Winning at Mergers and Acquisitions : The Guide to Market Focused Planning and Integration

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Summary: In praise of a great book
Review: Several months ago, copies of this book were distributed to our executive team in anticipation of an acquisition. We've since bought several more copies. The deal has progressed smoothly and primarily due to the guidance of Messrs. Clemente and Greenspan. It's as if they've read our minds in reference to the challenges we would face. Each time that a major obstacle or uncertainty has presented itself, "Winning at Mergers and Acquisitions" clearly and articulately has delivered the solution. The chapter on their methodology "marketing due diligence" is truly out-of-the-box thinking and has helped to shed new light on even the most mundane aspects of the process. Strategy, acquisition planning, cultural issues, integration implementation, and the like are all addressed with multiple case studies and practical guidance. We have greased the skids for cross-selling and revenue generation as they've instructed and the results speak for themselves. We are clearly ahead of schedule because of this book. Whenever we have balked at one of the book's solutions, we've found ourselves quickly in trouble and have gone back and implemented the guidance to remarkable success. Our gameplan for this amalgamation as well as for future ones is now neatly laid out. I can only imagine that more deals would have succeeded if they had stuck to the guidance so brilliantly imparted on these pages. In fact, I can't quite figure out how we ever had the audacity to make an acquisition before reading this book.

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Summary: Gave me the advantage i needed.
Review: Several years ago I was in a class at Cornell Law School that Drs. Clemente & Greenspan taught. Winning at M&A was a required text and their insights from working on several high profile deals were inspiring. Just a few years later, I am a successful in-house counsel to many recent acquisitions of a relatively high profile multi-national corporation. I have had the opportunity to share the finer lessons from Winning at M&A with our COO, director of Corporate Development, and our head of HR. Drs. Clemente & Greenspan have written an important book whose lessons seem to transcend time or circumstance. Just like Peter Drucker's management wisdom seems to apply to every company, economic environment, and business circumstance over the last 50 years, the work and guidance of Clemente & Greenspan in Winning at Mergers seems to be timeless and evolutionary. It allowed me as someone with little experience in the realm of consolidation and backwards integration to understand the ins and out of the process before I had ever sat in on a deal. This book should be read and kept by those who want to learn about business, marketing, or M&A.

Rating:
Summary: Gave me the advantage i needed.
Review: Several years ago I was in a class at Cornell Law School that Drs. Clemente & Greenspan taught. Winning at M&A was a required text and their insights from working on several high profile deals were inspiring. Just a few years later, I am a successful in-house counsel to many recent acquisitions of a relatively high profile multi-national corporation. I have had the opportunity to share the finer lessons from Winning at M&A with our COO, director of Corporate Development, and our head of HR. Drs. Clemente & Greenspan have written an important book whose lessons seem to transcend time or circumstance. Just like Peter Drucker's management wisdom seems to apply to every company, economic environment, and business circumstance over the last 50 years, the work and guidance of Clemente & Greenspan in Winning at Mergers seems to be timeless and evolutionary. It allowed me as someone with little experience in the realm of consolidation and backwards integration to understand the ins and out of the process before I had ever sat in on a deal. This book should be read and kept by those who want to learn about business, marketing, or M&A.

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Summary: Interesting, but too often unrealistic
Review: The authors do a good job of organizing their thoughts and generating checklists, which on the surface seem to make sense. However, their conclusions are based largely on limited surveys or anecdotal evidence. Also, the authors attempt to promote the approach promoted by their consulting firm. This may have worked for some of their clients, but it is does raise questions about whether it is applicable across industries or for firms which differ in size. Overall, the book is food for thought, but it makes statements which from my experience seem to be more wishful thinking than time-tested techniques. The danger here is that we as practitioners seek to grasp the latest fad rather than remain objective in terms of how we deal with transactions. There are lessons to be learned here, but we need to temper them with our own experience.

