CHAPTER 3
THE M&A FAILURE MYTH
For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.
—Gloria Borger1
You may consider it either naive or overly optimistic to claim that an acquisition could result in a positive outcome for your startup and its mission. After all, you may ask, don’t most acquisitions fail?
As it happens, the popular perception of acquisition failure has less to do with facts and more to do with news reporting and how our brain tends to hold on to negative information. Yes, there are plenty of stories of mergers gone wrong. For instance, in 2015 Microsoft laid off 15,000 employees and wrote off almost all of the $7.9 billion it paid to acquire Nokia’s handset business just the previous year. And a year before ...
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