The Office Merger Quotes

As always, behind the flow of money necessary for such mergers and acquisitions were the banks. Once there were hundreds of banks in America, owned by individuals and local families. But due to government regulations put into place during the Reagan-Bush years, these banks either faded away or consolidated. In 1990, there were thirty-seven major banks in the U.S. By 2009, buy-outs, mergers, and bankruptcies had reduced this number to four. Those left standing were Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, according to the General Accounting Office. Ominously, in June 2012, the giant global rating agency Moody’s downgraded the ratings of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan, citing concerns for the stability of the world’s financial system.

The courtship continued through January 2000, causing Musk to postpone his honeymoon with Justine. Michael Moritz, X.com’s primary investor, arranged a meeting of the two camps in his Sand Hill Road office. Thiel got a ride with Musk in his McLaren. “So, what can this car do?” Thiel asked. “Watch this,” Musk replied, pulling into the fast lane and flooring the accelerator. The rear axle broke and the car spun around, hit an embankment, and flew in the air like a flying saucer. Parts of the body shredded. Thiel, a practicing libertarian, was not wearing a seatbelt, but he emerged unscathed. He was able to hitch a ride up to the Sequoia offices. Musk, also unhurt, stayed behind for a half-hour to have his car towed away, then joined the meeting without telling Harris what had happened. Later, Musk was able to laugh and say, “At least it showed Peter I was unafraid of risks.” Says Thiel, “Yeah, I realized he was a bit crazy.” Musk remained resistant to a merger. Even though both companies had about 200,000 customers signed up to make electronic payments on eBay, he believed that X.com was a more valuable company because it offered a broader array of banking services.

Many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency: the endless ‘news’ feeds, the constantly changing screens of traders, the office lights blazing late into the night, the young analysts who find themselves required to work thirty hours at a stretch. But very little that happens in the finance sector has genuine need for this constant appearance of excitement and activity. Only its most boring part—the payments system—is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends. No terrible consequence would follow if the stock market closed for a week (as it did in the wake of 9/11)—or longer, or if a merger were delayed or large investment project postponed for a few weeks, or if an initial public offering happened next month rather than this. The millisecond improvement in data transmission between New York and Chicago has no significance whatever outside the absurd world of computers trading with each other. The tight coupling is simply unnecessary: the perpetual flow of ‘information’ part of a game that traders play which has no wider relevance, the excessive hours worked by many employees a tournament in which individuals compete to display their alpha qualities in return for large prizes. The traditional bank manager’s culture of long lunches and afternoons on the golf course may have yielded more useful information about business than the Bloomberg terminal. Lehman

The leader of the Drexel refugees was Leon Black, a husky, brash, Dartmouth and Harvard Business School graduate in his 30s who was running the Drexel merger group out of New York. Black was a native New Yorker born into privilege. But his world shattered in 1975 when his father, Eli Black, then the chief executive of Chiquita banana importer United Brands, leaped to his death from his office in the Pan Am building above Grand Central Terminal. In the days after his death, United Brands was discovered to have made millions in bribes to Honduran officials in order to reduce taxes on banana exports.

Nazarbayev had learned that Westerners could be just as adept as he was in turning money into power and power back into money. Some, like Dick Evans and Jonathan Aitken, went about it from positions at the top of business and government. Others had to wait until they had left office to monetise their access and influence. They had to get theirs from what they called ‘consultancy’. Blair was said to have made $1 million from Ivan Glasenberg’s Glencore for three hours spent talking the Qatari prime minister out of blocking its merger with a mining company. JP Morgan, the Wall Street bank that had won the financial crisis, retained him too, as did a Swiss insurance company, the government of Kuwait and Abu Dhabi’s investment fund. Some days he was a business consultant, others a philanthropist, or a governance guru, or a peacemaker. His money sat in a web of companies that almost rivalled the complexity and opacity Nazarbayev’s Swiss bankers had devised. By one estimate, less than a decade after he resigned as prime minister, his fortune stood at $90 million.

