S. The plan lost appeal as auto markets weakened, and the two broke off talks in November. Earlier in the year Chrysler canceled a deal with Renault to make a small Jeep, and postponed another with Hyundai to produce a medium-size car. In jet engines, a Daimler-Benz subsidiary ended an alliance with GE to join rival Pratt & Whitney, which offered the Germans a larger role. AT&T and Olivetti are closing down an ambitious attempt to market each other's products. Among the reasons: differences of temperament and marketing strategies. Even when they work, strategic alliances take their toll. Senior executives must set aside lots of time for jollying up the other side. They may see the particular skills and knowledge that give their own companies a competitive edge get diluted. Most of all, when they share costs and risks, they must also split profits and control.

More nuanced concerns add suspense and tension. Are you creating a future competitor? Is your partner really trying to unload a dying dog? Or is this just the first move in a takeover? Does that foreign ally simply want to siphon off your expertise? Lord Weinstock, 66, the shrewd financier who has served for 27 years as managing director of Britain's General Electric Co. (called GEC and unrelated to GE in the U.S.), has seen good partnerships and bad. As he puts it, with some understatement, ''Not all of our alliances have been successful.'' That hasn't stopped him from looking for more. Among the new ones: GEC's biggest partnership, a fifty-fifty joint venture with Cie Generale d'Electricite of France, which was consummated in June 1989. The new company, GEC Alsthom, instantly became the European Community's largest maker of generating equipment and other power systems. But an alliance GEC formed with Germany's Siemens later in 1989 to take over Plessey, a British electronics and defense firm, flopped. Instead of a whole array of joint ventures created with the pieces of Plessey, as originally proposed, the partners created only one, CGT, a telecommunications company 60% owned by GEC. The other Plessey pieces were sold or folded into one of the partners. What went wrong? Weinstock blames the outcome on the British Defense Ministry's refusal to allow GEC to collaborate with a foreign firm in sensitive areas. Consultants who watch the two companies ascribe the breakdown more to their inability to get along with each other. Siemens is basically an engineers' company, whereas GEC is a financiers' outfit. Sheer human incompatibility probably causes more failures among partners than any other reason. ''You have to suppress the ego,'' says Weinstock, who is not known for humility. ''It's absolute poison in a joint venture.'' At GE-Snecma's CFM International, the original rapport between Neumann and Ravaud lives on, despite occasional friction. Says Robert Garvin, general manager of aircraft operations for GE: ''The French are sometimes prickly and difficult, but they rotated good people through CFM.'' It helped a lot that the alliance was profitable. The exact numbers are secret: Although the companies split revenues, their earnings depend on how each runs its business. In a separate deal with Snecma as a 25% partner, GE is developing the GE90 jet engine, a 100,000-pound thrust monster 50% more powerful than anything they have built before. They hope to sell it to Boeing 777 customers. The costs of creating new jets are so vast they force aerospace companies into matrimony even when they would prefer to remain single. Japan's huge beckoning market puts U.S. and other manufacturers in a dilemma: If they don't take on Japanese allies, they may not sell their planes. If they do take on allies, they may help build a Japanese aviation industry that eventually will compete with them, as happened in electronics. In Boeing's alliance with divisions of Fuji, Mitsubishi, and Kawasaki to make the new 777, the Japanese will build about 20% of the airframe. Boeing has just taken its first order from United Airlines, for 34 planes plus options for 34 more, worth a total of $22 billion. Larry Clarkson, the senior vice president of Boeing's commercial group, explains why such a dominant company needs partners. ''The day of an airplane being a sole Boeing product has passed,'' he says. ''What's unique about the big-jet business is that it % takes a lot of dollars and involves high risk, a long-term investment, and a limited customer base. If we make another large airplane, we would have to have international involvement.'' Clarkson doubts that Boeing is creating future competitors in Japan. The Japanese already have the capability to make small planes on their own, but they probably wouldn't fly solo with a big one -- for the same reasons Boeing won't. Says Jordan Lewis, a Washington, D.C., consultant and author of Partnerships for Profit: ''Competition has become a team sport.'' Without team play, Europe's role in the big commercial jet business would be purely historical by now. The Europeans secured their place in the market in 1970 with the formation of Airbus Industrie, backed by France's Aerospatiale, Germany's Messerschmitt Boklow Blohm (now a Daimler-Benz subsidiary), British Aerospace, and Spain's Construcciones Aeronauticas. Airbus has survived inefficiency, confusion, nationalist fights over appointments, and what one manager describes as ''centrifugal forces.'' Yet for all the squabbling, the alliance is undoubtedly a marketing and technological success. Airbus has become the second-largest maker of commercial jets in the world, after Boeing, and has 30% of the global market. After billions in subsidies, it might even become profitable. The four original partners were government-owned, but the British and German companies have now been privatized and want to turn Airbus into a moneymaking venture. LIKE OTHERS involved in alliances, Roland Smith, the towering ex-professor of marketing who runs British Aerospace, finds them difficult. ''There's