Morning all, thanks for all your encouragement and various messages from last week…I appreciate all of it enormously and I’m excited about the opportunities for our baby going forward. Here is a link to an article written by my colleague, David Boyd. He captures beautifully the inherent conflict between the behaviour which we’re expected to exhibit in our corporate lives and that which is critical for our daily survival….characterised by […]
Good morning / afternoon friends, ex-colleagues, family members (!) and random folk who have an interest in the world of consulting and mergers & acquisitions in particular. I’ve been remarkably quiet for quite some time…this is not due to a lack of thought / interesting experiences etc but the development of the next stage in my M&A journey. My new venture, The Agile Gorilla is the result of the above merger. Please […]
A first for iROAM (inarticulate Ramblings of a Management Consultant)! I have asked my co-inteviewer to give his perspective on the interviews we conducted. Abhay Pande made some comments below which I wanted to share with you. My friend Ben de Haldevang and I spent a fair bit of time over the spring and summer of 2016 talking to a number of Asian senior executives, across several sectors, about their […]
East Goes West is a series of podcasts focused on the challenge of Asian businesses coming to Europe and the US. Abhay Pande and conducted a series of interview with senior Asian leaders to understand a little more of the cultural complexity that exists across the Asian landscape, recognise the key differences and start to think about what an Asian owner might expect of a European and American business. The […]
East Goes West is a series of podcasts focused on the challenge of Asian businesses coming to Europe and the US. Abhay Pande and conducted a series of interview with senior Asian leaders to understand a little more of the cultural complexity that exists across the Asian landscape, recognise the key differences and start to think about what an Asian owner might expect of a European and American business. The […]
East Goes West is a series of podcasts focused on the challenge of Asian businesses coming to Europe and the US. Abhay Pande and conducted a series of interview with senior Asian leaders to understand a little more of the cultural complexity that exists across the Asian landscape, recognise the key differences and start to think about what an Asian owner might expect of a European and American business. The […]
Over the next six weeks, I will be publishing a series of interviews which I and a friend of mine, Abhay Pande, conducted whilst based in Singapore. These interviews were born of a shared interest and desire to get beyond the myth and legend of Asian corporate culture and business practice and actually get some insights from Asian leaders that we have in our network. The facts are plain enough. […]
The Guardian recently published a long but interesting piece on the history of time management (from Taylor forward). You’ll find the link here. For me, the bit that’s really interesting and that feeds well into the current discourse is the differentiation between productivity and creativity. If you have a moment, do a bit of research to see how these two concepts are portrayed. Even 20 seconds googling will provide you […]
Dear friends (those of you who have signed up to this blog are almost inevitably that!), it’s been a while and I realise that I have broken the cardinal rule of blogging… that is regular, predictable and interesting pieces of short, concise and opinion filled content! Today I wanted to reference an extraordinary speech made by Sir Christopher Meyer at an excellent networking event in October. Sir Christopher talked extremely […]
With many thanks to my good friend, Alastair Campbell, for an impromptu conversation this week, I wanted to raise an interesting issue. Do the principles of anchoring apply to companies as much as they apply to individuals? To remind you, the concept of anchoring is based on the short circuit in our brain which applies a correlation to unrelated facts / opinions and thereby can make us make some assumptions […]
At the risk of sounding trite, the opportunities for successful acquirers have never been as great as they are now nor the risks higher! The market generally views with suspicion those who would target growth through deals as their primary vehicle M&A disasters, but for those who do it well, the leverage of the low cost of capital, reasonable valuations and potential for disruption in industries which have been spoilt […]
I’m struck by a couple of transactions in the last 6 months which have some unusual characteristics….and absolutely demonstrate the passive nature of both institutional and retail shareholders these days. The one in particular which I want to look at today is SAB Miller / Anheuser Busch. The announcement of the transaction between SAB Miller and Anheuser-Busch INBEV in the form of the public statement issued on 11th November 2015 […]
We are living in a period of reversals….for most of our lives, decisions have been made in the West and implemented (with mixed success) in the East. From outsourcing shared services to the Philippines and South Asia, to banks developing global platforms by buying local and regional businesses across Asia, to the great manufacturing shift to China and more recently to Vietnam, the emphasis on delivery has the remit of […]
On the morning after the most extraordinary day in British political history, the clamour in every publicly traded market is for certainty… about the timing of the triggering of Article 50, about the new leadership of the Conservative Party (and the Labour Party), about the terms of the agreement with the EU, about the position of the rest of the UK (in particular Scotland and Northern Ireland) etc! As an […]
Think about a recent acquisition that you were involved in. Having accessed the business in the post completion period, which of the following assets proved to be more valuable: The physical assets: Intellectual property, technology platform, operating infrastructure, plant and equipment, inventory / working capital, cash in the bank. The employee assets: innovators, R&D experts, operations managers, leaders, customer facing relationship managers, sales people, ‘historians’ (those who understood the context […]
Dealogic reports that there have been 17 unsolicited bids this year, an unprecedented number since 2008 and a record in terms of value of USD 54.9 billion. How it used to work… In the old days, the intermediaries of investment banks, brokers, corporate financiers were there to assess an appetite and report back on potential conditions which might make an approach attractive. In the old days, the raising of finance for […]
Good article on the challenges of recruiting for your new talent…worth a read Source: Business T20 – Five Questions that Agile Businesses Need to Stop Asking at Interviews
Last week saw the announcement of an attempted bid for Valeant, the serial acquirer masquerading as a pharmaceuticals company at a rather opportunistic time when the firestorm of media attention, debt levels, alleged pricing scandals and CEO ill health threatened to unhinge the business entirely. It’s not a first combination of this type…the acquisition of Boots by Alliance Unichem was financed largely by KKR in a similar sharing of interests. […]
Large consulting firms buying / investing in small specialists Telecommunications giants buying / investing in tiny adtech ventures Banks and insurance companies buying / investing in owner managed fintech businesses Once again we are on the crest of a wave of mergers and acquisitions whereby the very large swallow the very small. I’m not at all confident that we won’t have the same result the last time this happened…in the […]
I’ve posted previously on the futility of the classic organisational structure analysis when it comes to M&A (you’ll find the link here). A good friend and ex-colleague came back to me with an excellent challenge…easy to poke holes in it but what’s the solution? Let me respond and come up with some ideas on how to do this more effectively given the constraints of an M&A process pre announcement, notably: Limited access to […]
Inarticulate ramblings of a management consultant 