The passion of these newly rich Americans for industrial merger yielded to an even more insistent passion for a merger of their newly acquired domains with more ancient ones; they wanted to veneer their arrivisme with the traditional. It would be gratifying to feel, as you drove up to your porte-cochère in Pittsburgh, that you were one with the jaded Renaissance Venetian who had just returned from a sitting for Titian; to feel, as you walked by the ranks of gleaming and authentic suits of armour in your mansion on Long Island – and passed the time of day with your private armourer – that it was only an accident of chronology that had put you in a counting house when you might have been jousting with other kings in the Tournament of Love; to push aside the heavy damask tablecloth on a magnificent Louis XIV dining-room table, making room for a green-shaded office lamp, beneath which you scanned the report of last month’s profit from the Saginaw branch, and then, looking up, catch a glimpse of Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan and flick the fantasy that presently you would be ordering your sedan chair, because the loveliest girl in London was expecting

Trust is now recognized as a topic worthy of academic effort. In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, researchers Robert Galford and Anne Siebold Drapeau identified five simple ways to destroy trust in any organization:122 1.   Inconsistent messages—management proclaims one thing, actually does another 2.   Inconsistent standards—people feel that they are being treated differently because of where they work, which legacy organization they came from, etc. 3.   Misplaced benevolence—ignoring a poor performing or untrustworthy manager, or employee 4.   “Elephants in the parlor”—ignoring the role that office politics actually plays in their organization 5.   “Rumors in a vacuum”—senior managers embargo all information, or greatly restrict its flow—i.e., to only certain levels of management—during complex initiatives, merger discussions, restructuring, etc.

Labor and employment firm Fisher & Phillips LLP opened a Seattle office by poaching partner Davis Bae from labor and employment competitor Jackson Lewis PC. Mr. Bea, an immigration specialist, will lead the office, which also includes new partners Nick Beermann and Catharine Morisset and one other lawyer. Fisher & Phillips has 31 offices around the country. Sara Randazzo LAW Cadwalader Hires New Partner as It Looks to Represent Activist Investors By Liz Hoffman and David Benoit | 698 words One of America’s oldest corporate law firms is diving into the business of representing activist investors, betting that these agitators are going mainstream—and offer a lucrative business opportunity for advisers. Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP has hired a new partner, Richard Brand, whose biggest clients include William Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management LP, among other activist investors. Mr. Brand, 35 years old, advised Pershing Square on its campaign at Allergan Inc. last year and a board coup at Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. in 2012. He has also defended companies against activists and has worked on mergers-and-acquisitions deals. His hiring, from Kirkland & Ellis LLP, is a notable step by a major law firm to commit to representing activists, and to do so while still aiming to retain corporate clients. Founded in 1792, Cadwalader for decades has catered to big companies and banks, but going forward will also seek out work from hedge funds including Pershing Square and Sachem Head Capital Management LP, a Pershing Square spinout and another client of Mr. Brand’s. To date, few major law firms or Wall Street banks have tried to represent both corporations and activist investors, who generally take positions in companies and push for changes to drive up share prices. Most big law firms instead cater exclusively to companies, worried that lining up with activists will offend or scare off executives or create conflicts that could jeopardize future assignments. Some are dabbling in both camps. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, for example, represented Trian Fund Management LP in its recent proxy fight at DuPont Co. and also is steering Time Warner Cable Inc.’s pending sale to Charter Communications Inc. Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP have done work for activist firm Third Point LLC. But most firms are more monogamous. Those on one end, most vocally Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, defend management, while a small band including Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP and Olshan Frome Wolosky LLP primarily represent activists. In embracing activist work, Cadwalader thinks it can serve both groups better, said Christopher Cox, chairman of the firm’s corporate group. “Traditional M&A and activism are becoming increasingly intertwined,” Mr. Cox said in an interview. “To be able to bring that perspective to the boardroom is a huge advantage. And when a threat does emerge, who’s better to defend a company than someone who’s seen it from the other side?” Mr. Cox said Cadwalader has been thinking about branching out into activism since late last year. The firm is also working with an activist fund launched earlier this year by Cadwalader’s former head of M&A, Jim Woolery, that hopes to take a friendlier stance toward companies. Mr. Cox also said he believes activism can be lucrative, pooh-poohing another reason some big law firms eschew such assignments—namely, that they don’t pay as well as, say, a large merger deal. “There is real money in activism today,” said Robert Jackson, a former lawyer at Wachtell and the U.S. Treasury Department who now teaches at Columbia University and who also notes that advising activists can generate regulatory work. “Law firms are businesses, and taking the stance that you’ll never, ever, ever represent an activist is a financial luxury that only a few firms have.” To be sure, the handful of law firms that work for both sides say they do so

you’ll hate it. Not only because of the merger. The old office you and I knew has succumbed to management blight: meetings, mission statements, jargon, targets, obsession with process, the mania for measurement. Everything that can be counted, is; which, almost by definition, is what doesn’t matter. Nothing of value can be measured, so it’s not valued.

