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(More customer reviews)This is when business is at its most exciting -- when the façade of carefully laid plans and beautifully executed plays fades into a reality of last-minute decisions, Hail Mary passes and ego-driven competitiveness. This book looks at 50 such moments, dividing them into ten categories, such as "Do Your Homework" (The disastrous formation of Cendant from the merger of HFS and CUC Int'l) and "Take Advantage of Your Adversary's Weakness" (John Kluge buys and breaks up Metromedia). From small but critical decisions (Michael Robertson purchases the domain name MP3.com) to gigantic transactions (Quaker Oats acquires Snapple), from those that worked out beautifully (Berkshire Hathaway purchases Coca-Cola stock) to those that failed miserably (Novell acquires WordPerfect), deals are dissected. What emerges is a compelling case that dealmaking, at least as much as running a company or creating products, is what separates good companies from bad.
Mike Craig is one of my very favorite business writers. As he's demonstrated time and again on the website that I edit, he's in possession of one of the rarest traits in business writing: hands-on knowledge of how deals are put together. Having defended, sued, represented and antagonized dozens of public companies over his decade and a half as a corporate attorney, Craig knows how these deals are put together. Better, he knows how to explain them with flair.
This book is at its best when Craig is taking a company to task for a bad decision. Sony's ruinous acquisition of Columbia Pictures is gleefully detailed, from the initial overpayment to the hiring of Peter Guber and Jon Peters at inflated rates to the way Sony laid down when Warner sued them for hiring that duo. You can almost hear Craig giggling as he chronicles the missteps.
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