Joint ventures are like marriages. Half of them fail. When Reuters and Dow Jones set out in 1999 to create Factiva, a news and business-information joint venture, we knew the odds. The two companies had a long history of head-to-head rivalry for newswire scoops, and their corporate cultures were rooted in very different national traditions (Reuters being based in London and Dow Jones in New York). With the deck stacked against us, my chief negotiating counterpart at Reuters, Phillip Melchior, and I agreed that we’d need to make some unorthodox moves at the outset for the venture to have a chance. We decided on three main tactics.
A version of this article appeared in the November 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.