Rules to acquire by

When Bruce Nolop was an investment banker, he saw only the glamorous side of acquisitions. Since becoming executive vice president and chief financial officer of Pitney Bowes, however, he's learned how hard it is to pull them off. In this article, he shares the lessons his organization has learned throughout its successful six-year acquisition campaign, which comprised more than 70 deals: Stick to adjacent spaces, take a portfolio approach, have a business sponsor, know how to judge an acquisition, and don't shop when you're hungry. Pitney Bowes's management and board of directors now use these five basic rules to chart the company's growth course. For example, when evaluating a potential acquisition, Pitney Bowes distinguishes between "platform" and "bolt-on" acquisitions to set expectations and guide integration efforts; the company applies different criteria, depending on the type. According to Nolop, any company can improve its acquisition track record if it is able to learn from experience, and he suspects that Pitney Bowes's rules apply just as well to other organizations. Buying a company should be treated like any other business process, he maintains. It should be approached deliberately and reviewed and improved constantly. That means mapping a complex chain of actions; paying attention to what can go right or wrong at different stages; and using standard, constantly honed, approaches and tools.     

国内企业海外并购应注意什么?

近年来,国内企业海外并购进入了一个新的时期,不少国内企业走出国门并购外国企业。对于这一现象,欧美的媒体惊呼“中国来了”;而中国国内各方对此却看法不一:有的认为值得骄傲,有的认为现在为时尚早。为了能够从一个比较客观和积极的角度分析和理解这个问题,本刊记者专程采访了FCCA资深会员、德豪国际(BDO)会计师事务所高级经理黄文雄,请他从专业角度,就中国企业海外并购应注意的问题发表了自己的看法     

Lift outs: how to acquire a high-functioning team

More and more, expanding companies are hiring high-functioning groups of people who have been working together effectively within one company and can rapidly come up to speed in a new environment. These lifted-out teams don't need to get acquainted with one another or to establish shared values, mutual accountability, or group norms; their long-standing relationships and trust help them make an impact very quickly. Of course, the process is not without risks: A failed lift out can lead to loss of money, opportunity, credibility, and even native talent. Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams studied more than 40 high-profile moves and interviewed team leaders in multiple industries and countries to examine the risks and opportunities that lift outs present. They concluded that, regardless of industry, nationality, or size of the team, a successful lift out unfolds over four consecutive, interdependent stages that must be meticulously managed. In the courtship stage, the hiring company and the leader of the targeted team determine whether the proposed move is, in fact, a good idea, and then define their business goals and discuss strategies. At the same time, the team leader discusses the potential move with the other members of his or her group to assess their level of interest and prepare them for the change. The second stage involves the integration of the team leader with the new company's top leadership. This part of the process ensures the team's access to senior executives-the most important factor in a lift out's success. Operational integration is the focus of the third stage. Ideally, teams will start out working with the same or similar clients, vendors, and industry standards. The fourth stage entails full cultural integration. To succeed, the lifted-out team members must be willing to re-earn credibility by proving their value and winning their new colleagues' trust.     

石油天然气投资项目的政治风险管理

政治风险无法逃避,任何国家的任何项目都要面临此项风险,但是,这并不意味着政治风险无法规避。政治风险的表象纷繁复杂,不同国家,乃至不同行业的政治风险水平差异很大。根据项目的具体情况寻求正确的规避方法,对于某些特定行业来说至关重要,油气行业就是典型的例子。中国信保专家就此撰文分析     

