Masters of the Universe: Winning Strategies Of America's Greatest Deal Makers [Hardcover]

Daniel J. Kadlec (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 21, 1999

The names are legendary . . . Sandy Weill . . . Sumner Redstone . . . Carl Icahn . . . Hugh McCoII . . .

The stories are as fresh as today's headlines . . . Citicorp and Travelers Group . . . NationsBank and BankAmerica . . . Cendant . . .

Here, for the first time, you can meet the men and the minds that have ignited the greatest decade of deal making in the history of business.

In the 1980s Tom Wolfe coined the term "masters of the universe" for Wall Street's elite. Then deal makers were pioneering the leveraged buyouts and corporate raiding techniques of that colorful era. Times have changed, tactics have changed. But today merger and acquisition activity goes on at a rate far greater than anything seen in the eighties. To date the nineties have produced an incredible $8 trillion in mergers and acquisitions worldwide, compared to only $2.4 trillion in the so-called decade of greed.

Wolfe's phrase is even more apt today for the deal makers you are about to meet in this book.

These are strong, smart, visionary men of business who see what others do not, who act as others cannot, who have the will, the drive, the ambition to make their deals and drive their companies to heights that the rest of us can only envy--and learn from.

Nine of today's most powerful masters of the universe are profiled in these pages by Time magazine's Wall Street columnist Daniel J. Kadlec. Each of these top guns sat for extensive interviews, as Kadlec quizzed them about their greatest deal and the strategies they used to pull it off: the critical elements they saw that made the deal worth doing, and, ultimately, how they got the deal done.

The result is a penetrating, incisive portrait of business as it is done at the highest level, with fascinating insights and lessons for each of us. Inside you'll meet:

Hugh McColl, with his gripping tale of buyingBankAmerica

Sandy Weill, on how he pulled offthe Citicorp-Travelers merger

Stephen Bollenbach, on the rocky road to breaking up Marriott Corp.

Carl Icahn, with the inside story of his showdown with Texaco

Gary Wilson, on buying Northwest Airlines

Ted Forstmann, as he recounts surviving and then thrivingwith Gulfstream

Joe Rice, on his signature deal carving Lexmark out of IBM

Henry Silverman, as he relates his groundbreaking purchase of Avis

Sumner Redstone, with his farsighted deal for Viacom

Superbly written, always engrossing, and filled with the drama of great events and sensational deeds, Masters of the Universe will open your eyes to the brave new world of deal makers and deal making.

And Here's a Sample of What the Masters Themselves Reveal About Their Deal-Making Strategies

"Stay in one room. . . . Lock all the doors. Don't eat. Don't drink.Don't go to the bathroom until you've got a deal."-- Hugh McColl

"Any number of wonderful deal guys will tell you how important price is when you're buying a company. But I will guarantee you that it's not that important. . . . You buy the wrong business at 25 percent less than you should pay for it and you take a little longer to go broke. You buy the right business at 25 percent more than you should pay, and you make five times your money instead of six."-- Ted Forstmann

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: HarperBusiness (April 21, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 088730933X
• ISBN-13: 978-0887309335
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,328,137 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Snapshots of the Masters, not too revealing, June 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Masters of the Universe: Winning Strategies Of America's Greatest Deal Makers (Hardcover)

Although the book is interesting to read the stories are too concise to gain any particular insight into the "winning strategies". Generally this book is not much more revealing than numerous articles available on the persons concerned. Also stories on specialist dealmakers, like Forstmann, are intermingled with stories on corporate dealmakers, like McColl. Corporate M&As is a rather different subject from LBO maneuvering, in my view, and shouldn't have been combined in one book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars skimming the surface, May 25, 2001

By 

Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Masters of the Universe: Winning Strategies Of America's Greatest Deal Makers (Hardcover)

As a business writer, I fruitfully used this book as the barest presentation of the facts before going to do a heavy reporting project. However, had I not spent some time with one of the protagonists in this book and then a great deal more with his associates, I would never have clearly understood what they actually do and how they work. As it stands, this book offers a quick and dirty intro to the biggest dealmakers of their time. While some background and explanations are offered, it leaves out the gritty details and true complexity of what goes on in these huge and often risky deals. That disappointed me about this book more and more as I delved into my work.

Kadlec also adopts a kind of chummy tone with these guys, like they are bar pals as well as subjects for his work, and so you wonder what he may have left out to protect his professional relationships. He barely questions what they do and never really broaches the questions of ethics, as if such considerations don't exist; well, they do, and the people I spoke to were informed and concerned about ethics.

So this is merely a superficial trade-journalistic treatment. While this has merit, it is rather more like a vanilla milkshake than the full meal I had hoped for. I wanted deeper info, but then I was preparing to enter on a several-month project about a field I knew little about when I started.

The writing is also not very good, and lengthy interviews are included verbatim, which is a shoddy way to beef up the text to little purpose.

Not strongly recommended.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fine read for business book readers, May 10, 2000

By 

R. Spell "raspell" (Memphis, TN USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Masters of the Universe: Winning Strategies Of America's Greatest Deal Makers (Hardcover)

I like books that summarize outstanding businessmen. Sometimes I learn something. Sometimes I'm just entertained. This book does not contain massive new information but it entertained me and I learned something. While I recommend the book, it is not in the top 10 business books I have read.