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If You Don’t Have Control, Credibility Is Your Currency
In Irish culture, the shamrock is a symbol of luck. But when I got a call in late 2007 from Jeff Kip, my CFO, telling me that a private equity firm called Shamrock Holdings was buying up large blocks of Panera shares, I knew that Panera’s luck had taken a turn for the worse. There was nothing fortunate about being targeted by Shamrock, and despite being founded by Roy Disney (Walt’s brother), there was nothing funny about it either. These folks were best known for launching activist campaigns. They took down Michael Eisner at Disney. And now they were targeting us.
If you’ve never directly encountered activists, they might not sound like such a bad thing: motivated investors who see that ...
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