In this republished episode, I’m in conversation with Ben Gomes-Casseres, a longtime thinker and practitioner in the world of alliances and partnership strategy. Ben first joined me back in early 2015 to look ahead at alliance developments, and it was a real pleasure to welcome him back, this time to talk about his then-new book, Remix Strategy. If you listened to my previous episode with Russ Buchanan from Xerox, you already heard a strong endorsement of Ben’s work, and in this conversation you’ll also hear Xerox come up again in a way that’s genuinely coincidental. I love it when the threads connect like that across episodes, because it underlines the broader point: collaboration isn’t a side topic anymore; it’s a core part of how companies compete and evolve.

Ben and I start with the personal, including his background growing up on Curaçao and even a small but telling story about why he added a dash to his name in the United States, an example of how context matters when you’re trying to make things work across boundaries. From there, we move quickly into the heart of the episode: what Ben means by “remix,” and why it’s such a useful way to think about strategy today. Borrowing from music and visual art, Ben describes remixing as taking existing elements and combining them in a way that creates something new and valuable. He then applies that idea to business, where companies combine assets and capabilities through alliances, joint ventures, ecosystems, and mergers and acquisitions.

The conversation really comes alive when Ben explains the three laws that sit at the center of his book. The first is the classic idea that the combination must create additional value, his memorable shorthand is that 1 + 1 must equal more than 2. The second law is about making that potential real: once you combine, you have to manage the pieces so they operate as one. And the third law addresses a topic many teams avoid discussing openly: value capture. If you grow the pie together, you still have to share it in a way that keeps both sides committed and makes the governance work.

We also explore what happens when you scale these ideas beyond two-party deals into multi-partner constellations, from airlines to technology ecosystems to industrial collaborations. If you lead alliances, work in business development, or sit in the C-suite trying to make external partnerships deliver real returns, this episode will give you a clear lens, and practical language, for thinking about how combinations create value, how they succeed, and why they fail.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit petersimoons.substack.com