Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win?

EIGHT

Hardball M&A

Despite their high failure rate, mergers and acquisitions can be a powerful means of pursuing a hardball strategy much faster, or on a much larger scale, than could be done organically. Mergers made without a strategic rationale and acquisitions pursued on the whim of the CEO are softball moves. A good M&A deal creates competitive advantage; a great deal can help a company achieve decisive advantage, enabling it to lock up critical assets or build superior economics, making the company (almost) untouchable.

Mergers and acquisitions can be used to further any of the hardball strategies we discuss in this book. There are many other purposes of mergers and acquisitions, of course, that overlap and intertwine with these hardball ...