Joint Venture Consulting and Advisory

Who's My Boss Secondee Reporting and Loyalty

SECONDEES PLAY a key role in many joint ventures: some 80% of joint ventures have secondees in top management roles (e.g., COO, CFO) and 55% have a seconded CEO ( Exhibit 1). Parent companies use secondees for various reasons – for instance, to provide critical skills and capabilities, to accelerate initial ...

Joint Venture Director Selection: Shouldn’t the Board Have a Say?

VIRTUALLY ALL joint venture legal agreements provide owner companies with the unilateral right to nominate anyone they deem fit to serve as their representatives on the JV Board or equivalent body. In practice, owner companies often make these choices based on internal needs and dynamics, and often in a rush – ...

Making JV Governance Sing: How to Use a Shareholders' Committee

ONE OF THE ENDURING tenets of good joint venture governance is the central importance of getting true decision makers from each shareholder in the same room, talking directly to each other. In many JVs, however, the actual decision makers are too senior, too busy, or otherwise unwilling to serve on the JV ...

Alternative Energy: Forces and Consequences

ONE OF THESE DAYS we are not going to need fossil fuels.” Not a routine utterance by an environmental analyst concerned about climate change, but the stunning public admission by Ali al-Naimi that alternative forms of energy are finally going mainstream. Why does Ali al-Naimi’s prognosis of the future matter? ...

Joint Venture Board Attendance: Two’s Company, Thirty’s a Crowd

JV BOARD¹ MEETINGS are the beating heart of joint venture governance. A mélange of disparate JV owner and, management wants and needs are cast into a quarterly session that shapes the future direction of the business. Structured well, a board meeting promotes candor among Directors, enables discussions on ...

Small Joint Venture Portfolios, Big Consequences

HUNDREDS OF companies across scores of countries have formed three or more new joint ventures in the last decade (Exhibit 1). The JV portfolios of some of these companies like ExxonMobil, DowDupont, and Vodafone – are enormous, representing a material portion of the company’s assets, revenue, or income. But ...

When a JV Must Do an (Uneven) Deal with its Parent Companies

BECAUSE MANY JVs are closely related to – or even directly connected with – parent company businesses, opportunities often emerge for the JV to create value by working with the parents in new and uneven ways. This might mean developing new products, functionality, or technologies favored by one parent. It ...

Board Ballet: Choreographing the Joint Venture Board Agenda

FOR BETTER OR WORSE, the vast majority of time and attention that JV Board Directors spend thinking about the business or asset happens within the narrow confines of Board and committee meetings. As a result, orchestrating the Board’s annual agenda is a critical tool for JV Chairs and CEOs to engage, energize, ...

Report from the JV CEO Roundtable: The Questions CEOs Ask Their Peers

WATER STREET PARTNERS recently hosted our 8th annual JV CEO Roundtable at our offices in Washington, DC. We are privileged to regularly convene the world’s only network of JV leaders and felt especially so this year because we are celebrating our ten-year anniversary. We count a few of the participating CEOs ...

Water Street Partners advises clients on transactions and governance. Our transaction work specializes in joint ventures and other non-M&A partnerships, both in new deal formation and restructuring. On governance, we advise clients on corporate and joint venture governance, working with corporate and joint venture boards, management teams, and individual shareholders. We support clients around the world and across industries.

Slideware of the Month:
Emerging trends and findings from our new JV employee engagement survey.