Customer Reviews

Mergers & Acquisitions: Managing the Transaction

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I struggled to read this diatribe on Mr. Krallinger's years of M&A experience. The author tries to layout the M&A process to the average business person. He provides an appendix full of checklists, a timeline, and some very common sense do's and don't's. The rest of the book is filled with the author's unsubstantiated assertions, poor economic thinking, and xenophobic biases.

I brought the book to better understand the M&A process from a gritty, in-the-trenches prospective, but walked away feeling that I wasted my time filtering out the author's failings to find a few good nuggets.

Don't waste your time and money on this one.

At a very high level, Krallinger hits the right points for someone totally unfamilliar with the territory. His bulletted writing style makes for quick, easy reading, but requires you to do the reflection on them later on. I sympathize with other reviewers who found this book pithy and shallow, but they may have been looking for a much more detailed tome. This book prepares the reader to recognize at a high level what the issues are and provides a framework for working through them. That's it. It was perfect for me -- I had one night to think of good things to say before making a presentation that included some M&A issues the next day. All I needed was to be able to identify the issues. For that this is an excellent book. If you really spend time to deconstruct the bullet points, it is probably more profound, and for better or worse, the author left that work to the reader instead of writing a 1,000 page book.

This book is characterized by poor writing, sloppy reasoning, and shallow content. Look elsewhere unless you have too much time and money on your hands.

I had hoped to use this book as a training tool for my staff - - it's promoted as a guide to the process. However, after evaluating a copy, I believe the better course of action is to have them watch my six year old trade Pokemon cards. There is more logic and strategy behind his activity than in this entire book.

This book insults the intelligence of any reader who owns at least one neurone. It also insults other true books concerning mergers and acquisitions. The advices the book contains are like this: "Warning! Don't pay twice for a company. You pay once when you buy it, and you could pay twice if you need to restructure it". Please, pick your brains!