Deals from Hell

Foreword

Students sometimes ask the most amazing and perplexing questions, and oftentimes their innocence and point-blank questioning in the classroom aren’t wasted and can prompt a very important reply. If posed to the right professor, the answers can also prove equally delightful and insightful—particularly when a good professor has thought long and hard about the question for more than a dozen years. Such is the case with this book.

I am delighted to introduce you to Professor Robert Bruner of The Darden School. His book with the Dilbertian or apocalyptic title (depending on your point of view) Deals from Hell will serve great purpose in bringing more discipline and sharper thinking to the art and science of M&A, and to financial markets.

Whether you are investor or dealmaker, corporate executive or aspiring MBA looking for a career on Wall Street, you are sure to find this book both troublesome and inspiring. Great instruction always is. It cannot be otherwise when you carefully examine a series of M&A “train wrecks” through the same lens as Professor Bruner, a creative teacher in the field of M&A, who has been able to extract the hard, instructive lessons from these disasters. That knowledge, in this book, comes through artful contrasting of failures with other deals where greater discipline and care led to different results.

From my vantage point, this particular trip through M&A hell is very reminiscent of what happened soon after the space shuttle Challenger and its crew ...