Corporate-finance

This book has no proper indexing. There's no geographic index (so you can't find grants targeted to your state) and no subject index (so you can't find grants targeted to your need - ie capital improvements, education, etc). You would need to read every single entry in the book to find all the grants that could be applicable.

Mr. Wasserstein has written one of the most insightful, interesting books on the subject of M&A activity. The beginning of his book offers a concise, yet informative explanation of how the M&A and LBO businesses came about. A good history for those of us who may not be old enough to remember. The next part of the book deals much more in "big-picture" items. Why competitors in certain industries decided to start getting together, and what the political, regulatory and industry climate was at the time that drove such mergers. It is one thing to read newspaper stories of these deals-it is completely different when the story comes from the mouth of the banker who was sitting next to the CEO in the boardroom. The last section deals more in the nuts-and-bolts of doing actual deals. While on its own, it can get a little dry, this last section discusses a host of issues pertinent to getting a deal done, dealing with a number of political and regulatory requirements.

All in all, if you want to know the whole story behind those WSJ headlines, read this book. A great, in-depth study of what it is like advising on some of the largest deals this generation (or any other) has ever seen. Theory is great, but in the end, what counts is closing the deal, and this book tells how it all happens.

Bruce Wasserstein has managed to make the complex world of mergers and acquisitions as understandable as it can be exciting. He not only explains the intricacies of the transactions but does so in a way that the neophyte can quickly and easily grasp. He also paints fascinating portraits of the players involved. In so doing he puts flesh on the skeleton of the technical explanations. And of course there are the in depth and fascinating stories of the deals themselves- some with which the world is familiar and others of a more esoteric nature but all described in a page turning story tellers fashion.

This is the story from the inside. From a man who has participated in and observed some of the largest and most fascinating of corporate transactions. Fortunately not only is he an excellent M&A attorney but he's an excellent writer as well.

For those involved in transactions of this kind or who want to understand them better for investment purposes it's a textbook that will be referred to constantly.

And for those who are just interested in the drama of the deal it's a wonderful read.

Mr Wasserstein's work is not only very interesting amazingly readable, but also practically very useful and informative for businessmen, researchers, academicians and policy makers.

The Indian Government's policy makers can take a number of ideas from the book before they start experimenting with the unfolding economy, i.e., after decades of controlled regime. The practical and experiential lessons given by the author will help the policy makers navigate more dexterously while sailing on doubtful and controversial waters of corporate legislation and governmental control.
As a Ph D scholar, I find it very useful and I have no hesitation in recommending it to fellow students and to our Institute's (Birla Institute of Management Technology, New Delhi) library.
It would be even more useful if an updated publication of the book may be brought out that would include a chapter on M&A Pricing and Valuation.

I found the book to be interesting and challenging enough to order a copy for each member of my management team. My take on this book is that it provides a great deal of insight into managing the evolution process. As with most management texts, the most interesting and exciting parts of that insight show up in the latter third of the book. I suppose you could skip the first 175 pages and still get the flavor of what RHR and Best Buy did, but I encourage you to read it all. The last 100 pages will be your reward for getting through the first 175.

Things I noted in particular:

1) Early in the book, the authors set up the concept of the Head, Heart and Hands. The Head talks about getting the concept. The Heart talks about motivation, the desire to apply what was learned. The Hands is about putting the concepts into action and producing results.

2)There is a lot of discussion about the role of the Senior Managers in this process, I suggest you test yourself against the model that develops and see if you meet the authors' expectations.

3)If you don't read any other part of the book, I ask you to read pages 216 and study the table on page 234.

4) On page 216 you will see "When people set out to measure the effects of change on business results such as productivity, sales, profit, and employee turnover, they are measuring the outcomes of a process. Measuring results does not provide much information on how the change is proceeding or what issues might be impeding or furthering the change process." We all certainly focus on a couple of the measures cited - to what extent do we sacrifice the longer view in doing so?

The authors got me with the following: "Knowing the score at the end of a game gives you limited information about how the individuals played, where they need to improve, or what's getting in the way of their achieving a better score."

Sound familiar?

Three interesting observations...
1) I'm surprised Best Buy management would allow these details to become public
2) I liked the way the consultants admitted they learned something, too
3) There are many paragraphs where one could change the name of the company from "Best Buy" to your company's name, and the text would apply to YOU.

Therer are lots of books on transformational change out there. Few if any compare to Big Change at Best Buy for its candor, its practicality or its thoroughness. The authors take the reader on a no holds barred 5 year journey. The guts of the company are laid bare for better or for worse as senior executives share their struggles, their doubts, their hard won successes on the road to true breakthroughs in perfomance.

This is fundamentally a book about how to improve your financial results by changing your formulas for success. The authors prescribe a "head, heart and hands" change methodology which not only makes sense intuitively, but seems to work when applied with care by a team of consultants and insiders working closely side by side.

