Financial alliance links Britain and Spain: The three stages of trust accumulation

“No man is an Island, entire of itself”, wrote the English poet John Donne. What applies to the individual also holds true for the business world, in which no organization can ever operate entirely independently. When alliances involve companies operating within similar spheres, those organizations have to handle the sometimes‐fraught issue of developing trust. This can be particularly tricky in global alliances, such as those between Ford and Mazda in the automobile industry and KLM and Northwest in airlines.