a certain amount of tension,'' he says, ''and you have to accept that there will be differences. You have to cultivate alliances and take the time, not just to give instructions but to create the right environment.'' It takes some socializing, he says, pointing to an incipient paunch. To him there's not much choice: Either be prepared to deal with Koreans, Germans, or Americans -- or opt out of world competition. When the Japanese say they are looking for an ally, are they really looking for a victim? Charles Ferguson, a research associate at MIT and consultant to international firms, wrote in the Harvard Business Review last summer that the economics of the computer business play to the strengths of the big Japanese corporate families, the keiretsu. These well-financed, well-organized, vertically integrated families have systematically weakened the splintered American competition, he believes, and have wiped out much of the U.S. chip industry. Ferguson says that unless Western companies also create large-scale corporate families, they will become vassals to Japanese companies. He says Fujitsu ''quite deliberately'' worked ICL, its British computer-making ally, into a corner where ICL had no choice but to sell out to its partner. Fujitsu began as a supplier of components for ICL's mainframes and eventually became its only source of technology. When ICL's parent, STC PLC, a big British electronics firm, saw that its mainframe business was declining and decided to sell, Fujitsu was the only buyer it could find. In November -- in another example of cannibalism -- STC itself was bought by its ally and big shareholder, Canada's Northern Telecom. ONE U.S. DEFENSE is the consortium, a large alliance of maybe half a dozen or more companies that work on a specific project. In the usual alliance, two or three companies make an equity investment in a joint venture or sign an agreement to share marketing, research, or manufacturing. It took an act of Congress in 1984 to exempt R&D consortiums from antitrust laws, as well as an act of will to throw off the American corporate culture of keeping secrets and going it alone. The strongest of the resulting consortiums is Sematech, a nonprofit research group in Austin, Texas, which gets $100 million a year from its 14 corporate backers and a matching sum from the Defense Department. It develops the costly advanced equipment and technology to make semiconductors. At Sematech they call this ''precompetitive cooperation.'' If the Japanese are more skilled at getting the most out of a partnership -- by learning as much as they can and by dangling the bait of access to their markets to gain new technology, for example -- Western companies can do just as well if they work at it. Thomson of France used its alliance with JVC, which is partly owned by Matsushita, to get into the VCR business. Invented in the U.S., the VCR became totally a Far Eastern product. But to crack the European market, JVC put a manufacturing plant in Berlin with two European partners. Thomson, which wanted to strengthen its consumer electronics business, bought out the two Europeans and set about learning how to make the key parts of the VCR. Arguing that JVC needed to increase the European content of the machines sold in Europe, the French pressured the Japanese into showing them how to make the components in a plant outside Paris. JVC grumbled, but not loud enough to jeopardize its European foothold. U.S. auto companies try to learn from Japanese partners. If, as Gary Hamel says, alliances are a race to learn, then the auto industry has the right idea. No learning alliance has gotten more attention than Nummi, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., which took over an old GM plant in Fremont, California. Established in 1984, Nummi is a fifty-fifty GM-Toyota deal managed by Toyota to produce cars for both companies. The idea behind the partnership was that Toyota would learn how to deal with plants, suppliers, and labor in the U.S. while GM would learn the Toyota method of managing and manufacturing. Each rotates groups of its own managers through the plant for spells of two to three years. Since Nummi started, Toyota has opened two plants in North America. Together with Nummi, they produce nearly half of the company's 7.5% share of the U.S. market. Toyota obviously has learned how to make cars in the U.S. The GM people who went through Nummi learned too. Working Japanese-style in a big bullpen instead of private offices, the Americans discovered a new way of managing. ''I went through a personality change,'' says Stephen Bera, one of the first middle managers GM sent to Nummi. He says he had been used to ''going toe to toe'' to make things happen, but ''the Japanese wouldn't permit that. You couldn't become heated. They wouldn't allow anything but a professional discussion.'' BERA LEARNED, but did GM? He quit because he felt the company had no plan to spread the Toyota faith through the corporation; he now works as a manufacturing consultant for Ernst & Young in Detroit. Another veteran, John Krafcik, who now works for Ford, believes GM is doing a good job. It's hard to tell, because an organization as big as GM changes only gradually. GM is faulted by some academics and consultants for spreading the Nummi graduates thinly through the corporation rather than concentrating them in one place where they might have a striking impact. Their ideas vanished in the corporate bureaucracy. Nobody says alliances are easy, but they aren't going to go away. For all of Chrysler's disappointments with Fiat, Hyundai, and Renault, the company has working partnerships with Mitsubishi to make cars in Illinois, with GM to make gears, and with an Austrian company to make minivans. Vice chairman Steve Miller promises, ''The auto business will be increasingly characterized by joint ventures.'' So will other industries. Strategic alliances have become fundamental to doing business in the 1990s.