This is no oversimplified cookbook. The ins and outs of change are detailed in a very practical straightforward manner, leaving few stones unturned. Metaphors and analogies are used liberally to help readers get a 3D color picture and to enable them to generalize the issues faced at Best Buy to their own organizations.

Tips on how to fail at each stage of the process are very instructive in what not to do....as are the many colorful quotes from menmbers of the internal change implementation team.

This book feels real...lots of conflicts, values needing to be clarified, lessons learned about change. No sugar coating, but a happy ending nonetheless.

True change seems like it never comes without a struggle. Big Change at Best Buy chronicles both the struggles and the victories won, leaving little for the reader to imagine or reconstruct. It's all there, all the tools and the instructions for how to use 'em to fundamentally transform people, systems and culture for superior financial results.

This book utilizes interesting and detailed stories of well-known businesses, which emphasize the importance of giving a free rein to the creative energy of talented employees. Taffinder's advice is pragmatic and illustrated with interesting analyses and numerous examples. It covers a wide range of concepts and actions that are useful to any type of organization, and his use of "Action Lists" in most of the chapters provides the reader with important summary points. His use of lessons learned, as he describes the successes and failures of different organizations, provides the reader with a richer understanding of the concepts discussed.

The author emphasizes the necessity for business leaders to constantly strive for perfection, appreciate the lack of permanence in the ways business is done, and acknowledge the constant vulnerability all companies face. Leaders need to consider what can be expected from the future, and consider competitive strategies; will a business be a "rule maker," a "rule taker," or a "rule breaker?"

He discusses some of the personal psychological dimensions of transformational leaders, as well as the important leadership actions that are needed during the period of "big change." He emphasizes choosing the right team, uniting the team members, maintaining communications (which he feels is the essence of change), and keeping and supporting your change agents. They are the facilitators of behavioral change, and need continual support from their leaders, especially when the pace of the change process slows down.

His description of the organization of the future emphasizes networking, with a leader who provides purpose, focuses on essentials, and is the agent of cultural values. The successful business environment is characterized by rapid feedback, constant communication, and workers who are creative, think strategically, and exhibit a sincere commitment to the organization. There is still a critical need for relationship-building and trust, as well as risk-taking and opportunism, which are aligned with an openness to new ideas and possibilities.

The author stresses that "big change," or transformation, in order to be successful needs to be systematic, and should affect the entire organization at all three levels; the individual, the group and the entire organization. Taffinder highlights five elements of human and organizational effort, which is essential for big change to occur: 1. Awakening, 2. Conceiving the future, 3. Building the change agenda, 4. Delivering big change, and 5. Mastering change. Further, he emphasizes the essential role of a transformational leader in this process, stressing the importance of the leader having a strong conviction; he must adamantly believe in the changes taking place.

He discusses how the organizational climate has a significant bearing on organizational improvement. Innovation is impacted by employees' emotional involvement in goals and operations, the independence people have to share information, the way ideas are treated, and the emotional safety, tolerance of uncertainty, and overall atmosphere of the business itself. The author stresses the importance of good communication, employee understanding of the changes planned, an assessment of their willingness to accept the changes, and modification of the work environment to accommodate the new structure and processes.

Some implications of his ideas: Change occurs constantly, but knowing what to change, how to change, and when to institute change is not so easily understood. Changes may be incremental and moderate in some situations, while in other cases, the only way to survive is through a major transformational alteration. An organization needs to take part in critical self-analysis, be willing to challenge existing practices, and focus attention away from "empire building" and toward a winning attitude that is required to compete in a global economy. Leaders of big change must be absolutely clear about what is important to their business, what strategies will be used, where the business is coming from as well as where it is going, and what is expected of all of the employees. They need to be able to answer questions like Why change? Why now?

For real change to occur, fundamental changes in behavior are necessary and these changes need to be sustained over time. The use of training programs that concentrate on change management skills, technological skills and basic skills to support new practices, are methods that can maintain the changes being instituted.

Emphasis is placed upon building a culture that expects and allows people to accept and cultivate change. Businesses need to allow employees to use their brains, be empowered to make decisions, experiment with innovations (trial and error is encouraged), and build a culture of personal responsibility.

Taffinder's book is much like a manual on procedures to follow in order to deal with the change process. The information provided is useful and informative, giving the reader much to think about.

An excellent book based on many case studies and insights, Spending some time reading the book I greatly benefitted from the practical lessons. Provides a good route-map for organisations embarking or finding themselves in the middle of big changes.

The crisis at Enron occurred within a corporate form capable of organizational flexibility and self-financing that was embedded in institutional arrangements characterized by a free market ideology, deregulation, and lax regulatory enforcement. Big Business and the State provides a historical analysis of corporate change and the political and economic conditions that lead to the contemporary corporate form, which permits managerial risk-taking and opportunism.

