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The Four Colors of Business Growth
© Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
2011
Now let’s suit up. And let’s murmur a prayer for any opponents that
dare get in our way. They’re going to need all the help they can get.
– Lou Holtz in Winning Every Day
During the 1990s, Cisco acquired as many as 75 companies a year
to grow. Most of these companies had new technologies that Cisco
wanted access to. Many were relatively small companies and easy to
integrate.
NationsBank (prior to its merger with Bank of America, which then
created a larger bank with that name) built a national banking fran-
chise through strategic ...