Susan Decker Quotes

I was very clear why we put these companies together and what our goals were. It was really to allow both Sears and Kmart to compete in what I thought was going to be a more challenging but evolving industry.

Carl Icahn, corporate raider by trade, is creative, a scrambler, and certainly not to be underestimated.

M&A is always an opportunistic tool to grow a company.

The apparent strategy of Pfizer is to take over AstraZeneca, dismember it, and put the different parts of it into its three new divisions, with the ultimate aim of selling off one or more.

Typical mergers happen when there are two competitors coming together, and they reduce overhead.

Taking the company private was not the easiest thing I've done in my life.

When you see a merger between two giants in a declining industry, it can look like the financial version of a couple having a baby to save a marriage.

We understand that the real market value of Blockbuster may never be fully realized as a wholly owned part of Viacom.

[Corporate] takeovers are for the public good, but that's not why I do it. I do it to make money.

One of the interesting things about the Dell-EMC combination is that we don't have a lot of overlap.

I would be amazed if Oracle does not buy NetSuite.

It used to be that you would go in to see a CEO, and you would ask them, 'Is your company for sale?' and if they said 'No, we have no interest in selling,' that was sort of the end of the conversation.

Companies buy customers when they cannot win new business on their own. They merge when their executives do not have a better idea of what to do.

If I'm on the board of any company where there's an offer that comes in, I want to negotiate.

I have never run a public company. I spent my entire life working for a private company.

There are certainly valid reasons for taking a company private, and it's also possible that C.E.O.s perform better when monitored by a small number of owners in a private company rather than by the dispersed and often uninterested shareholders of a public corporation.

In the '70s and '80s, what private equity did is it changed corporate America. It started holding companies accountable, and for the first time managers started thinking like owners.

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.

Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.

Over the next few years the boardrooms of America are going to light up with hot flashes.

In the 1980s, corporate raiders began mounting unfriendly takeovers of companies that could deliver higher returns to their shareholders - if they abandoned their other stakeholders.

We get talent and scale from mergers.

When investors, particularly investment bankers, talk about splitting up companies, there's a lot of discussion about multiple expansion, and the reality is multiple expansion is an outcome, not a strategy.

Any successful company in the valley gets acquisition offers and has to decide whether or not to take them.

I had come out of retirement into a very difficult situation with the PeopleSoft takeover, got through it, and was having a good time, frankly. We just ran out of runway at PeopleSoft. Had we had another year, maybe two years, I think we would have made it.