Big Business and the State shows that corporate property rights and the legal bases of ownership are crucial to understanding corporate behavior. The book examines how historical transitions in corporations political and economic environments affected the three most significant corporate transformations in the last 110 years. During each historical period, in response to economic crisis, big business mobilized politically to pressure state managers to realign the institutional arrangements in which corporations are embedded.

The particular form of political mobilization is affect by historical conditions and social forces and structures (e.g., state business policy) that define the parameters within which social actors pursue and realize their interests. Class-based political behavior affected change in state business policy that resulted in rapid corporate form change during the late 19th and early 20th centuries (1880-1905), the 1920s and 1930s, and the 1980s and 1990s. During each historical period when corporations' capacity to accumulate capital declined, capitalists mobilized politically and attempted to transform the institutional arrangements within which capital accumulation occurs.

After New Deal legislation created several disincentives to using the holding-company subsidiary form, corporations changed their subsidiaries to divisions. Whereas subsidiary corporations are legally separate entities that are wholly or partially owned by the parent company, divisions are part of the same corporation and are wholly owned by the parent company and cannot issue stock. By the end of the 20th century, most of the largest U.S. corporations had changed to the contemporary version of the holding-company subsidiary form. This form, the multilayered subsidiary form (MLSF), is a corporation with a hierarchy of two or more levels of subsidiary corporations with a parent company at the top of the hierarchy operating as a management company. The mean number subsidiary corporations in the largest 100 industrial corporations increased from 21 in 1981 to 49 in 1993. This corporate form change occurred after big business mobilized politically and lobbied state managers to overturned crucial New Deal legislation including the tax on capital transfers from subsidiary corporations to the parent company.

Parent companies can use their subsidiaries to issue stock and take on debt. Although the MLSF increases the organizational flexibility and self-financing capability of big business, its embeddedness in the institutional arrangement characterized by a free market ideology, a political environment of deregulation, and lax regulatory enforcement permit managerial risk-taking behavior and opportunism.

This book is the best of a series of "the big book of.." by David E. Carter.
With its hefty selection of works to see and be inspired from, With clear sections and a selectiveness uncharacteristical of carter, this book can be used over and over again, and you can always find something new in it.
It is also of great value. If Graphis ( a high-end graphic design publisher) was to publish such a volume, you can bet the price will be over a hundred dollars.
In short, every designer needs this book.

This book's title is honest: it is really BIG. The Book is filled with full color contemporary samples of world's best graphic identity programs. The design projects showcased here are not only a huge source of inspiration, but a smart reference of how things are done in the real world of visual communication. The book shows all identity categories: from logos to brochures; from fleet graphics to outdoors; from annual reports to business cards. This publication is a must-have piece of work.

Jorion gives a good text book account of the Orange County debacle, concluding that this was a gross but purely human error, and not a failure of the financial system or the derivatives market.

The first part of the book introduces the problem quickly then proceeds to give the reader a crash course in risk management theory, explaining among other things the concept of Value-at-Risk (VaR). Many types of derivatives are described and their proper use explained. We are given a manager's working knowlege of finance.

Jorion then moves to the Orange County debacle proper and his conclusion is frighteningly simple: the financial managers of Orange County, entrusted with billions, did not know what they were doing. They were ignorant of what we learned in the first few chapters. They were amateur money managers playing roulette.

The book is still topical. The Basel II banking agreements mandate strict capital reserve requirements for a variety of risks, such as market and liquidity risk, so that understanding the concept of VaR is more important than ever. Most importantly however, Basel II requires preparation and reserves for operation risk, which most often has to do with the people side of finance rather than the mathematical vality of the models used. Jorion's book is thus also a good introduction to the human side of risk.

Readable account of the Orange County financial blow-up. Particularly interesting is the description of Robert Citron, the hapless college dropout who controlled billions of dollars of public money. Also fascinating are the prescient comments of the obscure accountant who ran against unbeatable Citron in the election prior to the disaster. Jorion manages to educate the reader, in a very painless way, about the institutions of the bond market (such as repos).

On the minus side, the book is not particularly well documented (in terms of, for example, the graphs and the sources of the data) and some chapters seem suspiciously like lecture notes, hastily adapted to a book format. Still, an enjoyable trip to the dark side of financial market.

This book tells the story of a 1.4 billion$ financial loss by the Orange County municipality.
The author explains very clearly what happened.
The municipality, through its treasurer, speculated that interest rates would stay the same or fall. Into the bargain, he leveraged his position with a factor 3. The means for the speculation were repos on bonds.

When the interest rates went through the roof (from 5,25% to 8% = + 52%), the value of the collateral (the bonds) for his position fell (with a factor 3). He got a margin call, but couldn't pay it. The biggest part of the investment (held by FBCS) was liquidated with a phenomenal loss. Only Merrill Lynch didn't cover their position.

The author gives excellent explanations on some very specialized investments like reverse floaters and other high tech financial operations of which the value can only calculated by partial integrals.

Food for investment bankers.