Rethinking the M&A model: give value to get value

Six of the seven top years all-time for M&A activity were 2015–2020, an era that provides strategists a plethora of insights about successful and failed acquisition choices. The boom is ongoing and seems impervious to the accelerating pattern of giant failures, including ATT’s spinoff in 2021 of Time Warner, by some estimates a $42 billion loss of shareholder value. But why is the track record so bad? Very few M&A deals create value and those that do generally require enlightened management and a new model for understanding of what drives the value of the acquired company.

In fact, not many...