Masters of the Universe: Winning Strategies of America’s Greatest Deal Makers: Daniel J. Kadlec
Editorial Reviews
Leveraged buyouts, stock swaps, megamergers–behind every spectacular, headline-making deal you’ve read about in the last two decades, there were real, live people risking their careers to buy companies, or combine them.
Daniel Kadlec, financial columnist for Time magazine, lines up nine of the biggest dealmakers of our era and profiles the most important deal of each man’s career. He keeps most of the focus on the transactions themselves, but also tries to attach a human face to business-page staples like Carl Icahn, Hugh McColl, and Sumner Redstone. He succeeds, to an extent; we come away at least with a feeling of what it’s like to engage in conversation with these corporate titans. For example, there’s a rather chilling encounter with Icahn that helps illustrate why he was such a cold-blooded success as a corporate-takeover artist.
Readers will probably end up liking most of these guys. Hugh McColl, for example, waited until his NationsBank was bigger than Bank of America before he merged the two, even though he could’ve done the deal several years earlier. He comes off not just as a man with brass between his legs, but also as one with unusual integrity.
But no matter how you feel about these sometimes cutthroat men and the business moves they’ve made, you can’t help but learn from them: how to improve weak bargaining positions, how to invest in out-of-favor industries, how to adapt to changing times–or, if you have the courage and vision, how to change the times to suit you. –Lou Schuler
From Publishers Weekly
Though there are very few surprises in this book, Time columnist Kadlec does an excellent job of putting deals into context. Among the business giants profiled are Ted Forstmann (who purchased Gulfstream), Carl Icahn (about whom Kadlec writes: “no dealAindeed no detail down to a quote in the newspaperAis too small to negotiate) and Hugh McColl (who built NationsBank). At the end of each profile, Kadlec tacks on a Q&A session taken from his interviews. And so readers will be amused to learn that McColl used to fire pipe smokers because “I figured anyone who had enough time to mess with pipes had too slow a metabolism for me.” Less interesting is the fact that Sandy Weill of Citigroup Corp. thinks that satisfying the “needs and feelings” of everyone who takes part in a deal is the hardest thing of all. With concise profiles and a journalist’s eye for revealing character traits, Kadlec sheds light on these giants of the conference room. Missing from the book, however, are representatives from foreign companies (a rather serious omission given globalization and such recent developments as Bertelsmann’s purchase of Random House and the advent of DaimlerChrysler). And Kadlec virtually ignores high-tech companies, a field where mergers, acquisitions and alliances seem to revamp the industry daily.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.