Beat the Odds in M&A Turnarounds

Martin Reeves et al.

While M&A deals and turnarounds are individually hard to pull off, combining the two can be even more challenging. Yet an analysis of roughly 1,400 M&A-based turnarounds between 2005 and 2018 shows that six management actions can help acquiring companies improve their odds of success. The rewards can be considerable. Successful buyers generate gains in both revenue growth and profit margins, and — most important — better returns.

Taking Stock of Corporate Risk-Taking

Vincent O’Connell et al.

Research shows equity incentives introduce bias in executive recommendations and strategic planning. To counter this, boards should consider three key steps in assessing corporate risk.

A Structured Approach to Strategic Decisions

Daniel Kahneman et al.

Many decisions about strategy require that senior executives make evaluative judgments on the basis of extensive, complex information. Such work is prone to common errors, but a disciplined, sequential approach can mitigate those errors and improve the quality of both one-off and recurrent decisions in an array of business domains. The process described in this article is easy to learn, involves little additional work, and (within limits) leaves room for intuition.

The Perils of Applying AI Prediction to Complex Decisions

Frontiers |

Susan Athey, interviewed by Frieda Klotz

While AI is brilliantly placed to solve decisions that are concrete and well-defined, in other contexts it can fail spectacularly, showing connections between facts or events but stumbling when the need to disentangle cause from correlation arises. Human input in the form of subject matter knowledge and common sense are often needed to complement AI. And executives must understand which challenges are right for these new technologies to address.