Summary of Bloodsport

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Rating

9 Overall

9 Importance

7 Innovation

9 Style

Recommendation

Business journalist Robert Teitelman offers an in-depth, eminently readable account of the takeover tsunami that engulfed Wall Street and corporate America in the 1980s. With dry wit and an eye for vivid detail, Teitelman tours the decade’s smoking battlefield of mergers, leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers. He reports on the University of Chicago’s free market economists, who provided a rationale for unrestrained takeovers and influenced the regulatory stance of President Ronald Reagan’s administration. Teitelman also explains how deal mania realigned corporate governance away from the “stakeholder model” – in which managers ran companies for the benefit of employees, customers, shareholders and the community – to the “shareholder model” – in which only stock owners’ profits mattered. getAbstract recommends this enlightening history to students of business and of business reporting, as well as to aspiring M&A specialists.

In this summary, you will learn

  • Why hostile takeovers became a trend in the 1980s,
  • How they helped shift control of corporations from management and boards to shareholders, and
  • How economists at the University of Chicago shaped pro-takeover views.
 

About the Author

Robert Teitelman, founding editor in chief of The Deal and former editor of Institutional Investor, is a freelance editor and writer for Institutional Investor, Barron’s and private clients.

 

Summary

Stakeholders vs. Shareholders

In the 1980s, the rising tide of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the United States exploded into a torrent of takeovers and buyouts. While companies were feverishly changing hands, the corporation itself – and Americans’ ideas about it – transformed into something new.

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