Even so, no amount of sharing and communicating may be enough to overcome barriers between organizations or people Sometimes people want to see things differently because of what they stand to gain or lose. In cross-border alliances, disagreements often reflect divergent strategies, not national misunderstandings Tensions increase when both partners are strong, presumably because both have interests they can legitimately push. Thus the effectiveness of soft management depends on a number of hard realities. Unbalanced incentives can interfere with any relation- ship regardless of how well those involved understand each other. Some conflicts that supposedly reflect cultural differences are really power struggles. In one European a consortium, the Italian representative succeeded in having a major project named