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While strategic alliances have emerged in recent years as common and important structural vehicles for business development, surprisingly little is known about how collaborative activities are organized and administered within these governance structures. We see classic organizational scholarship as useful insofar as it both provides clear classifications that distinguish alternative intraorganizational designs and explicates how they affect the inner workings of organizations. Existing alliance classification schemes based on type of collaborative activity, partner characteristics, or legal structure, on the other hand, rarely delineate important differences of how collaborative work is organized among partners. We seek to redress this shortcoming by developing a framework of alliance structural parameters based on classic organizational design considerations. Specifically we identify and discuss five key design parameters for alliances: the structural interface between partners, the structural "intraface" within partners, and the specialization, formalization, and centralization of the alliance organization. We show how consideration of these five parameters provides a deeper understanding of alliance governance and suggest how partner organizations can achieve differential levels of connectivity and steering for their collaborative ventures.

In this article, we reflect on the role that leadership has played in the response to the global Covid-19 crisis. We discuss two major 'fault lines' of leadership: narcissism, and ideological rigidity. A fault line is a problem that may not be obvious under normal circumstances but could cause leadership to fail stakeholders and society at large in a defining moment such as a global pandemic.Using case examples from global political leaders we elaborate on these breaking points in crisis leadership and contrast them with the healing properties of leader compassion and mending forces of evidence-based decision making. We conclude our article with implications for responsible leadership research and practice. MAD statementThe Covid-19 pandemic is a global health crisis of unprecedented speed and proportion and it has highlighted that crises can bring out the best and the worst in leaders. In this article, we aim to Make a Difference by encouraging reflection on the crucial role of responsible leadership in crisis, specifically leaders' ability to build and cultivate sustainable and trustful relationships with different stakeholders. We draw attention to two toxic leadership tendenciesnarcissism and ideological rigidityand make an argument for curbing narcissism and instead fostering compassionate leadership, and for careful reflection on the role of ideology and evidence-based thinking in leadership development and practice.