Management, Close J W

Too gossipy, not enough substance

I received "A Giant Cow-Tipping by Savages" as part of a Goodreads giveaway.

Having been born in the mid-to-late 1980s, my big accomplishment of the decade was potty training. Having been a history major and later a non-profit/museum professional, the world of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) was not one I was familiar with. So going in, it's safe to say that both the era and the business were new territory for me.

That said, even for a novice, Cow-Tipping is a fascinating look at the cutthroat world of M&As with an emphasis on the 1980s. The anecdotes are absorbing, sometimes grotesque, and are interspersed with the legal and professional battles being fought in boardrooms and courtrooms.

Since I don't have the business/legal background, I can't speak to the accuracy of the people and events involved, and many of the concepts were still confusing (my shortcoming, not the author's). However, I think the fact that this medieval historian was able to grasp most of what was talked about speaks favorably to Close's descriptions and writing style.

Recommended.

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The 1908s was the start of the M&A boom, glorified on the big screen by Wall Street. John Weir Close looks back at those days in A Giant Cow-Tipping by Savages.

The author is a lawyer and a journalist. He founded the M&A Journal and was an editor at The American Lawyer. His book seems to wrap more context, color and gossip around his old stories on M&A deals. The book reads like a collection of stories and lacks a coherent narrative.

You may guess from the title that Mr. Close may have warm feelings for M&A nostalgia, but has no love for the players. He dwells on their flaws. For many of the key players, those flaws were deep.

Many of the deals were deeply flawed. Bidders were fueled by fee-seeking advisers, cheap debt, and hubris. Many of the deals highlighted in the book lead to poor or disastrous results for the companies involved. The reality is that many of the mergers did not necessarily prove beneficial. The resulting company was laden with too much debt or managers who didn't understand the business.

The book starts by painting the corporate raiders as savages who brought down the managerial elite. CEOs and boards were sitting in comfortable seats and never feared that someone would come along and try to takeover their companies. Companies were then viewed for the break up values and the savages could rip it into pieces to create more value.

The book's title comes from a statement by Ted Turner during the AOL acquisition of Time-Warner. He didn't understand how a publisher, trying to sell magazines for a few dollars an edition, could combine with a company trying to give that content away for free. Turner was proved right as the AOL Time Warner merger is one of the worst business combinations of all time and cost Turner a fortune.

Since the book is really collection of stories, it is uneven. Some stories and some players are more interesting than others. Mr. Close is better at eliciting an interesting story in some chapters, but not others. At many times, the lawyer side takes over and dwells on uninteresting minutiae.

If you loved the merger stories of the 1980s you'll like the book. Otherwise it may not be a good addition for your to-read stack.

Disclosure: The publisher sent me a copy of the book to review. ( )

The author owes a lot to Thorstein Veblen, especially The Theory of the Leisure Class (where Veblen compares the owners of big business to savage barbarians), for the theoretical framework and presentation of this book. He not only takes the ideas of Veblen, he also attempts to recreate Veblen's biting satirical tone. But he fails in so doing.

I scored in the 99th percentile on the GRE Verbal and 97th percentile on the GRE Writing, so I would say my vocabulary and comprehension is generally very adequate, yet in several places the author completely lost me because he used dense language and words that were both too long (and had shorter synonyms) and too unordinary. Veblen at least limits himself to words that might be tested on the SAT, and his books are all fairly short; this book is not short, and many of the words of which I complain are not words that would appear on a standard SAT vocabulary list (many of which words most people find to be too long and useless as is). Perhaps the author should go back and take a look at Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," where Orwell says never to use a long word where a short one will do.