Too Proud to Lead by Ben Laker

Author:Ben Laker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472973047
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Listen to reason

Both the Myspace/News Corp story and the Nokia/Microsoft tale highlight the vanity lurking behind many mergers and acquisitions. We have personalized them as Murdoch and Ballmer case studies because in both examples there is plenty of evidence from comments at the time and subsequent analysis that as heads of their respective businesses they have taken direct responsibility and ownership of the decisions made.

Mergers and acquisitions have been a growth industry in themselves in the past 30–40 years. The fastest growing part of commercial law in that period has been in that area, with all the major law firms offering crack teams to steer companies through the intricacies of acquisition in the face of increased monopolistic scrutiny. As we have seen from these examples (and there are dozens of other high-profile cases we could have chosen), these are moments in a company’s progress – particularly in relation to buy-outs, acquisitions and takeovers – when the ambition, the limits of expertise and the over-reliance on the gut instinct of a CEO can have catastrophic consequences. There may well have been voices of reason suggesting ways to avoid the mistakes made, but here, as in many other boardrooms in similar situations, reason can often be drowned out by the hubris of a powerful, overconfident, lone voice.

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