Overview

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts's approach to leveraged buyouts was an important aspect of the corporate restructuring and governance reforms in the American economy from the mid-1970s through 1990. During that period, KKR crafted a series of progressively more elaborate deals tailored to specific companies and market conditions. Through its creative debt financing and its relationships with an evolving cast of investors, companies, and managers, KKR drove the scale and scope of the buyout phenomenon to unprecedented highs. This book, first published in 1999, examines KKR's record in detail. Based upon interviews with partners of the firm and on unprecedented access to KKR's records, George Baker and George Smith have written a balanced and enlightening account of how KKR has approached LBOs. The book focuses on KKR's founding, evolution, and innovations as ways to understand issues in modern American business. In examining KKR as a unique form of enterprise, the book bridges the gap between public perception and academic knowledge of the leveraged buyout.

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9780511581687

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' ... laudatory study of [KKR] by two business-school professors, one an economist by training the other an historian. From its formation in 1976, the firm of Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis and George Roberts grew to control 59 billion dollars of assets in 35 companies in 1989. (At the same time in American, only GM, Ford, Exxon and IBM were bigger.) In getting there, KKR pioneered a new approach to management that was to revolutionise the American economy.' The Economist 'Baker and Smith's work is remarkable well documented, provides a clear explanation of the successes and failures of KKR, and successfully sweats its mythically enormous profits down to size, in proportion to the high risk involved.' Contemporary European History

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