When to trust your gut

Many top executives say they routinely make big decisions without relying on any logical analysis. Instead, they call upon their "intuition," "gut instinct," "hunches," or "inner voice"--but they can't describe the process much more than that. What exactly is gut instinct? In this article, author Alden Hayashi interviews top executives from companies such as America Online and Johnson and Johnson to find out how they make decisions. Hayashi also presents the research of leading scientists who suggest that our emotions and feelings might not only be important in our intuitive ability to make good decisions but may actually be essential. Specifically, one theory contends that our emotions help us filter various options quickly, even if we're not consciously aware of the screening. Other research suggests that professional judgment can often be reduced to patterns and rules; indeed, truly inspired decisions seem to require an ability to see similar patterns across disparate fields. A CEO who possesses that ability can craft a perfect strategy by detecting patterns that others either overlook or mistake for random noise. But various traits of human nature can easily cloud our intuitive decision making. One potential pitfall is our tendency to see patterns where none exist. Thus, continual self-checking and feedback are crucial, and some organizations have made these processes part of their corporate culture.     

Risk-neutral investors do not acquire information

Give a risk-neutral investor the choice to acquire a costly signal prior to asset market equilibrium. She refuses to pay for the signal under general conditions. The reason is that a risk-neutral investor is indifferent between a risky asset or a safe bond in optimum and expects the same return to her portfolio ex ante, whether or not she acquires information. Risk neutrality thus implies the absence of costly information from asset price in competitive asset markets.     

When to walk away from a deal

Deal making is glamorous; due diligence is not. That simple statement goes a long way toward explaining why so many companies have made so many acquisitions that have produced so little value. The momentum of a transaction is hard to resist once senior management has the target in its sights. Companies contract "deal fever," and due diligence all too often becomes an exercise in verifying the target's financial statements rather than conducting a fair analysis of the deal's strategic logic and the acquirer's ability to realize value from it. Seldom does the process lead managers to kill potential acquisitions, even when the deals are deeply flawed. In a recent Bain & Company survey of 250 international executives with M&A responsibilities, only 30% of them were satisfied with the rigor of their due diligence. And fully a third admitted they hadn't walked away from deals they had nagging doubts about. In this article, the authors, all Bain consultants, emphasize the importance of comprehensive due diligence practices and suggest ways companies can improve their capabilities in this area. They provide rich real-world examples of companies that have had varying levels of success with their due diligence processes, including Safeway, Odeon, American Sea-foods, and Kellogg's. Effective due diligence requires answering four basic questions: What are we really buying? What is the target's stand-alone value? Where are the synergies--and the skeletons? And what's our walk-away price? Each of these questions will prompt an even deeper level of querying that puts the broader, strategic rationale for acquisitions under a microscope. Successful acquirers pay close heed to the results of such in-depth investigations and analyses--to the extent that they are prepared to walk away from a deal, even in the very late stages of negotiations.     

Knowing what to sell, when, and to whom

Despite an abundance of data, most companies do a poor job of predicting the behavior of their customers. In fact, the authors' research suggests that even companies that take the greatest trouble over their predictions about whether a particular customer will buy a particular product are correct only around 55% of the time--a result that hardly justifies the costs of having a CRM system in the first place. Businesses usually conclude from studies like this that it's impossible to use the past to predict the future, so they revert to the timeworn marketing practice of inundating their customers with offers. But as the authors explain, the reason for the poor predictions is not any basic limitation of CRM systems or the predictive power of past behavior, but rather of the mathematical methods that companies use to interpret the data. The authors have developed a new way of predicting customer behavior, based on the work of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel McFadden, that delivers vastly improved results. Indeed, the methodology increases the odds of successfully predicting a specific purchase by a specific customer at a specific time to about 85%, a number that will have a major impact on any company's marketing ROI. What's more, using this methodology, companies can increase revenues while reducing their frequency of customer contact-evidence that overcommunication with customers may actually damage a company's sales.     

Resource rents; when to spend and how to save

Countries with substantial revenues from renewable resources face a complex range of revenue management issues. What is the optimal time profile of consumption from the revenue, and how much should be saved? Should saving be invested in foreign funds or in the domestic economy? How does government policy influence the private sector, where sustainable growth in the domestic economy must ultimately be generated? This paper develops the issues in a simple two-period model, and argues that analysis must go well beyond the simple permanent income approach sometimes recommended.     