We knew that the prospect of our little studio being absorbed into a much larger entity would worry many people. While we’d worked hard to put safeguards in place that would ensure our independence, we still expected our employees to be fearful that the merger would negatively impact our culture. I’ll say more about the specific steps we took to protect Pixar in a later chapter, but here I want to discuss what happened when, in my eagerness to ease my colleagues’ fears, I stood up and assured them that Pixar would not change. It was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever said. For the next year or so, whenever we wanted to try something new or rethink an established way of working, a steady stream of alarmed and upset people would show up at my office. “You promised the merger wouldn’t affect the way we work,” they’d say. “You said that Pixar would never change.” This happened enough that I called another company-wide meeting to explain myself. “What I meant,” I said, “was that we aren’t going to change because we were acquired by a larger company. We will still go through the kinds of changes that we would have gone through anyway. Furthermore, we are always changing, because change is a good thing.” I was glad I’d cleared that up. Except that I hadn’t. In the end, I had to give the “Of course we will continue to change” speech three times before it finally sunk in. What was interesting to me was that the changes that sparked so much concern had nothing to do with the merger. These were the normal adjustments that have to be made when a business expands and evolves. It’s folly to think you can avoid change, no matter how much you might want to. But also, to my mind, you shouldn’t want to. There is no growth or success without change.

Nasser’s new order appeared to be on the way when military officers, pledging “loyalty” to him, seized power in a coup in Syria. This led, in 1958, to a “merger” of Egypt and Syria into what was supposed to be a single country, the United Arab Republic. But then in 1961 other officers seized power in Damascus and promptly withdrew Syria from the new “state.” The following year, Nasser sent troops to intervene in the civil war in Yemen, expecting a quick victory that would expand his reach. Instead it turned into a long battle against royalist guerrillas and a proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran joined with Saudi Arabia to support the guerrillas in resisting the Egyptian forces, one result of which was the establishment of an Iran-Arab Friendship Society, with offices both in Tehran and Riyadh. Nasser would end up calling Yemen his “Vietnam,” a political quagmire that added to the economic woes of the grossly mismanaged Egyptian economy.

Chase Koch began a rotation of high-level jobs that exposed him to the strategic pillars of Koch Industries’ modern business. It was telling what Chase Koch did not learn. He was not sent to the oil refineries, or to a pipeline farm, or to a natural gas processing plant. Charles Koch didn’t necessarily want to teach his son about the energy industry. Instead, Charles Koch selected a series of jobs that reflected what Koch Industries had become over the last decade and how it planned to carry on into the future. The rotation of jobs was set forth, roughly, as follows: Class 1. Private equity acquisitions and mergers. Class 2. Accounting and taxes. Class 3. Market-Based Management training. Class 4. Trading. One of Chase’s first assignments was to Koch’s development group, the internal committee that looked for new companies to acquire. He joined a division called Koch Equity Development, which bought shares of publicly traded firms. Chase worked in this office when Koch’s acquisition spree was at its peak, shortly after the Invista and Koch Fertilizer deals and during the $21 billion purchase of Georgia-Pacific.

In early 2000, Thiel and Musk were set to meet with Mike Moritz at Sequoia’s office at 2800 Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park to discuss the merger. Musk offered Thiel a lift from Palo Alto. The year before, Musk had purchased a Magnesium Silver McLaren F1, Chassis #067, from Gerd Petrik, a German pharmaceutical executive. A $1 million sports car complete with gull-wing doors and an engine bay encased in gold foil, Musk dubbed the automobile a “work of art” and “a really beautiful piece of engineering.” Even among McLarens, #067 was distinctive—one of only seven McLaren F1s legal to drive in the United States at the time.

The heroic nationalists have started fading into the background making way for the political traders and greedy bureaucrats. World changes, but in the North East it has changed at faster paces and not for the better. I should also make it clear that the mainstream of the Meitei society, though alienated, were wedded to the historical and cultural ties with India. Most of them had welcomed the merger with India. Only a few obscurantist and revivalists dreamt of returning to the golden days of Meitei kingdom. Besides the stalwarts like Dwijamani Dev Sharma I had encountered staunch Indian nationalists in Moirang Koireng Singh, H.Nilomani Singh, R.K Ranabir Singh, R.K.Birachandra Singh and a couple of CPI leaders, amongst whom Meghachandra Singh deserves special mention. The redoubtable journalist L. Joychandra Singh too played a prominent role in spite of humiliation heaped upon him by Baleshwar Prasad.

Even the heavy wood furniture was removed from her office once the U.S. Robotics/3Com merger was consummated in June 1997. "I felt so much better the day I got the same furniture as everybody else," she says.