In his book, "The Effective Executive" (p. 148.), Peter Drucker writes about the need for leaders to encourage debate and for management teams to avoid a rush to consensus.  In support of this view, he tells a wonderful story about how Alfred P. Sloan approached decision-making at General Motors: Unless one has considered alternatives, one [...]

Riverdeep, an Irish company that makes educational software, describes its agreement to buy textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin as a match made in heaven. Hmm. We think the deal may have been hatched elsewhere. As often happens in acquisitions that count on synergies, Riverdeep seems to have overpaid‚ deeply, if you will. The company will likely [...]

What is it about the word "synergy?" It pretty much disappeared from the business lexicon after the AOL-Time Warner merger, the mother of all synergy deals, showed itself to be a disaster. But the word, or at least the idea, is all over the place again. Apparently, you can’t keep a bad word down. A [...]

Following news reports that there is a coming glut of computer-animated films, we revisited our initial analysis of the Disney purchase of Pixar, which we felt was highly likely to fail. So far, Disney is doing just fine. Disney’s stock is up 25% since the deal was announced in January, while the Dow Jones Industrial [...]

Rumors of Yahoo’s interest in AOL, as recently reported in Fortune, give us pause. We understand Yahoo’s proclivity to do a deal. Advertisers and investors are flocking to Google, even though Yahoo remains the top site in terms of user traffic. As a result, Yahoo’s profits have been disappointing, and its stock is down almost [...]

Traditionally, before the Catholic church declared someone a saint, it appointed a “devil’s advocate.” That person’s role was to take a skeptical view, laying out every argument he could for why the prospective saint should be denied recognition. (Pope John Paul II abolished the office in 1983, after it had been in place for nearly [...]