德隆摔倒在"做大"的道路上

做大还是做强．这个类似莎翁“TOBEORNOTT0BE”的问题一直以来困扰着中国的企业家。人们习惯于将做大等同于多元化经营．将做强等同于专业化运作。二者之间应该如何选择呢？记者曾于去年就此问题与香港中文大学的郎成平教授探讨过。随后他那“做强是根本．做大乃误区”的论断便激起了业内的反复讨论。当好事者批评他是“理论上的正确．实践上的失败”时．高调进行多元经营的知名民企德隆却重重地摔倒在“做大”的道路上。究竟应该如何透过企业实践来理解做大做强呢？“做大做强”是否给中国经济带来其他顽症了呢？记者再次采访郎咸平教授。     

Risk measurement when shares are subject to infrequent trading

When shares are traded infrequently, beta estimates are often severely biased. This paper reviews the problems introduced by infrequent trading, and presents a method for measuring beta when share price data suffer from this problem. The method is used with monthly returns for a one-in-three random sample of all U.K. Stock Exchange shares from 1955 to 1974. Most of the bias in conventional beta estimates is eliminated when the proposed estimators are used in their place.     

When are contrarian profits due to stock market overreaction?

If returns on some stocks systematically lead or lag those ofothers, a portfolio strategy that sells 'winners' and buys 'losers'can produce positive expected returns, even if no stock's returnsare negatively autocorrelated as virtually all models of overreactionimply. Using a particular contrarian strategy we show that,despite negative autocorrelation in individual stock returns,weekly portfolio returns are strongly positively autocorrelatedand are the result of important cross-auto-correlations. Wefind that the returns of large stocks lead those of smallerstocks, and we present evidence against overreaction as theonly source of contrarian profits.     

Practical issues to consider when working with big data

Review of Accounting Studies - Increasing access to alternative or “big data” sources has given rise to an explosion in the use of these data in economics-based research. However, in...     

如何进行融资谈判并达成合理的交易？

许多企业家面临融资谈判时缺少起码的思路和经验,造成费时、费力、费钱,结果还不尽人意。鲜有商学院的MBA或EMBA课程谈及此话题,但它却是广大企业家关乎融资成败的绕不过的“门槛”,它不仅关系到融资谈判交易成功以获得极其宝贵的资金,而且关系到注资之后企业的安稳过渡与顺利发展     

Monitoring Targeting Performance When Decentralized Allocations to the Poor Are Unobserved

How can a central government monitor the performance of a decentralizedpoverty program when the incidence of the program's benefitsis unobserved at the local level? This article shows that, usinga poverty map and the corresponding spending allocation acrossgeographic areas, one can identify the latent differences inmean program allocations to the poor and the nonpoor. The nationalmeasure of targeting performance can also be decomposed intosubgroups. An application to an antipoverty program in Argentinais used to assess the program's performance before and afterreforms. Increases in funding and changes in program designbrought large gains to the poor, although performance differedacross provinces.     

不良资产评估的问题、原因及对策分析

不同种类的不良资产有不同的内在特征,在资产评估时需要对此给予充分考虑.实际工作中评估价值与处置不良资产的成交价背离较大的问题,反映出我国资产评估在理论和技术方面的缺陷.准确定位评估在不良资产处置中的作用,借鉴国际不良资产的"冰棍理论",尽快制定通用的评估准则才能更好地为不良资产处置服务.     

11 critical questions to ask when buying a physician practice

Answering probing questions in advance of a practice purchase can help hospital and health system leaders make informed decisions. The questions are intended to stimulate careful consideration before entering into a practice acquisition; no single piece of information or answer should be considered definitive in the final decision-making process. Success depends on having a clear game plan and spending time ensuring that all players-board, management, physician leaders, and the physicians who will be employees--understand and support the plan.