Mergers and acquisitions

The key is knowing what your top price is—and having the discipline to stick to it.

Congress and regulators must curb combinations that adversely affect the cost and quality of care.

During the past 25 years an increasing proportion of U.S. companies have seen wisdom in pursuing a strategy of diversification. Between 1950 and 1970, for example, single-business companies comprising the Fortune “500” declined from 30% to 8% of the total. Acquisition has become a standard approach to diversification. In recent years the productivity of capital […]

CEO Peter Walsh faces a classic innovator's dilemma. His company, Crescordia, produces high-quality metal plates, pins, and screws that orthopedic surgeons...

Now that providing services is more lucrative than making products, the old foundations for success in manufacturing are crumbling. Smart manufacturers are creating new business models to capture profits at the customer’s end of the value chain.

Criticism of the increasing number and complex collection of mergers, tender offers, leveraged buy outs, and proxy offerings has come from consumers, government, and business. The general negative reaction focuses on the amount of money involved and the complex managerial maneuvering among industrial giants. In the view of some financial economists, however, corporate takeovers are […]

Because our attention is a limited resource.

Last month, in an article in the New York Times on the ever-escalating “war for talent” in Silicon Valley, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a passing comment that has become the entrepreneurial equivalent of a verbal tick — something that’s said all the time, almost without thinking. “Someone who is exceptional in their role is […]

As far as I can tell, Yahoo did a lease/sale deal with Microsoft, thereby exiting the growing online search business to focus on the fragmented, super-competitive,...

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Drawing on extensive research of Fortune 500 companies that have lived through industry downturns and economic recessions over the past two decades, Darrell...

As with most mergers, the announcement this week that United Airlines was joining forces with Continental Airlines to become the world’s largest airline touted all of the benefits of the combination: Complementary routes that will give consumers more choice and flexibility; scale that will provide cost synergies; and resources that will allow for strategic investments. […]

Which company will benefit?

It's a test of what creating value means today.

Mergers and acquisitions, the stuff of newspaper headlines, quite often fail. Around 50% of mergers don’t achieve their business objectives, and takeovers cause the shareholders of most acquirers to lose money, according to several studies conducted over the past four decades. Yet, in an ironic twist, companies from developing countries such as China, India, Malaysia, […]

Back in September, my colleagues at HarvardBusiness.org asked if I had any reaction to the decision by Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis to pay $44 billion...

Strategic factors are often more important than purely financial ones.

Few deal makers have been at it as long, and at such a high level, as Bruce Wasserstein, the chairman and CEO of the financial advisory and asset-management...

In the heat of competition, executives can easily become obsessed with beating their rivals. This adrenaline-fueled emotional state, which the authors...

Acquisitions and alliances are two pillars of growth strategy. But most businesses don't treat the two as alternative mechanisms for attaining goals....