Mergers and acquisitions

The huge sums that private equity firms make on their investments evoke admiration and envy. Typically, these returns are attributed to the firms' aggressive...

Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, have been around in various forms for decades, but during the past two years they've taken off in the...

Companies are increasingly paying for acquisitions with stock rather than cash. But both they and the companies they acquire need to understand just how big a difference that decision can make to the value shareholders will get from a deal.

Less than a decade after the frantic merger activity of the late 1960s, we are again in the midst of a major wave of corporate acquisitions. In contrast to the 1960s, when acquirers were mainly freewheeling conglomerates, the merger movement in the 1970s includes such long-established giants of U.S. industry as General Electric, Gulf Oil, […]

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

Increasingly, senior executives who wish to expand their company's product, geographic, or customer reach consider alliances to be the strategic vehicle...

And changing how Americans think about the cost of healthy food.

Many high-tech companies looking for hot new products have caught acquisition fever. Smart buyers keep their eye on building the right long-term capabilities, which often means keeping the right people.

A lesson from the Mayo Clinic.

Capital markets now demand that CEOs monitor the "value gap" between what their company's shareholders realize now and what they might be able to get....

It was supposed to be an amicable "merger of equals," an example of European togetherness, a synergistic deal that would create the world's second-largest...

A new study of private equity buyouts shows that, on average, U.S. acquisitions made in "red" (Republican) states deliver significantly higher returns...

How do you reduce headcount when almost everyone gets the same scores on performance reviews? HR vice president Nils Ekdahl confronts that question at...

More than 5,000 joint ventures, and many more contractual alliances, have been launched worldwide in the past five years. Companies are realizing that...

Large-scale mergers often plague the “winning” bidder with what academics call the “Winner’s Curse.” The winner’s curse takes place when a bidder does indeed win the object for which he or she was bidding, but the value of that object turns out to be less than what was bid for it. What’s a recipe for […]

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

This fictitious case study by Idalene F. Kesner, the Frank P. Popoff Professor at Indiana University, and Sally Fowler, assistant professor at Victoria...

Today’s technology can put adjusted present value into the arsenal of every general manager.

Whatever you think of Carly Fiorina’s management style, she is a shrewd tactician. In the acrimonious proxy battle surrounding the 2002 Hewlett-Packard–Compaq merger, the promerger group, headed by the former HP CEO, squeaked by the antimerger dissidents with less than a 1% margin. But before Fiorina’s side could claim victory, the dissidents brought suit, accusing […]