Disclaimers, Apologies, and Modest Lies

I have a higher and greater standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can but I won’t.

Mark Twain

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.

Saki (H.H. Munro)

 

Every war story or anecdote recounted in this book to illustrate one principle or another is true. Even so, fictitious names, dates, locations, and transaction amounts are employed in the retelling to preserve the privacy of all parties to these transactions and events. My use of some obfuscation reflects a continuing commitment to preserve my clients’ confidentiality, even years later. Like most investment banks, my firm publishes “tombstones” reporting summary transaction information with the prior approval of our clients. As a result, if a sleuth in our Google world succeeded in matching an anecdote to a tombstone, I and my investment bank might well face an outraged former client whose trust we would have violated.

This book has been written over a number of years. Much in it has been inevitably addressed elsewhere in the huge plethora of M&A literature (maybe 75% of the material, with the balance being some notable exceptions, such as M&A conventions, the Rules of Five and Ten, pricing a company, etc.) but my point was to bring it all together in one place for the first time. If I have failed to appropriately credit any of my sources (crypto-amnesia), it is only because after 15 or more years of sporadic writing and teaching, it is impossible to remember where I learned all of this myself. I do know that some of it certainly came from my own reading but only if corroborated by subsequent experience, much more of it from original on the job experience, and a good deal of it from my colleagues.

Finally, I have written this book so that it can be read straight through or can be skipped around as one desires and finds useful.