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Summary: This book made us $22 million and saved our company big$
Review: The patented processes in this book helped my company get an actual return on our substantial investment by driving revenue and saving us millions. A roadmap for success,the book walks through all stages of the deal. It starts with the out-of-the-box "marketing due diligence" which honestly reveels the shortcomings of traditional due diligence. A jealous reviewer here calls it unrealistic, yet it's used by most of us in the Fortune 50 (he must have lost the contract to these guys) The writing is smooth and keeps your interest all the way and it gets quickly to the meat and potatoes focusing on revenue enhancement.(SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!) Anyone who's worked on a deal knows this is where the rubber meets the road. Even a fool can cut costs after a merger, but a failure of so many deals is not gerating revenue. The book using examples and case-studies explains how to fill what the author calls "the revenue enhancement opportunity pipeline." It virtually put money in our pocket!! Sheer genius. The middle sections of the book address combining products, services, customer bases, personnel decision-making criteria, management functions and proceses. The last 200 pages detail specific strategies and tactics for successful integration. Discussing the most commmon challenges, how to align corporate culture, employee and customer communication strategies, training and development, reward and recognition prohgrams,theres even a very comprehensive chapter on designing the new organizational structure. No book I have read on this subject speaks about so many important aspects and in such detail. The seven members of our management team each read this book over and over and used it as our gameplan constantly referring to it over the 8 months we worked on this deal. It was like having a consultant on staff! Our deal was a success BECAUSE of this book. Other companies, afraid to break with the traditional practices that only work half of the time, will be destined to repeat their failures. Heaven help their shareholders.

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Summary: The most valuable acquisition of the year ! A must have!
Review: There are many books on M & A out there. Winning at Mergers and Acquisitions is different...it truly delivers! Clemente and Greenspan share their experiences at each phase of the process - from strategy development through integration implementation. They give specific guidance on overcoming the challenges that every company encounters when it decides to do a deal. Their insights on how to keep customers and employees on board are priceless. They show how to link people, products and processes to top-line growth concerns. And most important, they explain how to accomplish effective integration. Winning at Mergers and Acquisitions is the most valuable acquisition I've made this year!

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Summary: Interesting but needs help if it is used in the classroom
Review: This book does a great job of discussing merger planning and implementation issues in what seems to be a very practical way. It is well written. Howvever, I have used this book in a graduate class with very mixed results. Because it is so narrowly focused, it fails to discuss the wide variety of other issues that need to be addressed such as valuation, deal structuring, tax issues, payment issues, closing gaps in buyer-seller expectations, effective negotiating techniques, etc. This are very real issues that I face in my current profession. Winning at Mergers really needs a companion text which effectively addresses many of these issues. The best I have read are Depamphilis' book Mergers, Acquisitions, and other Restructuring Activities and Hook's Practical Guide to doing the Deal. When used with a text the quality of these, Winning at Mergers can be a very good book in the classroom.

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Summary: Required Reading for MBAs - tested in real life!
Review: This book is brilliant. It takes you behind the scenes to explore companies' cultures, management structures, marketing practices and strategic focus. It explains what companies have done wrong and what others have done right. You can really get a sense of how easy it is to take a wrong turn when acquiring or merging. The authors share so many case studies that when I applied their "critical success factors" to a recent deal that I worked on, virtually every decision led our team down the right path. These guys aren't pitching work like so many other books on the market. They freely give their methodology away and it's brilliant. After reading, you really understand corprate culture and its influences. The guidance is priceless both pre-deal and post.

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Summary: Comprehensive and complex
Review: This is a great book. Similar to Jemison's Managing Acquisitions, this is a book that provides extensive information on many strategic topics. The book is well-written, far from dry, yet really digs down deep. It departs from Jemison in its real-world application. The book details where other companies have gone wrong and where others have made the right decisions. It is a bit high level, so I don't think it would suffice as one's first introduction to business. But I was exposed to this book as a grad student at Vanderbilt and it has plugged me in more quickly to the world of organizational design, cultural analysis, and specific business strategies than I would have guessed. Real interesting book. I could see having it around for a long time to come.

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Summary: A valuable guide -- well worth the price
Review: Well written, very relevant, and quite helpful. Chock full of case studies, very specific guidance and especially the "insiders outlooks" where managers who are going through it talk candidly about what works and what doesn't. Good insights on culture and driving revenues. Hundreds of pages of real life experiences. A very good book for those who don't have all the answers. After I read this book, I was a lot smarter.